This chapter examines how gendered notions of vulnerability shape the protection and asylum systems. While international and national frameworks increasingly incorporate gender equality through “mainstreaming” and targeted measures, these mechanisms often reproduce the very inequalities they aim to mitigate. Vulnerability has become a key concept in humanitarian and legal discourse, yet its operationalization tends to essentialize women and children as passive victims, obscuring structural causes of exclusion and eroding agency. Based on the life stories of African migrants through Mexico, this chapter interrogates how vulnerability operates simultaneously as a protective tool and a mechanism of control. It shows that labeling women as “vulnerable” can grant visibility and access to aid while also reinforcing dependency, marginalization, and racialized hierarchies of deservingness. Ultimately, the chapter argues that gendered vulnerability is not an inherent condition but a relational and political construct produced through intersecting regimes of law, care, and governance.