Amongst agaish: the criminalization of Eritrean migrants’ communities of care

In the Processo Agaish trial, Italian prosecutors accused Eritrean refugees of human trafficking and exploiting their clients’ desires to move further North. Pointing out the mistranslation of the Tigrinya word agaish was part of the defense's strategy to show that the purported victims in this case were not clients, but guests, often family members of those accused who hosted them, not for money but for something akin to hospitality. Defense lawyers linked this case with activist efforts to decry instances where solidarity with asylum seekers was criminalized as aiding and abetting human trafficking in order to expose this criminalization of solidarity as the latest politically motivated tactic in migrant deterrence. This article details the culturally specific forms of caretaking amongst Eritreans in order to consider, from an Eritrean perspective, the relational aspects of care and rethink the scholarship on the ‘criminalization of solidarity’ that limits itself to understanding solidarity in terms of politics. This article further argues that relational ties and hospitality practices amongst agaish become fragmented in the Eritrean diaspora. This work is based on ethnographic fieldwork with the Eritrean refugee community living primarily in Rome from 2016 to 2018 and access to case files in a human-trafficking investigation.