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"In the wake of post-9/11 xenophobia, Obama's record-level deportations, Trump's immigration policies, and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, the US remains entrenched in a circular discourse regarding migrant justice. As organizer Silky Shah argues in Unbuild Walls, we must move beyond building nicer cages or advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. Our only hope for creating a liberated society for all, she insists, is abolition. Unbuild Walls dives into US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, from the last forty years up to the present, showing how the prison-industrial complex and immigration enforcement are intertwined systems of repression. Incorporating historical and legal analyses, Shah's personal experience as an organizer, as well as stories of people, campaigns, organizations, and localities that have resisted detention and deportation, Shah assesses the movement's strategies, challenges, successes, and shortcomings. Featuring a foreword by Amna A. Akbar, Unbuild Walls is an expansive and radical intervention, bridging the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition." --
List of contents
Prologue
Introduction
Part One: Immigration in the Era of Mass Incarceration
- The US Prison Boom and the Growth of Immigrant Detention
- Obama, Criminalization, and the Limits of Reform
- Deterring the “crisis”: White Supremacy and the United States-Mexico Border
Part Two: Organizing for Immigrant Justice
From: Legalization to Racial Justice: The Evolution of a Movement Privatization and the Demand to Defund Communities Not Cages
Part Three: Making Abolition Abolitionist Approaches to System Change Beyond Abolish ICE
About the author
Silky Shah has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2009, she joined the staff of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigrant detention in the United States, and she now serves as its executive director. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in
Truthout,
Teen Vogue,
Inquest, and the
Forge, and in the edited volumes
The Jail Is Everywhere (Verso, 2024),
Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (Haymarket Books, 2024), and
Transformative Planning (Black Rose Books, 2020). She has also appeared in numerous national and local media outlets including the Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC.
Summary
“Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I am going to fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Drawing from over twenty years of activism on local and national levels, this striking book offers an organizer’s perspective on the intersections of immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.
In the wake of post-9/11 xenophobia, Obama’s record-level deportations, Trump’s immigration policies, and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, the US remains entrenched in a circular discourse regarding migrant justice. As organizer Silky Shah argues in Unbuild Walls, we must move beyond building nicer cages or advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. Our only hope for creating a liberated society for all, she insists, is abolition.
Unbuild Walls dives into US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, from the last forty years up to the present, showing how the prison-industrial complex and immigration enforcement are intertwined systems of repression. Incorporating historical and legal analyses, Shah’s personal experience as an organizer, as well as stories of people, campaigns, organizations, and localities that have resisted detention and deportation, Shah assesses the movement’s strategies, challenges, successes, and shortcomings. Featuring a foreword by Amna A. Akbar, Unbuild Walls is an expansive and radical intervention, bridging the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.
Foreword
Print and e-ARC distribution to trade and consumer media, both traditional and online, via
Edelweiss, and other distribution platforms.
Targeted outreach to left and abolitionist organizations and book clubs.
Interviews in lefty magazines like The Nation, Jacobin, Dissent, New Republic
Interviews, reviews and excerpts in popular outlets like Teen Vogue, Vice, Jezebel
Virtual events with high profile scholars and activists
Radio and podcast interviews
Academic, library, and digital marketing campaigns
Outreach to indie booksellers
