Interview with Silky Shah
Silky Shah has been an immigrant justice organizer for over two decades. She is currently the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition working to abolish immigrant detention in the U.S. We met up recently in Chicago at the annual Socialism Conference. We were both on a panel with other activists sharing lessons from organizing efforts against carceral infrastructure. It was the fourth of July, and the day Trump signed his One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. The bill is one of the harshest austerity measures to dateโgutting what little social safety remains all the while funneling billions of dollars to immigrant enforcement and detention. Over the next four years, the government will allocate $170 billion for immigration enforcement, detention and border security, including $75 billion in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hire 10,000 additional ICE staff, including deportation officers, to facilitate the administration’s goal of one million annual deportations.
Understanding how we got to this point in immigration enforcement and detention is a key contribution Silky Shah makes in her book, Unbuild These Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition published last year by Haymarket Press. Her book analyzes how, starting in the 1980s, US immigration policies became deeply intertwined with the rise of mass incarceration and the expansion of the American carceral state. Key moments, such as post-9/11, Obama’s record-level deportations, and Trump’s policies have led to a more repressive and expansive immigration detention system. The bipartisan consensus around immigration enforcement and detention forged in response to a deepening capitalist crisis is important to not lose sight of, if we are to provide a viable alternative to the right wing and liberal narratives about immigration.
Zhandarka Kurti: I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about yourself and the organizing work you are a part of.
Silky Shah: I’ve been organizing at the intersection of anti-prison and anti-detention work for the last twenty plus years. I was born and raised in Texas and I’m from a South Asian immigrant family. I grew up in Houston, which is an immigrant city in every single way. I started organizing as a student in the aftermath of 9/11. At the time, there was a big prison boom happening at the US/Mexico border and I was working with an organization doing a lot of work around criminal justice issues. But all the new prisons we were fighting against were being built for immigrants. I initially came to know about the Detention Watch Network (DWN) as a member when I was working as an organizer in Texas and it was great to find a place to connect with people doing anti-detention work in other parts of the country. And that was around 2005, which was when the draconian and anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner bill passed the House and immigrant rights marches were planned in response. In 2009, I joined the staff of DWN and eventually became executive director. The network was founded in the 1990s after two really bad immigration bills passed and as the detention system started growing. Initially it was a network of legal service providers and people of faith concerned about what was happening, but over time more grassroots organizers and those who have been directly impacted by the system doing organizing work on the ground joined the network. We focus on grassroots organizing and local, state, and federal-level advocacy. There are also a lot of harmful narratives about immigration that we are trying to push back on. And so, that’s the work we do. For a while we were successful in limiting the expansion of immigration detention facilities and helping shut some of them down.
ZK: What motivated you to write this book?
SS: When I started thinking of this book, it was after Biden entered office in 2021 and there was part of me that was just blown away by how much we were able to shift politically in the context of the George Floyd uprising, especially the public resonance around abolition. I had come to abolition early on. In 2003, I went to the Critical Resistance Conference New Orleans which introduced me to abolition. But it started to make more sense to me once I was working at Detention Watch Network and seeing how reformist strategies were not helping us reduce immigrant detention. And then suddenly because of the Black Lives Matter uprising and the pandemic, which was a conjunctural moment, there was an opportunity to shift the way people were thinking about immigrant detention. And there were a lot of lessons there that I wanted to share.
But then at the same time, Biden had just come into office, and the democrats were starting to capitulate to the right on many issues, including immigration. And so, I felt that it was a good opportunity to argue for why abolition was such a necessary lens and tool to show the pitfalls of those reformist strategies and to also to share some of the movement history that helped me learn these lessons.
ZK: One of the important interventions that your book makes is examining how the growth of mass incarceration contributed to the rise of the system of mass detention we have in place today. Can you say more about this?
SS: It happened in a lot of different ways and at the core both systems are connected to anti-Black racism. So, in the early 80s, when the modern immigrant detention system started to take shape, a lot of it was because large numbers of especially Haitian refugees, but also Afro-Cuban migrants were coming to Florida. Haitians were deemed economic migrants unworthy of asylum, even though they were seeking asylum due to the political instability and violence which the US fueled for decades through its support of authoritarian regimes like the Duvalier dynasty. But the US response was to detain all these Black migrants who were coming to Florida. Some people said that this was racist. But this did not stop the US government who used this as a test case and just did it to more people. And so, it was the logic of anti-Black racism that led to Central Americans being detained. And then eventually, this policy of mandatory detention became law with the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. So, there is also a relationship between harsher sentencing, the war on drugs and immigration policies. Itโs not like these things are happening in a vacuum, they’re happening together constantly.
One of the things that abolition teaches us, which abolitionist scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore and others remind us, is that there’s so much about these systems that are tied to political economy. The prison boom for instance happens because economically challenged rural communities saw prison building as a recession-proof industry that can offer jobs. And similarly, the same thing happened with immigration detention. A lot of different places are vying for detention contracts because itโs what brings revenue and jobs. Basically, all detention is outsourced. So, you have, of course, private prison companies, which are really a byproduct of neoliberalism. But you also have these county jails across the country that have a symbiotic relationship with the federal government which is bankrolling county jail expansions. They did this in McHenry County in Illinois so they could have more space to detain immigrants. And then that county becomes dependent on that revenue and the jobs that come with it. And so all those things are interconnected. And this is not unique to detention. It’s not unique to county jails or state. The whole prison industrial complex operates this way. The prison industrial complex and the detention system are both very deeply embedded in the U.S. economy.
To find out more about how the US built the world’s largest immigration detention system, please click here.
ZK: It seems that with Trump in power we have forgotten the historical context of how our US immigration system came to be. For us millennials especially, George W. Bushโs administration played an important role to make the system more repressive in response to 9/11. Itโs been maddening to see how Bush is being repackaged in the Trump era as โa decent guy.โ
SS: I get frustrated because there’s a lot of erasure of the Bush era and how much harm it did. He’s a large part of why we are here. Thereโs so much about what happened during that period of time that led us here. There was all this attention and resources that went to the so-called domestic war on terror which operated through the criminal legal system in terms of the ways it targeted immigrants. There were more detention centers, but there were also more agreements between ICE and local jails, and more programs for local police to target immigrants. In the immigrant rights world, a lot of people use this term crimmigration, which I think can be helpful. But I think it also sometimes lends itself to this idea that to make everything better, we just must separate the two systems. But it ignores many of the reasons why people are in immigration detention and why we have the largest prison system in the world. It’s the political economy. Itโs also anti-Black racism, racism more generally and xenophobia and it’s that both systems are used to warehouse people who are considered undesirable. So, the same logic is used to justify the building of immigrant detention centers, jails, and prisons and this is why I believe it’s so important that we fight the whole system and not just one piece of it.
ZK: I think discussing the connections between these systems is more important than ever. The recent anti-ICE protests in LA and elsewhere make me hopeful but it seems to me that there are a lot of divisions to overcome in terms of Black and Brown solidarity.
SS: There are a few ways that these divisions are very intentional. For instance, Trump talking about so-called โBlack jobsโ or Greg Abbottโs busing scheme did a lot to divide African American and Latino communities. But itโs not just Republicans who are trying to pit communities against each other. We see this also in liberal identity politics in the way that the nonprofit sector works, where immigration is framed as โthe Latino issue,โ and criminal justice as โthe Black issue.โ And we were just talking about the Bush era where national security was seen as the โArab Muslimโ or โthe South Asian issue.โ It’s disempowering. These systems are not separate, they are connected. And the reality is when you look at how the immigration system works, Black people are disproportionately targeted for immigration enforcement, just like the prison industrial complex. But again, all of this is intentional to divide communities, and racism is so deeply embedded in the system. And liberal attempts sometimes to address this, which we saw under the Obama administration, was to tie the criminal justice system and immigration system more closely together which lent itself to more people being funneled into the system and not actually reducing it in any way.
There is also a long history of how race and racism have functioned in immigration policy that I discuss in the book. For instance, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the immigration bans in the 1920s. And in those moments is when we can see how things were laid bare which could be a powerful opening also for our movements. For instance, thinking back to the Black Lives Matter movement, when people were reckoning with racism in the U.S. and seeing perhaps for the first time the crisis of racist police violence and mass incarceration, it actually made it so much more possible for the immigrant justice movement to push for things that are not going to funnel people into the system. Having that bigger conversation about civil rights and racial justice actually gives us so much more opportunity to make the case for everyone.
ZK: As you discuss in the book, the Black Lives Matter movement and the George Floyd uprising in 2020 in particular opened up a horizon of political possibilities in terms of showing the limits of liberal reforms. Can you say a bit more about how the framework of abolition helps us to make sense of and be critical of liberal reforms? How have liberal reforms paved the way for a harsher and more repressive immigration detention system?
SS: In the book, I spend a lot of time on the Obama years because they are instructive for our ability to understand how a moment of possibility in terms of reform became so deeply harmful.
And there are three things I focus on. The first is when Obama came into office there was an effort to reform the immigrant detention system in response to public reports of horrible conditions inside the facilities and the rising number of deaths. Also, the administration really leaned on this idea that detention was a civil proceeding. Everyone became obsessed with the fact that many of the people held in these detention centers did not have criminal convictions, but thatโs beside the point. I hope that those that read my book can see that the point of the detention system, like the rise in mass incarceration, is to exclude and warehouse people that are perceived as undesirable and not necessarily a response to more undocumented immigration. So, the goal under Obama was to have โnicerโ detention facilities because in it people were going through a โcivilโ proceeding. And in this process, the Obama administration ended up working with a lot more private prison companies. The capacity went from less than 50 percent to 70 percent operated by private prison companies because the Obama administration pushed the line that the private prison companies would make nicer facilities. This is what liberal reforms did. And these private facilities are a lot harder to intervene on compared to the state and local facilities where we have a little bit more leverage. I remember this one facility, the Karnes County detention center in Texas. They did this whole dog and pony show where they had the New York Times come out and hold a big press conference to say โlook at these guards, they are really more like resident advisors because they are wearing khakis instead of uniforms and the facility is less like a prison because the people held here pose minimum security risk.โ Well, then why are you even holding them in the first place? Why donโt you just release them? And then a few years later, the Obama administration started detaining families in those same facilities. Kids inside these facilities were losing weight, they had severe psychological problems. And this is just one cautionary tale of what happens when you build so-called nicer facilities and cages.
ZK Nice cages are still cages and over time they become just as brutal as the original ones they replaced. This is a hard lesson that abolitionists have learned time and time again.
SS: Yes, and another lesson I would say we have learned from abolitionists is that alternatives to detention often expand the system. For instance, when you are a lawyer, you are thinking about your clientโs specific needs and what you can do for them. But sometimes the alternative to detention you offer or accept misses how much harm it does to the system. So, if you are pushing for alternatives to detention programs (ATD) like an ankle monitor for your client, you donโt realize that this can trap your client in a larger machinery of surveillance and detention. What ended up happening over time was that state actors simply just expanded the scope of people who were under some form of surveillance without reducing detention. These alternatives to detention programs ramped up during the Obama years. So, by the time we got to Biden, over 300,000 people were in the ATD program. And now the Trump administration is using all this data to target these individuals on ATD for deportation. This is a really important cautionary tale about how harmful the reliance on alternatives can be.
The third point I want to make about reformist approaches is an important one. Obama was trying to pass comprehensive immigration reform which purports to help some immigrants at the expense of others. So, his administration pushed for a path to citizenship for some people who were seen as deserving, while at the same time he expanded criminalization and border militarization. And Obama embodied this in every way and constantly pushed the so-called โgood immigrant versus bad immigrantโ narrative and the insidious idea that there were some immigrants who were so bad that they were deserving of detention, criminal prosecution and even deportation. And he did this constantly and he did this through also more merging of the jail system and immigration system. So, then the county jails became the gateway for deportation in so many ways. And through a program called Secure Communities and all these other ICE police collaborations. And this liberal idea that we are going after the so-called bad guys just expanded racial profiling to higher levels. And we had many more people funneled into the system. And also more people were being formally deported, which meant that they had a bar to re-entry (five-years). So, if they tried to come back during that time, they would be criminally prosecuted. And so, these policies grew both the immigration detention system and the deportation system as well as the number of immigrants in US Marshalsโ jails and the Federal Bureau of Prisons because there was just a cycle of people who did return because they had families and their livelihoods here. This narrative also gave so much fodder to the Republicans because it affirmed this idea that some immigrants were deserving of being deported and that immigration was a public safety issue, which is a lie.
Obama constantly reinforced this dichotomy of the good and bad immigrant in everything he said and then he failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform. And so, when I think about the abolitionist perspective on immigration, I think about all these different components: the infrastructure thatโs being built, the political economy, these racist narratives. And I think sometimes people really live in the terrain of legal strategies and litigation and don’t see how much the infrastructure and narratives are such a big part of how these systems change and evolve.
ZK Itโs interesting because both BLM and immigrant rights struggles took off during the Obama era.
SS: Yes, under Obama there was the illusion of reform. I mean that’s the thing that’s so hard about this momentโit just feels like the levers of power are so limited and the legal route is increasingly being cut off. During Obama, BLM was on the rise and this incredible organizing by immigrant youth who got him to do stuff. DACA[1], for instance, was an outcome of that organizing as were some of the anti-deportation struggles. And there was a possibility then and things we could do. It was not perfect. And I’m the first person to critique Obama and the harms of that administration. But because of that organizing, because of that work that was done, there was a possibility, and it helped a lot of people. But Biden was not a compelling target in general and especially after his blanket support for the war on Gaza.
ZK: Speaking of sleepy Joe- in 2020, we see the Democrats ride the wave of BLM militancy into political power and then immediately shift to the right. And then they lose to Trump in 2025. And the first piece of legislation that heralds the beginning of the Trump administration is the Laken Riley Act which passes with congressional Democrats supporting it. It was the first sign of the storm to come.
SS: Yeah, absolutely. It was the first time we saw such a significant change in mandatory detention since the 1996 laws. People charged with certain theft crimes suddenly had no right to a bond hearing which now of course has been expanded exponentially. Bond hearings may now be eliminated for millions of immigrants. The Laken Riley Act is a clear example of politicians exploiting a tragedy to stoke a moral panic and then extend state control. And the Democrats fell in line, you know, not all of them, but, some 50 of them did, just enough to ensure it was made into law. There’s so much to say about this.
What was challenging about the Biden years is that there was a void in talking about immigration reform which just gave the Republicans more space to frame the narrative. And then things became more acute especially in places like New York and Chicago because of Greg Abbott’s busing scheme which really taxed local Black and Brown communities who were struggling with not having the social safety nets and resources in place to take care of incoming immigrants and the Biden administration not providing those resources. Suddenly, the border crisis just took up all the oxygen. And that was the main right-wing narrative: โwe’re bringing the border to Chicago; weโre bringing the border to New York City.โ
The narrative of the Obama administration was the so-called good immigrant versus bad immigrant whereas under Biden it shifted to the old immigrant versus the new immigrant. So immigrant communities themselves were divided in addition to communities of color being divided. And Trump was successful at scapegoating immigrants. And then, you know, Kamala Harris at some point is running more hard line than Trump saying, look, I tried to pass this really, really draconian border bill and Trump stopped it. So, she positioned herself as even more hard line than Trump. So, all of that’s happening. And then the election happens. And then you have people whom you know, and I write about this in the book, like these DC lobbyists, who have played a sort of significant role in pushing comprehensive immigration reform and pushing the good immigrant versus bad immigrant frames. Frank Sherry and Cecilia Muรฑoz, they write this article in the Atlantic, all about basically how these groups are the reason why the Democrats lost and why they lost their way on immigration. And it gave a lot of cover to Democrats who are feeling some heat after the election. And that was their kind of reasoning. Many of these Democrats who voted for the Laken Riley Act, were like, oh, we are catching heat for losing to Trump: so let’s do this, letโs support this really, bad bill.
One of the things that is important to note is that a lot of this is about contingency. There are these acute moments where these choices are made that are so deeply harmful, often in haste, without realizing the consequences. This happened after 9-11. This happened with the โ96 laws, which the impetus for one of them was the Oklahoma City bombing. So, you know, it happened after the 1988 election with the exploitation of the story of William Horton that led to Bush Sr. winning the election. So, there are these moments that create the space to support harsher policies. And then it compounds over time. And so, this is what we’re seeing. And the Democrats have capitulated because they just had no vision, and they were so craven. We get to this place where now we have the first bill Trump has signed is the Laken Riley Act with Democrat support. It is unbelievable. And it helped set the tone for starting to send immigrant detainees to El Salvador, kidnapping and disappearing immigrant students who support Palestine and so on and so forth. All that stuff, you know, is an acceleration of things that have come before.
ZK: A lot of the ICE kidnappings have been framed through the lens of due process. What do you think of this framing? This is not the first time that due process has been denied to immigrants. What is different now?
SS: Due process is such an interesting thing because most people donโt really know what it means. In the beginning, everyone was like โoh my God, they’re sending people to El Salvador without due process.โ But itโs not just about due processโthey shouldn’t be sending people there in the first place. Itโs absurd that this is happening at all. Thereโs this way where due process feels like a liberal good thing that people deserve. I don’t want to outright dismiss it, because I think ultimately, if people believe in it, we should use it to get people to understand that it is essentially being eliminated for millions and millions of people. And there are aspects of this that could become a paradigm shift. It’s a real question right now in terms of the use of CECOT in El Salvador or the deportations to South Sudan and other places that we’re seeing, and if it will be normalized that becomes a real question.
But a lot of this is just an acceleration of things that have already happened. So, for instance back in 1996 under Bill Clinton, that was a moment when due process was stripped for large categories of immigrants. One of the big things it did is that it shifted the paradigm from a resident versus non-resident paradigm to a citizen versus non-citizen paradigm. So it meant that people prior to the new law would have the right to due process and have their fair day in court. For instance, a legal permanent resident who had a green card, had family or had been working here for a long time even if they had a criminal conviction could make their case before a judge and wait for their case to be heard. But after 1996, there were a huge list of crimes that were added, for example โcrimes of moral turpitudeโ where people could be mandatorily detained which means they no longer had a right to that bond hearing that would get them out of detention or to make their case to stay in the country. So, you saw this big stripping of due process for so many people, and this is the reason why my organization Detention Watch Network started. Suddenly people who had been in this country for a decade were being fast-tracked for deportation. And that was 30 years ago. You know, that was a long time ago. And it really set us up for everything that was going to come after 9-11. Like all the money now was coming into it. So, it took like these laws that were in place and just amplified everything. And during the Obama era, we had cases that were moved through legal proceedings quickly. The term that was given to these cases was โrocket docket,โ because it meant that certain deportations or removals were expedited through the courts, denying people due process.
Now fast forward to this moment when people are being shipped to El Salvador without any real ability to make their case or international students who had been in solidarity with Palestine being swept up into the system. And the fact that we’ve denied due process to so many people for so many years makes it possible for Trump to do it now.
ZK: And today we find ourselves in a very terrifying moment. Billions of dollars are being funneled to ICE enforcement, detention and border security. I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about what is at stake at this moment.
SS: One of the scariest things is that with ICE getting this much more money, a lot of the growth will be permanent, like how the 1996 crime bill shaped mass incarceration and how 9/11 shaped surveillance. Itโs so much easier to build these systems up than to take them down and so what this means for our fight in the long term is really terrifying to me. Iโve been doing anti-detention work for over 20 years now and whatโs happening now is even beyond my own imagination of how bad it can get. The treatment of people in detention has always been bad from the food to the medical care. But now itโs happening on another scale and itโs just devastating. Even just today, we heard about somebody who died in detention. The deaths are going up and of course this will get worse with more people being detained. I am worried because they will have $45 billion for detention which means more facilities will be built. ICE works in this sort of ratchet strategy where they overspend on their accounts and so they will take some money from FEMA or other parts of DHS and they will make a case to Congress and say โwe are now at this level and we need more money to do this.โ
ZK: And the facilities can be built relatively quickly like we saw with Alligator Alcatraz in Florida.
SS: One of my worries is that you have these awful makeshift facilities like the Everglades detention camp, and that should get our attention. But thereโs also traditional detention, the private prisons, county jails which we can expect to expand at a rapid pace. And Tom Homan has basically said he doesnโt care about standards in those facilities at all. But then you have the military bases, and then you have the Federal Bureau of Prisons being used and then you have the offshoring. The main argument I make in the book is that the growth of mass incarceration and policing in this country changed immigration enforcement, but I think that immigration enforcement is also about policing, prisons and how the military will operate. Now that they have all this money, it feels that our ability to dismantle is much harder because whatโs happening is also a jobs program.
ZK: That is an important take. ICE will be recruiting at least 10,000 deportation officers. The new facilities will be contracted out to the highest bidder and there will be a need for staff to operate them.
SS: Immigrant detention started to grow at the time when neoliberalism was on the rise with all its attendant problems including deindustrialization and austerity. The building and operation of detention infrastructure got outsourced so there’s only five ICE-owned and operated detention facilities and all the others are either private prisons or county jails. Now we’re seeing this even evolve into Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities, state prisons in Alaska, and military bases. They are about to open Camp Atterbury in Indiana, so I think there is a real question of what thatโs going to start to look like because they are moving towards a military-based model. So, all those things are accelerating and expanding in different ways right now. But the thing is that even with those private prison companies, oftentimes the way these contracts work is that the private prison company will have a contract with a local county. And usually, they are getting local counties to issue bonds to build a new facility. So, itโs government money that’s issuing the bonds with the private prison companies who are making the money. And local counties play an intermediary role. So, they’ll have the contract with ICE through what’s called an intergovernmental service agreement and then have a separate contract with, say, CoreCivic or GEO Group, and they make a certain amount of money. Sometimes, it’s a dollar a day for a person who’s detained. Sometimes it’s some other form of arrangement. But a lot of times, even when there’s a private prison company involved, there’s a local component that creates these perverse incentives for incarceration, which gets us to the point about the political economy.
For instance, there is a lot of attention to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the lobbying that private prisons might do with members of Congress to get them to support harsher immigration laws but there’s been studies that show that members of Congress make decisions about this stuff based on whether there’s a facility in their community and whether it would lose jobs. So for instance, recently Amy Klobuchar posted on X about how she pushed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to reconsider its decision to close down a facility because of all the jobs that would be lost. And this is Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator. So that state and local piece is so important because it’s where we have more leverage and where we have more power, and why we’ve been so successful in places like Illinois, or Maryland, or Oregon, and places where ICE doesnโt have facilities that would make it easier for them to detain and deport more people.
On August 1st, 2025, the new migrant detention center located at the Fort Bliss U.S. Army Post began receiving the first detainees. ICE spokesperson stated that the goal was to detain 1,000 people by August 17th. It is reported to be the largest detention center for migrants in the United States with capacity to detain 5,000 people. (Photo credit Brian Kanof / Special To El Paso Times)
ZK: I have seen some of the data that shows that Trump is still lagging Obama on deportations. All of this could change now with the new funding for ICE and detention capacity. But I think it brings up the question of how do we bring people into political organizing while continuing to remain critical of both parties? How do we ensure that the anti-Trump and anti-ICE energy doesnโt just get funneled into midterm elections or some near future electoral hellscape?
SS: I’m personally also just reckoning with this as well because I have so much frustration with the role that the Democrats played to get us to this point. But there are some differences. In many ways, Obama’s deportations were out of the public view whereas Trumpโs goal is to show spectacle. Because of Obamaโs real commitment to the war on crime and this lie of the public safety narrative we ended up with so many more people being funneled into the system through the criminal legal system. Whereas when you look at like Bush or Trump, there was much more of a spectacle element: mass immigration raids that completely disrupt a community, detain 600 people at once and push kids into foster care, etc. Itโs about instilling fear.
We really need to reckon with this history so that we don’t just repeat the mistakes of the past. But one thing that stopped Obama’s deportations from being as bad as they were was that some state and local governments said no, we are not going to comply with ICE. The only way that ICE can fulfill its mandate or quotas is if other law enforcement agencies collaborate. And so there is an opening to wage fights at the local and state level to curb this. We also need to understand what stopped deportations from being so high under Obama were things like DACA and temporary protected status. And it was also sanctuary policies in various cities and jurisdictions which cut off collaborations with law enforcement. These are efforts that we need to be expanded on today. But how do we think about sanctuary city policies in a way that also opens the space to talk about police violence? In the past, the opportunity to shape sanctuary policy was due to the fights that BLM waged around police violence. These are some of the lessons from the Obama era that may be helpful to make sure we double down.
ZK: And this brings me to the last question: what are some flashpoints of struggle that we can imagine going forward?
SS: We do want targets we can influence. One is jails and prisons. One of the big ways that people are transferred to ICE facilities is whenever they’re being released from prison or jail. The men that were transferred to South Sudan were coming out of prison. So ending those transfers is going to become an important fight. Another is to study, take seriously staffing and recruitment and to strategize about how to disrupt them.
A third is to get involved in your neighborhood, workplace or community to fight back. We must remind people that fascism happens through law enforcement, and our struggles are connected. It begins by paying attention to what is happening in your community. Are there detention centers in your city or state? We know there are plans to build more. If they have the capacity or space, they will find people to deport. So, how can you get together with people to make sure these detention facilities do not get built? Just because they have the money doesnโt mean that these expansions are a done deal. This is the time where we need to bring people in because a lot of people want to do something. So, we need to engage in action and political education to build power on the ground and not get so caught up in the perfect strategy.
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[1] DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a U.S. Obama-era policy that provides temporary relief from deportation and work permits to certain undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children, often referred to as “dreamers.” To be eligible, individuals generally need to have arrived in the U.S. before their 16th birthday, have continuously resided in the U.S. since June 15, 2007, and meet certain educational or military service criteria.