Lux Issue 11/12 features interviews and essays on the fight against fascism around the globe. Read more from Kenya, India, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and the U.K.
“Kamala Harris talks Tough on Immigration” read a Reuters headline this summer on an article clearly spoon-fed by the campaign. Quoted staffers and politicos promised the new candidate would rise to meet Republican attacks that she was soft on the issue, that she’d take an “enforcement-first position,” be “combative,” and indeed, “lean in” on border security. It’s a sign of how far right the United States has lurched on immigration, even — and in fact especially —under liberal administrations.
For the last several decades, Democrats have caved again and again to the demonization of immigrants, dropping demands for legalization and fixing the asylum system and building up only the apparatus of detention and deportation: a bonanza of contracts for drones, biometrics, fences, and cameras; a tenfold increase in funding for Border Patrol, from $363 million in 1993 to nearly $5 billion in 2021; an increase from 4,000 to 20,000 border agents. As of this August, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was detaining more than 36,000 people, maintaining a network of contracts with private companies and local municipalities to keep prison beds filled, and deploying data-mining and dragnet surveillance across communities.
In her new book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition, longtime organizer Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network (DWN), explains the overlapping recent history of mass incarceration and the security state and shows the limits of any attempt to reform either system. We have to demand “a society where immigration isn’t criminalized, where people have freedom of movement and the freedom to not fear being incarcerated,” Shah told me. To do that, she argues, the migrant justice movement needs to incorporate the tenets of prison abolition, to create stringent tests for whether efforts to help people within the system might actually be helping prop it up.
“Our target is the U.S. government, which is making the choice to detain people.”
Part handbook, part movement memoir, Unbuild Walls tells the story of 20-plus years trying to stop the incarceration of immigrants. Shah grew up in Houston, Texas, in an immigrant family; she went to a majority-Latinx high school. In college, she worked on divestment campaigns against private prison companies. September 11 happened, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE were formed, and there was a ramp-up in detention and deportations. At the same time, she says, “there was a prison boom happening in South Texas and along the border.”
“I was a criminal justice advocate, but everything I was working on was fighting the incarceration of immigrants,” she says. “So they weren’t separate things.” Her new book shows the two issues are truly inseparable — both historically and from a strategic perspective.
Shah and I spoke in June, amid campaign panic about the border, about how to keep fighting for immigrants under any administration. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Cora Currier Why is it so important to keep abolition as an explicit goal? What happens when you don’t?
Silky Shah We saw a lot of concern around deaths in detention as Obama came into office — and the administration’s response ended up just being creating nicer detention centers. Nicer cages, essentially. Having the clarity of an abolitionist lens got us to this place of like, oh wait, actually, these “nicer detention centers” are pretty terrible. People are still deprived of liberty and treated horribly, and deaths are continuing.
In New Jersey in 2013, advocates attempted to end a contract at a detention center, and immigration lawyers came back and said, “Well, we don’t want this to happen because we provide services there.” Some people even said that there wasn’t “enough” detention in New Jersey! It has gotten to the point where the ability to provide services as a nonprofit is actually reinforcing a lot of the things that we are fighting against. And, of course, alternatives to detention have just widened the scope of who’s under surveillance and expanded the scope of who could, at any time, be targeted for detention.
CC “Alternatives to detention” meaning ankle monitors, check-ins, et cetera.
SS Yeah — ankle monitors, check-ins. Smartwatches are now being rolled out. Instead of a reduction in detention, what we ended up seeing was just a widening of the net. It was wild because, in the Obama era, when it was pushed [both by advocates and the administration], the idea was that this would give us an opportunity to get people out. But they just continued to expand detention too. So all the things were expanding, and the idea of “alternatives” affirmed the perception that there needed to be a check on immigrants; there needed to be some sort of compliance mechanism. It just reinforced this idea of immigration as a public safety issue.
CC In the book, you have other examples of these sorts of ideological pitfalls, like the fact that the Dream Act, which provided relief from deportation for people who’d come to the U.S. as kids, ended up being pro-military by giving special provisions for people who served in the military. Or you have mayors of cities trying to justify sanctuary policies by saying it will help increase cooperation between immigrant communities and the police.
SS It’s so fraught. To take another example: Within the immigrant rights movement, the strategy that emerged, especially in the early 2000s, has been to position immigrants as American. It was a framework of patriotism, nationalism, innocence (of course), and productivity.
[I remember] the 2006 marches [for immigration reform] in Texas: so many American flags, and all these immigrant rights advocates telling people to not carry Mexican flags or Salvadoran flags. It was bizarre. For so long, as an organizer, I would hear from these folks who did public opinion research that, “Well, talking about the root causes of migration actually doesn’t help us.” So we can’t talk about U.S. wars in Central America or elsewhere, or talk about the North American Free Trade Agreement or different policies that have resulted in increased migration because we want to prop up the U.S. as being good. It became very American exceptionalism. It hurt our ability to make connections so much.
“It’s about freedom of movement, ending detention, ending deportation, and limiting ICE’s reach.”
It’s incredible to read and learn about the history of the sanctuary movement in the 1980s [when organizers worked with refugees fleeing U.S.-backed regimes in Central America] and how deeply internationalist it was. That era of more internationally focused approaches is something that’s reemerging and is really exciting. This moment of Palestine solidarity has been so critical, and it doesn’t come from nowhere. For example, there was a campaign a few years ago around getting a lot of movement groups to sign on to a letter dropping the Anti-Defamation League [as a partner in social justice work due to its Zionist stance]. DWN signed on, other immigrant rights groups signed on. Certain members actually decided to leave DWN because we chose to sign on to it, but we stayed on, and we committed [to Palestinian solidarity]. I think it allowed us to be pretty clear about where we stood and how we could show up in October of last year and since then. We made connections between war funding and border enforcement funding and staged an action during a [Secretary of State Anthony] Blinken hearing. We’ve been coordinating solidarity actions in D.C. (around Netanyahu’s visit for example).
CC One of the many campaigns you detail in the book is a Trump-era effort to cut the budgets of ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) under the slogan Defund Hate. It started in 2017, a few years before the 2020 uprisings and the national demand to defund the police. You describe it as a break from the usual Washington pursuit of comprehensive immigration reform, with all its concessions on security, and as a moment when groups actually came together to push an abolitionist agenda. In light of the backlash to defund the police, I’m particularly curious about places where you got pushback and how you moved beyond it.
SS Defund Hate initially was about Trump trying to build more of the wall at the border, quietly expand detention beds, and increase the number of ICE and CBP agents. The wall has become a symbol, but [what they actually need are] the personnel and the facilities — the prisons and the jails — to lock people up. Defund became a tool and sort of litmus test for a lot of Democrats in Congress [who wanted to stand against Trump]. ICE was playing this game with appropriations where they would overspend on their accounts, borrow money from different agencies like FEMA, for instance, by saying they needed more detention beds. That would bring ICE’s spending up beyond what was allocated, and they’d use that to make the case to get more money the next year. They did this for several years under Trump, but then we started to expose it.
People were ready to go further under Trump than previously, although a lot of the more liberal-minded folks in D.C. were like, “This will never work. We need more money [in the immigration detention system] in order to treat people well.” I write about some critiques of the campaign as well, but ultimately, it helped people understand the role of money in the system.
This seems wild now because we’re talking the day Biden put out this fucking executive order [restricting asylum at the border], but in the proposal for the fiscal year 2023 budget, he was calling for a 26 percent reduction in detention, which would not have happened without saying defund, without all those local campaigns. We saw a lot of shifts during that period; even one of the ranking appropriations members, Lucille Roybal-Allard of California, proposed a reduction to 10,000 detention beds during the pandemic. It was wild to see how far they were willing to go in that moment. It was the pandemic, it was Trump-era policies, it was also the summer of 2020 when the uprisings for Black lives happened. A lot of things were possible, and we had built a lot up until that point to push the boundaries.
Once Biden was in office, all of this became harder because a lot of the resources went back to [efforts related to] legalization. Also, people were back to that mindset of, “Well, we need more money at the border,” sort of missing the point. That’s been a challenge. Also, federally, the money stuff is so hard because they can just kind of pull money from anywhere.
CC You note the overwhelming use of private prison companies in immigration detention versus the overall prison system and that a focus on private prisons has created, in some ways, a division between immigrant justice and the broader anti-prison movement. Can you talk about where you think the emphasis on private prisons can obscure the real goal?
SS A lot of people are like, “Oh wow, look, these really evil corporations are making a profit off of incarcerating people.” But the reality is, it’s all a carceral economy. It’s not unique to private prisons. Jails and sheriffs benefit greatly from ICE detention and federal contracts, and counties have become very dependent on the money the federal government is providing them by detaining immigrants or detaining people in federal custody. Towns with prisons have also become dependent on the jobs that are created. A lot of people focus on the private prison lobby, which of course is a problem, but public guard unions have also advocated for harsher policies.
If they sign an executive order tomorrow getting rid of private prisons completely, including within ICE, I would be very happy. But ICE detention uses private prisons because they want to keep detaining immigrants, not because they want to keep working with private prison companies. I’ve had the experience multiple times with other organizers who are like, “Oh, well, our target is the GEO Group or CCA [Corrections Corporation of America, now CoreCivic].” And I was like, “GeoGroup or CoreCivic are the opposition, but they’re not our target.” Our target is the U.S. government, which is making the choice to detain people.
CC We have this image, especially from during the Trump administration, of lawyers as immigration rights heroes — descending on airports during the Muslim ban and representing literal babies in court. I’m curious how you see the predominance of legal thinking in the immigration context. How does that relate to your work on abolition?
“Courts don’t operate in a vacuum. Social movements impact the way decisions are made.”
SS Right now, there’s a really big push in the immigrant rights world to say legal representation for everyone is the answer. When you look at the model of public defense in this country, which became a legal right with the 1963 Supreme Court ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright, it was after that court case that we saw the rise in mass incarceration — so there isn’t actually a correlation between legal representation and decarceration. The model of public defense we have is very, very broken. You talk to anybody who’s doing public defense work — it’s really hard work. It’s unsustainable. We need sentencing reforms, prison closures, other things; there need to be strategies that are actually reducing the system itself.
Absolutely, we need a legal strategy. There’s no question. I do think that’s important, but the courts have moved even further to the right, and the possibilities are limited. And the courts don’t operate in a vacuum. Social movements impact the way decisions are made. I quote Derecka Purnell, who says there’s basically this outsourcing of the resistance to lawyers and this belief that lawyers are going to save us — it’s just not true. It hasn’t happened, it’s not working, and it’s actually unsustainable. This idea that the ACLU is our savior — it’s really concerning. We’re going to lose. We need to deeply understand that organizing and building power are essential, and if we put all that energy and money and resources into more lawyers, that isn’t going to necessarily get us where we want to go.
CC We’ve written a lot about this in the abortion context at Lux — this waiting for the Supreme Court or putting all your faith in the outsize amount of money spent on court cases versus actively trying to build abortion support networks or to support providers. The focus on lawyers can be disempowering for people, too, because they think, “Well, I’m not a lawyer. What can I do?” The “site fights” you describe, where people shut down or stopped plans for detention facilities in their area, are great because they’re examples of local organizing that’s aimed squarely at the federal government, which seems like an impossible target. Like, who am I to take on ICE in my city or in my town? Yet that’s what you’re doing in all these campaigns, these local flashpoints.
SS One more thing I’ll quickly say about the lawyers piece is that this is one of the really big challenges in the immigrant rights movement. Immigration law is so complicated, and every lawyer loves to tell you how complicated it is, constantly. There’s a lot of making organizers feel kind of dumb. I’m not a lawyer, and I’ve experienced this multiple times. I’ve worked in a space where I’m surrounded by lawyers, and there is this element of elitism and also saviorism. It becomes hard sometimes to really combat that.
So if there’s anything I want people to take away from this book, it’s that they actually have the agency to make change. We had a state legislation working group where people would come together and be like, “Okay, look, California did this, and these are some of the challenges that happened, and California passed this anti-detention bill. And actually, now Washington State is going to try to do it, and Illinois is going to try to do it. What are the ways that we can have one build on the other and make these even stronger?” Now we have seven states that have anti-detention bills, which is remarkable.
The state of Illinois doesn’t have any immigration detention at all anymore. When McHenry County was like, “No, we’re going to keep the contract with ICE” — because essentially, they wanted the money that was coming for the McHenry County Jail — immigrant rights advocates decided to run with a bill against intergovernmental service agreements between counties and the federal government. They won at the state level, and now, there’s no detention.
CC How important is that kind of deep organizing in the communities surrounding a prison? Obviously, each place is going to be unique, but it’s interesting for me, coming from a very rural place, for instance, to think about organizing around rural prisons and in places where the prison economy is just so entrenched and enmeshed. Is immigrant detention more or less difficult to rally people around?
SS It’s been much harder in more conservative locations and also in rural locations where people are really dependent on the jobs, like in Louisiana or Texas. But there are always people you can find. When I was working on trying to stop this facility in Laredo, Texas, there was a small town north of Laredo called Encinal, and there was a couple there who were professors at the university who were trying to stop this 500-bed facility that the town was going bankrupt around. I write about Eagle Pass, Texas, which was actually very supportive of Operation Lone Star, this [border security] operation that Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, put in place. But there is a wide coalition there saying, “No, actually, we don’t want this anymore.”
The politics are tough, but one thing that we’re trying to do is unpack what people want and need in their community. Things have started to shift enough ideologically that the idea of being a prison town isn’t the sort of pinnacle that it was at the height of the prison boom, so we need to really be thinking about: What are communities feeling like they’re lacking? What about a just transition? In California, for instance, where a lot of these facilities are in more rural communities like Adelanto, they passed the Heal Act, which said, We’re going to allocate $5 million — not a lot of money, but still — $5 million to counties that are considering moving away from immigrant detention to provide some resources for job training or whatnot. Meeting people where they’re at and understanding their fears, their dreams, and what they want is going to be so essential to shifting in those communities.
CC You talked about how much you were able to achieve because of broad liberal sympathy and outrage under Trump and how that deflated under Biden. We’ve just had that executive order on asylum; the New York Times is running headlines about how harsh border policies are so popular. In terms of tactics and strategies, do you see a meaningful difference in these two administrations?
SS Regardless of who wins in November, the real shift for the immigrant justice movement is going to take a long time — it’s about actually putting forth the vision of freedom of movement, of demilitarizing the border, ending detention, ending deportation, and limiting ICE’s reach.
Under a Trump administration, which we hopefully won’t have, it’s going to be a real question of how far he can go on mass deportations and building camps, et cetera. That’s going to look like a lot of what we saw before, which is state and local organizing to block ICE’s reach but also direct action disruption at these [detention] sites and doing everything we can to stop their expansion. Under Biden, what we were already seeing was both a move to the right on the federal level and a very limited set of reforms, the gutting of the asylum system, and more border closures. They’re going to increase prosecutions at the border, and they’re also trying to expand detention again in Texas, Utah, and Illinois. And we see S.B. 1070 in Arizona [the state’s “show me your papers” law, allowing authorities to demand identification of anyone they suspect is undocumented] and all this copycat legislation in other states. Every single way that Abbott is approaching the Texas strategy against immigrants right now is through the criminal legal system. It’s going to be that much more important for us as movements to home in on that connection, embrace abolition, and understand that these aren’t separate fights. Right now, it’s so important for us to have that clarity so that hopefully, five years from now, 10 years from now, we can start winning.
CC Well, it’s not a tremendously hopeful note to end on, but that’s where we are.
SS Change is possible. It feels really, really hard right now, but things were terrible as the Bush administration transitioned to the Obama administration. That’s when I came into this job. I want people to remember that under Obama, it was social movements — it was saying “not one more deportation” and fighting for Dreamers and civil disobedience and really sophisticated strategies at the local, state, and federal levels that got us to start reducing deportations. We did that, and we were able to do that because people were engaged. People rose up and said, “No, we don’t want to lose our community members and have them be incarcerated and banished.”
Cora Currier is a writer and editor at Lux.
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