As part of its sustained advocacy towards the second International Migration Review Forum (IMRF) in May 2026, the Women in Migration Network (WIMN) undertook extensive preparatory work throughout the reporting period to strengthen feminist, migrant-led engagement in global migration governance. This included the coordination and launch of the Spotlight Report on Global Migration 2026, developed in partnership with Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), which provided analysis and recommendations across key themes including regular pathways, the care economy, climate displacement, regularization, criminalization, and digital surveillance. WIMN also mobilized organizations and advocates around Towards the IMRF: A Feminist Manifesto for Structural Transformation in Migration Governance, calling for rights-based, intersectional, and accountable migration policies grounded in gender justice and migrant leadership.Over 140 organizations have endorsed the manifesto.
In parallel, we invested significant effort in convening and maintaining an informal cross-regional gender group of Member States committed to advancing feminist and intersectional approaches within the IMRF negotiations and follow-up process, together with OHCHR, IDC, and UN Women. Through regular engagement, strategic briefings, and relationship-building, this informal coordination space contributed to sustaining dialogue between civil society and supportive states on gender equality, migrant rights, and accountability within implementation of the Global Compact for Migration. Additionally, in coordination with the International Detention Coalition (IDC) and the Gender and Migration Hub, WIMN supported efforts to secure a dedicated gender rapporteur for IMRF-related events, helping ensure that gendered dimensions of migration governance were systematically documented and reflected in official and informal discussions.
Throughout the IMRF week, we engaged in strategic advocacy, coalition-building, public events, and direct engagement with UN processes and Member States, contributing a critical feminist perspective to global discussions on migration governance, centering the experiences, rights, and agency of women migrants and gender-diverse people in shaping equitable and humane migration systems.
Inside the UN
WIMN contributed directly to official UN discussions through the participation of our delegation including Roula Seghaier, Paola Cyment, Pinar Ozcan, Berenice Valdez, Moujan Moghimi, Julie Jang, Carol Barton, Carolina Gottardo, Catherine Tactaquin, Cindy Clark, and Annas Shaker in the UN hearings. Our Advocacy Lead, Paola Cyment, spoke in both the informal multi-stakeholder hearing and Roundtable 4 of the Forum. Drawing on WIMN’s feminist and intersectional advocacy, including recommendations from the Spotlight Report and Feminist Manifesto. Interventions highlighted the gendered impacts of migration governance, including precarity in care and informal labor sectors, the criminalization and securitization of migration, barriers to regular pathways and social protection, and the importance of meaningful participation of migrants in decision-making spaces. Our contributions also underscored the need for stronger accountability, rights-based policy implementation, and cross-movement collaboration to address the interconnected challenges of gender inequality, climate displacement, labor exploitation, and digital surveillance in migration governance.
WIMN members communicated migration needs within the feminist lens, especially those pertaining to domestic care workers and GBVH to UN officials, delegations, and civil society organizations.Distributed our 2026 Spotlight Report on Global Migration to the parties mentioned above to ensure that migrants issues are heard from the feminist, human rights perspective.
Read our full statement on RT4 here → link to speech (31:19).
Side Events
Women, Girls and Immigration Detention: Exploring Gender-Responsive Alternatives (Virtual)
WIMN partnered with UN Women, OHCHR, Gender + Migration Hub, Government of Colombia, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, where we intervened on the implications of gender responsive alternatives on women migrants.
This event aligned with gender-responsiveness as a key guiding principle of the GCM and encouraged states to mainstream a gender perspective and gender equality in their response to migration. WIMN’s intervention illustrated the ways in which understanding of the gendered experiences and impacts of immigration
Advancing Gender-Responsive Implementation of the GCM though National Implementation Plans (Virtual)
Together with UN Women, the governments of Germany, Ghana, GIZ, Nepal, and the Center for Migration, Gender, and Justice, WIMN fostered a space to examine why gender-responsive implementation of the GCM matters and how policy tools such as NIPs can help bridge the gap between global commitments and lived experience. As we move forward from the IMRF, national implementation plans should integrate gender considerations. The 75 minutes session was moderated by WIMN’s Advocacy Lead, Paola Cyment.
Promoting the Economic and Social Inclusion of Women through Gender-Responsive Migration (In-Person)
WIMN partnered with the Government of Canada, Government of Mexico, Government of Kenya, GIZ, UN Women, United Nations Department of Economic and SOcial Affairs, OHCHR, Gender+Migration Hub, International Migration Research Centre, and the International Detention Coalition.
Towards Migration Governance with a Care Perspective (In-Person)
We have also organized together with Bloque LAC, Dejusticia, GIZ, IMUMI, IDWF, ITUC, Organización Migrantas, the Research Group on Population and Sustainable Local Development with DIEP of the University of Cuenca, Secretariat for Women, and the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá, partnering with Global Alliance for Care to support the facilitation of this event, to have an essential and timely conversation on care work and care rights.
Parallel Events and WIMN Contributions:
WIMN had similarly had an important presence in the parallel event.
Before the official week commenced, WIMN had a hybrid event on 28 April 2026, during the Global Gender and Migration Forum, titled “The Feminist Migration Policy Agenda – Confronting Structural Violations and the U.S. Rollback on Rights.” The event convened advocates, researchers, and migrant-led organizers in New York and virtually. WIMN re-launched Feminist Migration Policy Agenda (FMPA), a framework developed to influence policy discussions and movement building in the migration justice landscape. Moderated by Mayuri Anupindi of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, the 90-minute forum brought together leaders from migrant justice, reproductive rights, and anti-racist movements to examine how shrinking civic space, militarized borders, and cuts to feminist organizing are disproportionately impacting women and gender-diverse migrants. Speakers repeatedly stressed that migration governance cannot be separated from labor systems, climate policy, racial capitalism, and public health. FMPA researcher Shanti Uprety described the current moment as “the most alarming period in decades,” citing escalating border externalization, expansion of detention and deportation systems, pressure on United Nations agencies to remove gender and inclusion language, and the closure or suspension of programs run by migrant women-led organizations due to funding cuts. The forum positioned migrants as rights holders and governments as duty bearers, emphasizing structural reforms including decriminalization, protection from digital surveillance, language justice, and investment in community-led systems of care.
The discussion grounded these policy debates in concrete lived realities and evidence from frontline organizing. Janay Cauthen of Families for Freedom shared how the deportation of her Haitian partner after a decades-old conviction pushed her to establish a support network helping families prepare contingency plans and pursue legal remedies. Raquel Cruz-Juarez of Planned Parenthood Federation of America linked migration enforcement to reproductive justice, highlighting that more than 50 Planned Parenthood health centers have closed nationally, disproportionately affecting rural and migrant communities, while at least 16 miscarriages have reportedly occurred in immigration detention. Janvieve Williams Comrie of AfroResistance presented findings from organizing in Panama and across migration routes showing that Black migrants are disproportionately detained, subjected to violence, denied interpretation services, and excluded from Know Your Rights trainings. She also documented gender-specific harms faced by Black migrant women and girls, including childbirth in transit, lack of menstrual products and medical care, economic exploitation in informal labor, and heightened exposure to gender-based violence. Closing the event, Roula Seghaier framed anti-migrant, anti-Black, and anti-abortion policies as interconnected systems of exclusion and called for an “intersectionality of love” rooted in collective organizing, feminist solidarity, and sustained advocacy ahead of the IMRF process.
We have also participated in the Civil Society Action Committee led campaign, titled “Resist, Reclaim, Realize”, intended as three main pillars to uplift migrants and defend human rights. The first pillar was to resist the criminalization, cruelty, and erasure of migrant rights. The second was to reclaim the power, respect, and the narratives driving migration culture and language, diversity, and representation on the migrant’s terms. The third pillar was to realize that in order to achieve a migration policy rooted in justice we must work collectively towards accountability, shared goals, and strategies for change.
In that spirit, Elmer Romero, a regional organizer based in Houston, presented how his work in popular education has informed migrant workers of their rights and what they can do as ICE and the U.S. government continue to dismantle systems of security and stability for migrant workers. Viktor Genina of the Scalabrini International Migration Network underscored the necessity of civil society’s advocacy for governmental accountability and consistent compliance with international law. Genina beckoned the room to consider the EU’s selective acknowledgement of the legitimacy of international law: When the U.S. captured Nicolás Maduro or as Israel continues its egregious violations of international law in Palestine and Lebanon, the EU did not regard such acts with the same criticism as it did when Trump declared his intention to acquire Greenland for national security reasons.
WIMN representatives Nisrene Nawar and Isabel Seo spoke on their personal experiences as first- and second-generation immigrants. They examined their key takeaways from the discussion on the campaign and its value, and posed questions regarding the execution of resisting criminalization, which were acknowledged by William Gois, Regional Coordinator of Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA), who built upon them invoking the concern of becoming “event organizers” as opposed to agents of change.
On May 8th, WIMN issued the closing remarks in the side event “Towards Migration Governance with a Care Perspective” to contribute to the ongoing dialogue surrounding the labor demand and exploitation of migrants, especially migrant women, within the context of the care economy.
Dinorah Arceta of IMUMI and Lucía Ramírez Bolívar of Dejusticia served as panelists to introduce the event, and issue objectives and acknowledgements. They emphasized that migrant women make up the large majority of paid care work under exploitation and are often the ones caring for their families as well. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has recognized the right to care as a fundamental, autonomous, and enforceable human right to inform approaches to legal and political advocacy.
In turn, Inkeri von Hase, a global coordinator who has dedicated her career towards making migration safer for women, continued this discussion by asserting that the need for care is universal—this is highlighted by the unbalanced care systems that currently exist, and the existence of a global care crisis, calling for the adoption of the ILO 5R framework for care work: to recognize, reduce, redistribute, reward, and represent. This crisis has increased in urgency with the rise of an aging population with higher demands for care.
Gladys Cisneros, Chief of the Labour Migration Branch of the International Labour Organization spoke on the growing demand for care workers and how it is currently shaping the labor demand of migrant workers. Now, countries of origin are facing higher demands for care workers. In Syria, many refugees are coming back and are unsure of how to establish secure labor migration pathways when the domestic economy in Syria is devastated. Migrant men also form a significant part of the care economy, as they participate twice as much as nationals.
Catalina Bosch Carcuro of Migrantas in Chile shared that the majority of women deciding to migrate do so due to caregiving responsibilities, as what they currently earn is not sufficient to care for their children (or the violence they are subject to does not allow them to care for their children). Migrantas has focused on care from a eco-feminist perspective: targeting the care of life as well as the care of nature as a more comprehensive approach to the subject of care.
Roula Seghaier of WIMN closed the panel by noting that labor is often performed by the marginalized, the colonized, and those in debt, that together we would not be defeated, working on the intersections with the climate, disabilities, gender and gender diversity. She insisted on the necessities to break the silos to counter the rise of the far right.
Rally on May 6th: Migrant Rights are Human Rights
WIMN members and volunteers gathered together at the office of our member, ACT Alliance, to make signs for the rally.
The NGO Committee on Migration collaborated with the Grassroots Forum on Migration Governance, the Civil Society Action Committee, and WIMN to lead a rally around the UN and the Church Center of the UN.
WIMN Board and Team Strategy Meeting
There is nothing like the opportunity to exchange in person in a world where borders and obstacles stand in the way. On May 9th, our board members, team, and members at large convened to discuss organizational development strategies, from delegation policy, collaboration expectations, and ethical banking approaches, to strengthen the financial support network and compliance as WIMN further institutionalizes. We have also utilized the opportunity to welcome our new board members and operations manager in person, bid the original cohort of interns farewell, and introduce the new cohort of interns to the board members. Find out more about the new cohort here.
Another important task WIMN accomplished was continuing the collection of raw material for the archiving of the history of women in migration, not only as an institution, but also as the waves of organizers that have supported our work for decades, and the ways in which their collective effort supported policy change and movement building. Our team interviewed Catherine Tactaquin and Carol Barton, our former co-conveners and two co-founding members of WIMN. This process aims to result in a documentary film that will inform broader audiences on the beginnings of organizing across siloes and bridging gender and migration, as well as the various challenges and victories our members had. We hope to take the opportunity of our 15th year anniversary in 2027 to reflect on the past decade and a half, and relaunch stronger, bigger, and more united efforts towards all rights for all migrants.
The IMRF 2026 represented not only a critical advocacy milestone for WIMN, but also a launching point for sustained collective action in the years ahead. Building on the momentum generated through the Spotlight Report, Feminist Manifesto, strategic partnerships, and direct engagement with governments and UN agencies, WIMN will continue supporting the development and monitoring of gender-responsive national implementation plans for the Global Compact for Migration. At the same time, WIMN remains committed to strengthening transnational feminist movement-building across migrant-led, grassroots, labor, climate, disability, and human rights networks in response to the growing criminalization of migration and the global rise of authoritarian and exclusionary politics. Recognizing the importance of preserving movement memory and intergenerational knowledge, WIMN is also investing in archiving and documenting the history of feminist migrant organizing, including oral histories, interviews, and multimedia storytelling projects that capture the voices, struggles, and contributions of migrant women and gender-diverse advocates. Through these interconnected efforts, WIMN aims to ensure that feminist migration justice remains not only visible within global policy spaces, but rooted in long-term organizing, accountability, and transformative social change.
