The week after the election I talked on Zoom with Silky Shah, a friend and an incredible immigrant justice organizer. I have learned so much from Silky over the course of our long friendship, and it was an honor to talk with her about her new book. As I write in the foreword, Unbuild Walls is much more than a theoretical guidebook. It is a tool and sophisticated primer for activists, organizers, students, and intellectuals who hope to change the world.

Amna Akbar (AA): You’ve been leading the organization Detention Watch Network for over a decade, and you’ve been a key player in shaping immigrant justice and racial justice campaigns across the country. This past spring you published this incredible book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition, with Haymarket Books. After two decades of organizing, why did writing a book feel like the thing to do now?

Silky Shah (SS): I came to abolition pretty early on. I was probably 21 or so. This was in 2003 in Texas, or right about the time when I was graduating college, and I had seen how detention was growing after 9/11 and started to get involved in criminal justice reform and immigrant rights work. Abolition was a guiding vision for me. But it wasn’t until 2020, when it felt like there were real openings around abolition, when I felt that the moment really created space for us to make the case against immigrant detention. There was this culmination of so many years of organizing against prisons, organizing against deportations and against detention, and seeing that come together into an incredible organic movement of people calling for divestment from these harsh systems and investment in social safety nets, health care, and education. In the book, I wanted to show people who care about immigrant justice that there is a long tradition of abolition that captures their insurgent demands and sharpens our ability to demand an end to state violence.

There is still a lot of frustration with how parts of the immigrant rights movement have created a criminalizing dichotomy between deserving and undeserving migrants. So one part of the book project also speaks to immigrant rights advocates who lack an abolitionist frame and aims to give them a better understanding of how opposing the prison-industrial complex has helped us. I also see it as a resource for those who are interested in prison or police abolition but want to learn how immigration fits in and why it hurts us to remain siloed.

AA: The book is rich with learned study of immigration law and politics, the realities of deportation and detention, the changing dynamics of immigrant rights and justice movements—with a focus on critical lessons. What are some of the key arguments?

SS: I broke the book up into three sections: a history and analysis of the system, a history and critique of the movement, and some offerings for how we can approach the work with an abolitionist lens. The first part helps people understand the history of immigrant incarceration, especially over the last 50 years, and how it has shifted over time. I show that it’s shifted because of the rise in mass incarceration, the ascent of the war on drugs, and then eventually the war on terror. The ascent of racialized mass criminalization, in other words, also led to more and more immigrants being detained and deported each year and a general toughening of immigration enforcement along racial lines. Immigrant detention didn’t expand in a vacuum. It wasn’t some separate thing that developed just because of xenophobic attitudes around increased immigration. Rather, it expanded in conjunction with and as part of the same racist, capitalist, and imperialist logics that drove the growth of the prison system in the US, which is one of the largest in the world.

For example, it’s not just that the system keeps immigrants in custody because they’re awaiting the status of their immigration case or deportation; it also criminalizes and prosecutes them for the act of crossing the border. This expanded criminalization of immigrants ballooned the system in different ways. I try to show how the criminal legal system and the immigration detention systems are fully intertwined, and how even our reforms and the way we approach reform tend to be similar to how people approach reform in the criminal legal context in that it all just lends itself to the system expanding, becoming larger.

On this note, the second chapter examines how under the Obama administration—where there was a possibility for progressive immigration reform—the reforms just led to more people being detained and more people being deported.

AA: In the book, you document incredible organizing wins, underlining the importance of building power and being disciplined. But you also unpack in concrete ways the peril of pursuing reforms with powerful examples from the Obama years. Can you give an example of a reform during the Obama administration that led to an expansion of this country’s capacity to criminalize and detain immigrants?

SS: When the Obama administration came in, due to numerous exposés on deaths in detention, it prioritized reforming the detention system. People who are being detained, they argued, are there for “civil” or administrative proceedings, not “criminal” proceedings. So their idea was that we should treat these people—purportedly “innocent,” noncriminal immigrants—better, which is problematic in all these different ways. But that was their approach.

In response to immigrant rights advocates’ concerns about how terrible the conditions in detention were, the Obama administration expanded and built nicer facilities rather than releasing people from detention. The administration and DHS were saying, well, the conditions are bad. So let’s just create nicer facilities for these people who are in “civil” immigration proceedings.

We were in fact calling attention to the horrendous conditions of immigration detention. But a singular focus on conditions, rather than the violence of immigration detention itself, just lent itself to expansion.

Obama also further privatized immigration detention. Because private prison companies were more willing to create ostensibly better conditions than the varied actors running county jails used for detention, the administration saw expansion of private facilities as a way to make the system more “civil.” When the administration started, less than 50 percent of the detention capacity was run by the private prison industry. By the end of Obama’s term, it was up to 70 percent.

We tried to tell the administration that they didn’t have to put people in detention and that there are alternatives. But often the alternatives taken up by the administration meant not a removal of individuals from immigration enforcement but rather the imposition of things like electronic monitoring, GPS monitoring, and sometimes ICE check-ins in person or by phone. These alternatives ultimately expanded the carceral state’s reach and subjected more people to the violence of the immigration system.

This is what we’ve seen time and again in the criminal legal system: The push for alternatives just lent itself to more people being under some form of surveillance. All of a sudden, people who would otherwise never have been detained were now being put on an ankle monitor. This meant that more people came under the wide net that ICE was casting and as a result, detention never went down. Surveillance expanded and detention expanded. And now there was a whole category of people who could easily be brought back into the system because of the scale of surveillance and monitoring.

What I’m trying to convey in the book is that this relationship, the merger of the criminal legal and immigration systems, lent itself to more people being deported, more people being detained. And the Democrats have built this system as much as the Republicans have. Obama bought into the war on crime and applied this framework to immigration, even as he promised to make the system less violent. He pushed the good immigrant-versus-bad immigrant frame, ramping up enforcement against those who came in contact with the criminal legal system. The immigrant rights movement went along with increased immigration enforcement, in part because of this false perception that Obama was just making a play to get immigration reform passed in Congress.

We need to remember that we have done this before. We fought mass deportations before, and fighting deportations is an inherently abolitionist act.

AA: We are talking the week after the 2024 election. But before we get to Trump: What happened in the conversation between the immigrant rights movement and Biden from the beginning to the end of the administration? Early on Biden was making promises to shrink the numbers of immigrant detention cases and initially seemed to follow through to some extent. Some detention centers were closed. But then he shifted rightward, to the point where, you argued, Kamala Harris tried to make it seem like she was more hardline than Trump.

SS: On the first day of the Biden administration, they put forward a 100-day deportation moratorium, which was just remarkable, something the movement had been pushing for for a long time, since the Obama years.

They put out a set of enforcement priorities that placed a check on ICE agents, meaning they couldn’t rampantly target people for deportation. Then—this last piece was symbolic, but they did put forth an immigration bill that didn’t have carve outs for people who had criminal records, which was also significant. This is a post–2020 moment when abolition and critiques of the criminal legal system and of mass incarceration were really salient.

A lot of what we were able to do was to push and say, stop excluding people because of their interactions with that system, and let’s help everyone. We were seeing it in some of the policy that Biden was putting out. And there were a number of people who had been in advocacy organizations who started working within the administration at DHS. But it became clear that there wasn’t much political will on the part of the White House to do any of the things they wanted to try to do, and their early reforms never came to fruition. There were a few attempts, symbolic attempts. For example, the Biden administration ended the contract for ICE at the Irwin County Detention center, which was the facility in Georgia where there had been stories about forced hysterectomies and other gynecological procedures. They stopped detaining families, which was hugely significant, although they shied away from taking credit for that. So much of the Democrats’ and Biden’s strategy was to keep immigration out of the news because they believed that it harmed their image. They ended up keeping a lot of Trump-era policies and border closures, which just gave more room for the Republicans to commandeer the narrative. Biden and the Democrats never really offered any countervailing vision to a conservative approach to immigration, such as saying, as a start, that immigration is good. There was once a bigger narrative that presented immigrants as our community members, our family members, etc. The Democratic Party is not putting that forth anymore. The administration quickly retreated, and the Republicans took back the narrative.

AA: They’re not even promoting the basic liberal narrative.

The Harris campaign attempted to wipe out any memory of the racial justice movements of the last decade and any work the Left has done to change discourse and even move policy to some extent. Your analysis clarifies a similar story when it comes to immigration—there was a shift, fomented by organizing, and then there was a frontlash. Members of Congress went on TV to talk about abolishing ICE, for example! Not that long ago, we were in the thick of Black Lives Matter and prison abolition, amid this surge in left-leaning thinking about the immorality and antidemocratic politics of state-sanctioned racism and criminalization. But now these ideas, which had once held some purchase among the progressive political class, are completely absent. Forcibly forgotten, perhaps.

SS: Yeah, the basic liberal narrative isn’t there anymore, which is notable. There were a few good things the Biden administration did. But even with those good things, they rarely amplified them; they didn’t say, “Hey, look! We’re doing this for immigrants, because we believe in their humanity and their right to dignity, resources, and care.”

I think a couple of things were also tipping points to the rightward lurch that we’ve seen. One is that the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has pretty much been running the game and narrative on immigration in the US. The state of Texas has sued on any positive reforms the Biden administration tried to make and has even challenged previous reforms like DACA. Anything that attempted to offer some relief to immigrant communities in the US, Governor Abbott has attacked.

They started Operation Lone Star, which has funneled billions and billions of dollars into state-level immigration enforcement around bogus declarations of “disaster” and an “invasion” at the border. We’ve seen this merger of the criminal legal system and immigration system in a lot of ways at the federal level. But Operation Lone Star has merged the state criminal legal system with the immigration system, creating harsher penalties for certain crimes, converting state prisons into facilities just for migrants, and bringing in law enforcement from across the region to help with rounding up and prosecuting migrants in south Texas. The state has since passed even more draconian laws that, for example, would prosecute people for helping migrants, including a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for “human smuggling.” If you’re driving with somebody who is undocumented or living with somebody who’s undocumented, you could be prosecuted under such laws.

But what really pushed things over the edge was Abbott’s busing of migrants to cities like Chicago and New York that already had weakened social safety nets because of the pandemic, which started pitting communities of color against each other in terms of getting the resources available. I would read the comments on articles in the New York Times, and people would remark that Abbott brought the border to New York City, and now they understood what people at the border were going through, which is just a totally absurd thing to say. But it worked. It was effective. A proliferation of baseless crime and moral panic stories about immigrants on mopeds, stealing watches, or whatever culminated in a surge of right-wing feelings toward immigrants, made worse by the fact that the Biden administration was just avoidant on the issue and keeping in place a lot of horrible policies. The result was a general loss in liberal support for immigration. And it culminated in this border bill that Harris touted constantly on the campaign trail. She frequently bragged that it was one of the harshest bills we had seen in decades; that it effectively would close the border to people seeking asylum; that it had money for the border wall and the largest appropriations for ICE and Customs and Border Protection custody operations (detention) that we had ever seen. It was an incredibly draconian bill. And the reason it didn’t pass is that Trump basically told Republicans not to pass it because he thought it would make Biden look good. Then on the campaign trail, Harris repeatedly celebrated the fact that she tried to get this border bill passed, Border Patrol endorsed it, and this was a great bill and Trump tanked it, effectively showing that she was more hardline than Trump on immigration.

Those are the conditions we are in now. They were trying so hard to claim that the Republicans were white supremacist, and that Trump was out of bounds and we needed to defeat him to save democracy. But then they were championing the “border security crisis” and the “crime panics” around immigration, major components of the Right’s agenda. That wasn’t going to square with people, that wasn’t going to work. I think that that’s what’s so challenging about the moment we’re about to go into.

AA: The fundamental thrust of your book is an argument for the immigrant justice movement to adopt abolition. How has abolition shaped the immigrant rights or justice movement, and what does the election of Trump mean for the abolitionist flank of these movements?

SS: Because of all those years of work that we did under the Obama administration in response to the mass deportations taking place, it was no longer politically popular to rampantly target community members for deportation. We were able to significantly bring down the number of deportations of people currently living in the US through things like sanctuary policy at the local level and affirmative relief, like DACA and temporary protected status, which Obama was compelled to sign because of movement pressure from immigrant youth and those fighting enforcement. All of those things prevented so many people who currently live here from being caught up in the deportation machine.

Abolitionist threads within the movement helped get us to a more radical sanctuary policy, which cut ties between ICE and local police. It was so important for us to understand immigrant justice as a racial justice struggle, and also as a struggle against policing and prisons. The rise of Black Lives Matter really helped that.

As for the abolitionist element of the movement today, it’s in a different place, largely because Biden was terrible on this stuff, so the movement is very frustrated in general. There’s a lot more, maybe not always willingness to fully embrace abolition, but willingness to understand the problems with the way we’ve done things before.

Part of the problem is that so much of the organizing and advocacy and especially lobbying in DC has focused on people who live here at the expense of people who are coming. This is what we saw under Biden, where there was this acceptance of a punitive border policy even as they continued to celebrate immigrant rights for those who were already here. And it’s true and notable that we didn’t see this significant rise in people being deported from within the interior under Biden. We started to see it this year a little bit, but for the most part so much of what was happening on immigration was focused on border enforcement as opposed to interior enforcement. Of course, interior enforcement is still happening, just not at the scale it was under Obama.

But this intense dehumanization of migrants and immigrants generally made it harder to make the case for people currently living here. So we can’t really divorce the border from the interior. And I think under Trump, we’re going to see the criminalization of both happening at much higher levels. We need to make sure that whatever approach we’re taking, it’s a more holistic approach, not just fighting for some at the expense of others. That is one of the core lessons of abolition.

We need to remember that we have done this before. We fought mass deportations before, and fighting deportations is an inherently abolitionist act. People forget that there was such a robust and active movement when Trump came into office in 2017. People had spent years fighting deportations under Bush and Obama, trying to advocate for some affirmative relief. We know how to fight for our community and our community members.

AA: Right. Amid the first Trump term, the immigrant rights movement, bolstered by popular outrage, was able to push back against the Trump family separation policy.

Are you fearing less popular resentment or anger or mobilization? Is it possible that it will be harder for Trump to overplay his hand this time?

SS: Yes, we were able to move things during the Trump era because of the widespread outrage, but some of that was very surface level. Now we need a deeper understanding of these systems and how all incarceration and deportation leads to family separation. And this is, of course, what abolition helps us to see.

From my perspective, a major missed opportunity of the first Trump administration was how the level of engagement and support was pretty fleeting across the board and didn’t get transformed into a long-term mass movement.

This is the time to create on-ramps to do the deeper organizing work, to think about that long-term work that needs to happen, while we’re doing everything we can to protect those people who are going to bear the brunt of this new administration and to stop the detention expansion. I think there’s this desire to believe, well, if we can change the narratives, if we have different ways of talking about this, maybe people will engage more and shift their thinking. But no, we just actually need to build power and build an organizing base to shift things. In many communities, organizations are creating community defense networks to prepare for raids and community sweeps that will happen under the new administration. In states and localities where there might be a more friendly political climate, people are organizing to pressure public officials to strengthen sanctuary policy or prevent detention expansion. In some places where groups are doing deep organizing to understand the needs of the community, people are pushing for a transition away from carceral economies and for more investment in job training or support that isn’t tied to having a detention center nearby.

I think in the Trump era, and especially in 2020, many people began to understand abolition more than they did before. We have resources available because of that moment of reckoning. I hope it’ll be an opportunity to bring more people in again and keep them in.

Immigration is about everything. It’s about labor, it’s about gender. It’s about economic justice. It’s about climate. It’s connected to every single issue. And so we need to communicate that our ability to make the case for immigrants is our ability to make the case for everyone and conditions getting better for everyone.

AA: Say more about why making the world better for immigrants is better for everyone.

SS: I think I’m trying to say the opposite. Actually, making the world better for everyone makes it better for immigrants. I think if we do the work to expand workers’ rights, expand social safety nets, health care, education—all of that makes things better for immigrants. And when conditions are better for everyone, it makes it easier for us to fight for immigrants and make sure they’re not excluded from those public benefits. So we have to understand that it’s not just some separate issue. It’s a part of the fabric of doing social justice work in the US and anywhere, really. But the bigger point I’m trying to make is that immigrants have become an easy scapegoat because people are struggling from a sense of scarcity and economic insecurity. So many of the resources we have go to the prison-industrial complex, immigration enforcement, and US militarism. How do we make sure we’re bringing people in and doing that political education and keeping them in this work? In the next four years, though our ability to shift things will be mostly at the state and local level, that work is going to be so critical to getting those longer-term wins. From my perspective it is the big lesson for how we approach this new administration.

AA: Your point about organizing at the state and local level is often overlooked because people think of immigration in national terms. What do you think local fights will look like in the second Trump administration? How do you anticipate them looking similar or different as compared to last time?

SS: There’s going be work to do at every single level of government. I think we’ll continue to do work at the federal level; the Democrats have been extremely disappointing, but I do think pressuring them to stop all the money that Trump is going to try to get from Congress to do different enforcement, detention, and deportation actions will be necessary.

But local and state work is going to be a critical way to fight back and stop the raids, and support people who are subject to home raids and worksite raids, and also stop detention expansion.

In both the Obama era and the Trump era, we saw a strategy for fighting against mass deportations through state and local policy. For example, a number of communities worked to end ICE contracts at local jails, which created incentives for ICE or local police to find people to fill those beds. Ending the ability for them to have that space to detain helps prevent deportations. Detention exists to facilitate deportations in addition to punishing and dehumanizing people. Cutting off that capacity really helps.

The other thing organizers can do is stop ICE–police collaborations through local and state-level advocacy. We’ve seen robust sanctuary laws in places like Oregon and Illinois, and seven states have passed laws against detention. I think we’re going to have to continue pushing governors and state attorneys general to have a firewall against what Trump is trying to do.

My biggest concern is in places like the South and Southwest, like Texas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, where local officials are ready to work with the Trump administration. I think those places are where we’re going to have to really get resources to communities, to build up networks of support. There was a massive raid in Mississippi that many people probably remember in the first Trump term. In those instances you have whole communities destroyed. You have hundreds of people who are locked up at once. They have children who might end up in foster care because they don’t have a sponsor or somebody to be with. Many of them are not just detained because of their immigration status, they’re also put into criminal proceedings for immigration crimes. We’re going to need a robust amount of support to help people. It’s hard to overstate that.

AA: If people want to get involved in doing this work in the coming years, what would you recommend?

SS: There are people doing immigrant justice work in every single corner of this country, so find the people who are doing it in your community. There are probably legal service providers who are looking for volunteers, organizers, grassroots organizations, statewide coalitions. There’s so many different groups, and there’s so many different ways to support them, whether you are providing mutual aid or helping coordinate a campaign or designing materials or something else. And if you’re interested in keeping up to date on what is happening and getting action alerts, you can sign up at detentionwatchnetwork.org. We have members across the country, and there’s a list of our members, so you can see if they’re in your community and connect with them. 

Featured image: Silky Shah