The Authoritarian Machine Is Growing — and It Won’t Stop at Immigrants

“Fascism and authoritarianism are deployed through law enforcement,” says Silky Shah.

Kelly Hayes

Kelly Hayes

— 32 min read
Photos of Kelly Hayes and Silky Shah beneath the Movement Memos podcast logo.

“Fascism and authoritarianism are deployed through law enforcement,” says Silky Shah. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Silky and I discuss immigration raids, rising authoritarianism, mass protest, innocence narratives, and what it means to organize effectively in this moment.

Music by Son Monarcas & David Celeste

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This transcript was originally published in Truthout. It is shared here with permission.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about solidarity, organizing, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. This week, we’re talking about immigration raids, rising authoritarianism, mass protest, innocence narratives, and what it means to organize effectively in this moment. In the first week of June, ICE agents carried out raids and made immigration arrests in multiple sanctuary cities, sparking protest and resistance. As we make sense of these events — and potentially step into the fray ourselves — it’s crucial to understand the threats we face, how we got here, and how our language and framing can either strengthen or sabotage our efforts. Today, we’ll hear from author and organizer Silky Shah, who is the executive director of Detention Watch Network — a national coalition working to abolish immigration detention in the United States. Silky is also a Truthout contributor and the author of Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. I hope you find her insights as grounding and clarifying as I have.

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[musical interlude]

KH: Silky Shah, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

SS: Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here with you.

KH: I know this is an incredibly difficult time, and that folks who are organizing in defense of immigrants are under tremendous pressure right now. So I just want to start by asking, how are you doing? And how’s your team holding up?

SS: It’s a hard question to answer. I think there is a real sense of grief and fear and concern for all the people that we work with and our families and our communities and our members, just given the escalation that we’re seeing right now. And at the same time, people are paying attention, people are fighting back, people are in the streets, and I think that gives us a lot of places to do the work, to say, “Okay, these are the ways that we fight back. How can we be strategic in this moment? How can we see the opportunity in people paying attention?”

So it’s confusing because I think in a lot of ways, under the Biden administration, people weren’t paying attention. People thought things were fine, and actually so much of what happened during those years set us up for where we are now. And so I think these are the moments when organizations like Detention Watch Network, and people who have been focused on immigration enforcement, have a lot of work to do and a lot of ways to bring people in. But at the same time, the fight is that much more immense and it’s tough and devastating to see what’s happening.

KH: Well, I deeply appreciate the work you’re doing, and I am so grateful that you were able to make the time to talk about what’s been happening, so that we all might be better equipped to face the situation and do our part.

SS: I think the thing I’ve been saying for the last few months is, this is the time for political education. This is the time for really understanding these systems. It feels hard because our levers of power are different and we have to adapt and adjust. I started doing this work back after 9/11 and, for years and years, we just lost campaigns or didn’t win, and we would just be like, “Okay, we’re going to just keep trying and keep trying.” And then at some point we had some openings. And so I think that’s the way to think about this moment is, this is the time to be building up. This is the time for political education and to bring people in so that we’re ready whenever those opportunities do arise.

KH: I couldn’t agree more. I also think having a strong analysis is important in moments when people feel particularly frightened, disoriented, or fired up by what’s going on around them. And I am seeing a lot of those energies at work on social media right now.

In the past week, we’ve seen immigration-related raids and arrests in a number of sanctuary cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis. These actions have included deceptive check-ins, militarized raids, and what some are calling “public spectacles” of enforcement. How do you interpret this escalation, and what do you think it signals about the administration’s strategy and goals on the immigration front?

SS: For many, many years, the way that we were able to stop deportations, to push back against the rounding up of community members was through things like sanctuary policy or stopping the expansion of the detention system and also strategies for affirmative relief like deferred action for childhood arrivals, DACA or temporary protected status. So there were all these ways that the system was still rounding people up and so many people were being deported, especially in the Bush and Obama eras and going into the first Trump administration. But we adapted our strategy and said, “No.” The way that this often happened was through the criminal legal system, and because these sanctuary policies had grown, actually it was harder for ICE to round up people. And so in many ways, I think this is a response to all of those wins, and that’s what happens over time. Whenever you have wins, of course, the state is going to figure out ways to go around that.

And so what we’re seeing now, I think, is serving a few different purposes. We knew that work-site raids were going to be a major thing under this administration. It was true for Trump’s first term. It was true for the Bush years where there would be these huge operations in places like Mississippi or Iowa where so many people would be rounded up – hundreds of people – and they were really disruptive. But they also took a lot of work planning those, and I think what we’re seeing now is, especially because of this “operation at large” that Stephen Miller has really pushed this sense of, “They have to meet these numbers.” They made all these campaign promises about the millions of people who are going to be deported. And so they’re trying to meet those numbers because our strategies of making sure people know their rights, making sure that sanctuary policies are in place have actually prevented the thing that they want to do.

And so they’re escalating, and they’re escalating by bringing in the National Guard. They’re escalating by going after sanctuary cities, like you said, and trying to really scare people. And I think it’s both serving the purpose of trying to meet those numbers and also instill fear in communities where there’s this forced attrition and people are leaving on their own because they’re scared of ending up in detention or ending up disappeared or trafficked to another country in the world (which we can talk about more). That’s our understanding of what’s happening, and they’re evolving their strategies to both instill fear and, not just for immigrants, but also for those people who are trying to support immigrant communities.

And this is not a new playbook. I think watching the coverage of what’s happening in Los Angeles, for instance, right now as we’re speaking and the tear-gassing of protesters, it feels like over a decade ago when we saw the Ferguson uprising during the Black Lives Matter movement and the response and how police are responding. I think the hard part is that, in that moment, it was the militarization of police that put a lot of emphasis on how that ended up playing out. And Obama was in office there, so there was this strategy of saying, “Okay, how can we intervene here and push the Obama administration to intervene?” And right now, I think what’s so scary and what’s so hard, and to your question of how we’re doing, we’re only five months into this and this is what we’re seeing. I think trying to really understand how much more this escalates and how we can make sure we’re protecting our communities and we’re in this for the long haul and seeing how that operates.

I think already we’re seeing these questions of how is LAPD going to respond? How are these local actors? But really what we’ve seen time and time again is ICE doesn’t operate on its own. It operates with support of law enforcement at all levels of government often. And so, I think that is going to be a real question as we see this escalation and what we can do to try to squash it and make sure that immigrant communities are protected and also those people who are taking action in support of immigrant communities.

KH: In April, you wrote that “immigrant incarceration has become a clear testing ground for this administration’s authoritarianism.” Can you talk about how immigration detention is being used as a testing ground and what patterns or shifts you think people should be paying closer attention to right now?

SS: So, this administration is essentially weaponizing detention to expand its authoritarian strategies. This includes, for instance, shipping people, trafficking, or essentially state-sponsored trafficking of people to places like El Salvador or South Sudan or beyond. It includes the detention of students that are being targeted for their protest and support of Palestinian solidarity. And that I think is where we’re seeing it used in a way to kind of, as many people have said, deny due process and move in this direction of people being targeted for thought crimes or people being deported or removed from the country or imprisoned indefinitely without any reason. And I think that that is a lot of what we’re seeing, and part of the reason we’re seeing that is because there’s been many years of this system growing and growing and growing and extending to more and more people. And so, now that extension includes people like Mahmoud Khalil, like Kilmar Abrego García, who both have received a lot of attention.

But I think the thing to pay attention to right now is, I think there’s a lot of focus on these particular cases, which makes a lot of sense, but also the infrastructure of detention is really changing, and it’s something that I think what it portends is really a real paradigm shift in the system. The last time I think we saw significant paradigm shift was after 9/11, with the creation of DHS, and also the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the expansion of more border militarization, more money going to the system, and currently there is a budget bill proposal that the House just passed that has $45 billion for detention, which is 13 times actually what the current detention budget is. And so, the fear is that more and more people will be caught up in the system as the system grows more and more. And detention, like the easiest way for this administration to deport people is by having more detention capacity.

Detention is the strategy by which… it’s a facilitator of deportations. And so, right now there’s roughly 50,000 people in the detention system, it’s the highest it’s been since 2019 under Trump’s first term, and it’s evolving in a lot of different ways. One is the thing that’s getting the attention is of course people being shipped to the CECOT [“Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo,” which translates to “Terrorism Confinement Center” in English] prison in El Salvador, or to other locations across the world, including these terribly dystopian stories about those individuals who are sent to South Sudan and then getting moved to Djibouti where they’re being held in shipping containers, in really, really deplorable conditions and life-threatening conditions. And that’s really a particular escalation. I think the one thing to name about that is the US has the largest detention system because the US has the largest prison system in the world. And so, for so long, the way that we’ve done detention is in the US and with large capacity to detain people.

But other countries across the world, including Australia, and the UK, and Denmark, and Israel, have had these sort of schemes of detaining people offshore. And that I think is, it’s not unprecedented in the global context; I think in the US context, this is a real big shift, and something we should be concerned about because I think there’s also the slippery slope of what Trump has named of potentially sending citizens to CECOT who are in the federal prison system. And so, that’s this constant expansion. So, I think that’s one thing to be worried about, of course, there’s also this expansion in use of military bases and even federal prisons here are now holding people in immigrant detention, and in addition, we’re hearing a lot more stories about people being held in field offices, so essentially office buildings, where they’re not set up for people to be staying there overnight or for several days or for several weeks, and these stories out of places like Massachusetts and elsewhere and Baltimore, the conditions are just getting worse and worse.

The other thing… And the thing that I really worry about though in the context of all this happening is the normalization of traditional detention, which is growing that much more, and if this budget bill passed, could grow even more and more. When you look at the detention system, a lot of it is concentrated in private prisons, which people talk about a lot, and also county jails, county jails across the country are expanding and expanding the use of immigrant detention, being used for immigrant detention. And of course, private prisons are expanding, but one of the things that has been revealed recently is that, in Florida, for instance, the Krome Detention Center, which is actually kind of in the modern era of immigrant detention, one of the first facilities that was opened up in South Florida near Miami, it was a facility that was open to detain specifically Haitian migrants in the early 80s who were fleeing a U.S.-backed dictatorship, but we’re deemed economic migrants not worthy of asylum.

So, this facility has been around for a long time, and it’s had terrible conditions for a really long time. But what we’re hearing for instance, is because Krome is one of the five ICE-owned and operated facilities, it’s required to take people regardless of the capacity. And so, you have just more and more people being sent even though they don’t have the capacity. Whereas, at a private prison, they might be able to say, no, we can’t take more people. And in the context when it’s a government-run facility, if it’s an ICE field office, if it’s something else, because Stephen Miller says, because this administration is saying we need to detain more people, these places are being inundated. And I think it reveals to us that there is so much emphasis on privatization or this being a corporate strategy, and Trump’s cronyism… Which is absolutely true, I’m not denying that.

But really what is happening at Krome reveals that it’s the system itself that’s the problem, having these ICE-owned and operated facilities – it’s not like the conditions are better. And in fact, right now you could argue they were so much worse. And so, I think that it’s necessary that we pay attention to that. And I feel that the infrastructure is shifting right now, and so I think for us, a lot of the questions are how do we stop the offshoring, and make sure that it doesn’t become the norm while also fighting the existing detention system in the way it’s expanding and evolving currently.

KH: I really share your concerns about offshoring and the importance of resisting that carceral strategy, which will undoubtedly expand in scope if it persists. Right now, I think we’re seeing an effort to recreate the climate of terror we saw during Trump’s first term with family separation — but this time, they’re exploiting the culture of forgetting around criminalization. The goal is to make the threat of being sent to CECOT a constant source of fear and dread for immigrants, while keeping the situation forgettable for everyone else — unless someone we’re absolutely certain isn’t “a criminal” gets caught up in it. By labeling people as gang members, and using words like “alien enemies,” they’re trying to manufacture forgettable people, as far as the broader public is concerned. And that mechanism, of rendering people forgettable, will also apply to the rest of us when we’re the ones being offshored, because we’ve already been conditioned, in this society, to forget what happens to criminalized people when they’re disappeared into the system.

Now, you’ve mentioned Trump’s efforts to deport international students with ties to the Palestine solidarity movement. Of course, the Palestine solidarity movement has already been stigmatized, criminalized and positioned as inherently punishable, which we also saw under Biden. But this move to deport international students who have any affiliation with the movement really sits at the intersection of Trump’s war on immigrants, the repression of Palestine advocacy, and Trump’s broader attack on higher education.

It’s obvious that reducing the number of non-white immigrants and terrorizing non-white immigrant communities is one of the core priorities of this administration. Support for Israel’s genocide, and for Netanyahu, whose impunity is aspirational for Trump, is also embedded here. I also think it’s important to observe how the stigmatization of student protesters, by both parties, is being exploited to treat solidarity with Palestinians as a political affiliation that is inherently worthy of deportation and criminalization — because we’re going to see more of that, as protesters are increasingly characterized as “insurrectionists.” And then, there’s this element of policing thought, and attacking institutions where ideas about liberation and oppression might be shared.

As you’ve alluded to, some of the things that people are reacting to as being particularly shocking right now are things that have been happening for a while, but this policing of thought, the severity of that, and these attacks on cities and institutions where the administration feels their white supremacist values aren’t being sufficiently upheld, this feels like a significant escalation. It feels like an effort to remake society, and the attacks on immigrants that we’re seeing seem like an early stage of that larger project.

SS: I couldn’t agree more. I really do think that the targeting of student activists is in this sort of Venn diagram of what this administration is trying to do. Like you say, this convergence, it’s like immigrants are a target, Palestinians are of course a target, and people who support Palestine are a target, and these are the “enemy populations” of this administration, and then universities, because like you said, it’s taking away the institutional basis for free thinking. It’s an easy front to show that there isn’t any room for dissent. And so, these particular institutions, universities become a site to do that. And the way they do that is by punishing people. So, whether it’s through disappearing people, deportations, having all these institutions waste money on legal battles, taking away their money, taking away their possibility for research and other capacities, I think all of those things are strategies to go after universities, and then use this low-hanging fruit of Palestinians who fall into that Venn diagram are people who are international students who have supported Palestinian protests or protests in support of Palestine, this is… They’re an easy target.

And I think in so many ways it’s because they see it as an easy target, they sort of went after Mahmoud Khalil, and Rümeysa Öztürk, and all these other individuals. And Mahmoud Khalil is still being detained, because again, he’s this sort of testing subject, how far can we go with this? And even now with how we’re seeing some of these things evolve, like we were talking about detention as a testing ground or the offshoring… Like Kilmar Abrego García is finally coming back, but they’re saying he is going to be charged with potentially harboring immigrants or facing criminal charges. And so, all of those things, they’re taking these steps, and then how do they justify these steps and how do they hold onto them, and how far can they go, I think is the question. And how institutions are going to respond.

And so, from my perspective, I think one of the big challenges is how much people are really fearful of talking about Palestine, and at least I can say, obviously this has played out at particular universities, Columbia obviously. So, when you’re looking at the nonprofit system, for instance, so many of our organizations depend on funding from foundations, and foundations are also a potential institution that will be targeted, [501C3] infrastructures are a potential institution that will be targeted. So, I think there’s so much fear, and again, because there isn’t a lot of political education sometimes about what’s happening in Palestine, or the understanding of these conditions, or this has become this sort of tool by which to go after institutions, people are that much more scared. And so, I think in terms of how we respond and what I strongly believe is that it’s so important that we see these struggles as interconnected. And I think on immigration and migrant justice and Palestine solidarity in particular, I think there’s just this bigger question of the U.S. role in what’s happening in Gaza, and the West Bank right now, and how we understand it, and us as people who are living in the U.S. and want to respond to that. But also Gaza has been a laboratory for a lot of the tactics and militarization that’s being utilized at the U.S.-Mexico border. And also the reality is that the U.S. system of immigration, and the response to that is in large part because of U.S. foreign policy and the role that U.S. foreign policy has played in so many other parts of the world to lead to these levels of migration. It’s not only U.S. foreign policy, but it plays such a significant role, of course, which we’ve seen over time because of U.S.-backed wars and efforts in Central America. But even now, this sort of villainization of Palestinians, you also see this villainization of Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio last year, we saw that and also of Venezuelans.

And I think there’s this thing where it’s like these are the “enemy populations” and is this the sort of evolution. Whereas before the focus was on the “rule of law” and it was sort of masquerading as the way to go after people. Now it’s really evolved into what you’re naming, which is essentially belief systems. Mahmoud Khalil was essentially targeted for a thought crime, and that is a major, major escalation. So it’s important to understand that there’s a huge system that’s been built up over time that is being utilized and weaponized in all these different ways. But this escalation around Palestinian solidarity and targeting immigrants in particular around that, is such an important piece of why we need to be in solidarity, like migrant justice movements and Palestine solidarity movements need to be in solidarity with each other because these things are being utilized to go after our communities.

And yeah, I guess the thing I would say in terms of a response is that it’s so important for us to make sure that in whatever way that we are working against the escalations right now, or how these things are moving is to have that sort of deeper political education and not fall into these innocence frames or other frames around this that might suggest that some of what ICE is doing is okay, or some of what this administration is doing is okay for certain people. And that instead we need to just be really clear that the way these institutions have been built up and the way that authoritarianism and rising fascism works is through law enforcement. And we have to make sure that we are fighting the system as a whole and not accept that some people are deserving or undeserving because of their interactions with the criminal legal system and whatnot.

And then also I think it’s so important as the migrant justice movement to really have a political education about what is happening in Palestine right now, the history of that, the history of the U.S. involvement and those sort of broader connections and really understanding our movement as an internationalist movement, which I think is something that’s really been lost over time. I think there have been moments when the migrant justice struggle, the immigrant rights struggle in the U.S. has really been much more internationalist like in the 1980s, for instance, during the Sanctuary movement and really understanding what was happening in Central America.

But I think in the last few decades that has really been lost. And I think this is the time to really fully embrace that, both because of the role that U.S. foreign policy plays broadly, why it’s so important for us to call out what the U.S. is doing in terms of the destruction of Gaza and Palestine, but also as we’re seeing the offshoring of detention and how different places are being … The fact that the Trump administration is trying to send people to South Sudan or to Ukraine, there’s so much there I think about us needing to have a broader internationalist lens to the work we do to support migrant justice efforts.

KH: I really appreciate what you were saying about innocence narratives because we’re seeing a lot of people lean into that approach right now — highlighting, for example, those with no criminal record or those who had legal status but were still harmed by the administration. And I know this can be tricky, because I do think it’s important to correct false narratives and to tell the truth about people’s stories, particularly in the face of fascist lies. But when we zoom in on particular people, and exceptionalize their cases, that’s often done at the expense of other people, who are more or less written out of the story at that point. Winning becomes a matter of helping the most perfect victims, rather than stopping fascist and carceral violence. How do you think we should address these concerns and push for a more expansive vision of justice?

SS: Yeah, I mean, I think when Mahmoud Khalil was taken or when Kilmar Abrego García, when those sort of stories sort of blew up, I think it is absolutely justified and terrible and things that I don’t think should be happening. And again, like I said, Khalil’s being targeted for what is essentially a thought crime, and Kilmar Abrego García was just sort of swept up into this and those things are not okay. But I think the thing that people really, really leaned on is this idea of them being denied due process. It was a hard thing to hear as somebody who’s been doing this work for a very long time.

I mean, Detention Watch Network was founded in 1997, which was the year after the passage of two really harsh draconian laws, which we sort of referred to as the 1996 immigration laws that actually expanded the scope of who would be denied due process, including green card holders and people who had visas and people who had … It wasn’t just undocumented people, but it was like any non-citizen could be denied due process if they had had certain types of interactions with the criminal legal system or people who are newly arriving could be denied due process. And so those things expanded significantly then. And that was 30 years ago. It was a really long time ago.

And I think the thing that abolition and a deeper understanding of the prison-industrial complex teaches us is that when you accept that some people are deserving of incarceration or detention or deportation, the scope of who is eligible, the scope of who is deserving just keeps expanding. And so that’s what we started to see. And so when it comes to the question around innocence frameworks and who’s deserving and who’s not deserving, I think again, there’s this sort of thing where for so many years, their strategies of targeting people, and especially under the Obama years, they really perfected this was sort of masquerading as like, “Well, we’re using the rule of law and the rule of law is the way that we go after people through the criminal legal system.” And it just ballooned the system. And there was no real perspective or understanding of the many, many years of the growth of the prison system in this country to more than 2 million people in prison by 2000 when in 1970 we had 300,000 people in prison.

And so I think that sort of historical understanding and political education about why we have the largest prison system in the world is often missing in this conversation and how that’s expanded over time and really how Black, Indigenous, Brown people and working class and poor people are really the people who are caught up in the system. And so I think all those things are really an important part of this conversation. But when it comes to immigration specifically, I think there is a lie that’s constantly being told to us that immigration is a public safety issue. And so people just accept that and people have completely accepted that as a frame. And so then the response is, “Well, this person isn’t deserving because of this, or this person is relatively innocent in these ways.”

And what it does is it keeps reinforcing this idea that some people aren’t deserving, that keeps reinforcing the idea of the good immigrant versus the bad immigrant. And what’s happened is that this emphasis on the good immigrant versus bad immigrant, which under the Biden years was really the old immigrant versus the new immigrant, those things have been so embedded and reinforced that it gave the Trump administration and the right wing to basically take on this idea that all immigrants were bad. And similarly, they implemented what is known as the “Muslim ban” or the Muslim African ban, but even expanded beyond that, travel ban. And again, it’s this idea that national security, which is again another lie that’s always told to us, that immigration is about national security and public safety, they are now expanding that even more and more.

And it’s when we accept these ideas about immigration as a public safety question, or immigration as a national security question that they have more fodder, they have more ability to use those narratives to go after more people. And so we have to disrupt that and say no. I mean, immigration is about family relationships, it’s about seeking refuge, but it’s about labor. And we have to have a bigger conversation about the political economy and the role of immigration in that. And like I was saying earlier about the sort of role of U.S. foreign policy. And so I think in terms of how do we navigate these concerns and push for a more expansive vision, I’ve said this, there was many, many years where under the Obama years where you saw the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and this sort of questioning of policing and mass incarceration and how those things have evolved.

And in many ways, I think the immigrant justice movement benefited so greatly from that period of time because it gave us the sort of understanding of the criminal legal system and the sort of connections to make and the work to actually expand sanctuary policy, which isn’t perfect by any means. But it did actually help reduce deportations. And so that bigger racial reckoning and all these bigger questions actually gave us room to push back against the criminal legal system and its role in immigration. I think now we are seeing the use of the criminal legal system, the use of different levels of law enforcement, the FBI, et cetera, to go after immigrants. And I think it’s a time where we need to make sure that our fight for immigrant justice is doing that deeper work to say, this is only possible because fascism and authoritarianism are deployed through law enforcement. And this is only possible because we have one of the largest prison systems in the world and this really robust system of policing that’s been increasingly militarized.

So we need to make sure that we both … Yes, I absolutely believe that ICE should be abolished, but if we stop at ICE, we’re sort of missing the bigger picture and we don’t actually kind of get to the core of the problem with the system as a whole. And so from my perspective, I worry that if we lean into these due process narratives or these innocence frameworks, that it just lends itself to actually a lot of what happened during Trump’s first term, which is it didn’t actually do the deeper work that we need to do. And so I hope that we learn some lessons this time and try to really do the work to not … This heightened focus on immigration and immigration enforcement right now is an opportunity to sort of go deeper and do that political education so that once we have the opportunity, we can push back against the whole system.

KH: What you’re naming about law enforcement as a mechanism of authoritarian control really resonates. It’s something we have to keep lifting up, especially with so many people fetishizing “the rule of law” as a knee jerk response to Trumpism.

I also want to emphasize, while we’re on the subject of innocence frameworks, that this applies to protest as well. When protesters are accused of “violence”… as I said, we need to correct misinformation, where it exists. If people are accused of things they did not do, the truth should be told. And at the same time, the good protester/bad protester divide has got to go. We cannot deploy logics that position people resisting fascism as being responsible for fascist violence — logics that deem protesters disposable because something got broken or spray-painted, or because someone defended themselves or their community.

I’ve seen people on social media saying that if protesters don’t remain peaceful — which is an elastic term that police, politicians and the media can strip away no matter what you do — Trump will escalate. As some of us who have attended a lot of protests know, they will call us violent whenever it suits them to do so. Governments have described rescuing migrants at sea as “trafficking,” for fuck’s sake. They’ve called poetry “violence.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a protest where a cop brutalized a person, and then charged them with assault to lend themselves cover. That story will be manufactured if they want to manufacture it. They will lie, and they will use infiltrators, if need be, and they will craft their narrative. I need everyone to be serious. We cannot control how they characterize us.

What is within our control is whether or not we do their work for them by casting blame on the same people they scapegoat. We can choose not to depict people engaged in civil resistance to fascism as being responsible for fascist violence, just as we can refuse to suggest or accept that any immigrant who has been sent to CECOT deserves to be there, with or without a criminal record. When we are talking about fascist violence, we blame fascists. And we should seek to interrupt that violence. Criminalization — which includes the criminalization of immigrants — is the primary mechanism of violence at their disposal. So to play into carceral narratives of innocence and guilt, and who is worthy or disposable, among people resisting, and among people who are trying to survive is wholly unacceptable.

Above all, let’s not do their work for them. Let’s not be so psychologically captured that we join them in blaming or disposing of their scapegoats.

SS: I think that’s really well said. And I think, like I said, there is this way that the broader obsession with public safety, and the rule of law, and national security, and all these things just lend itself to more and more people being put into a category of, what they did was wrong and they are deserving of this, versus the person who is not deserving. And it actually doesn’t help any of us.

KH: I would love to pivot to what can and does help us. So, if folks are listening, and they’re angry, frightened, or upset about what’s happening right now, what kind of organizing should they engage with in this moment?

SS: I think it’s a hard question right now, how to prioritize. I’ll be really honest. I do think that there are so many fronts. I have been so incredibly inspired by the communities that have been coming out in support of immigrants locally across the country. And I think, again, and we learned this during the first Trump administration, this is a moment to really go local. What is happening in your community? What can you do to support immigrants in your community or people who are being targeted for whatever reason in your community? And making sure that there’s infrastructure and support set up. There’s a lot of tools and resources out there, from Siembra, for instance, in North Carolina, which I know you interviewed them, Kelly. They have a Defend and Recruit resource that I think is really helpful to local communities who are trying to fight back and figure out what they can do to prevent people being put into ICE custody.

I also think that the big piece for Detention Watch Network and our work is really stopping this infrastructure from being built up. It’s so much easier to build up these systems than to take them down. And so I think it’s really, really important right now for us to think about the ways that we can block expansion. Across the country we’re seeing not just new facilities or new contracts happening, but also existing facilities being expanded, potential use of military bases, them using different types of facilities. So I think it’s a time of getting as much information as we can about the expansion that’s happening and paying attention to that and demanding of elected leaders at every level of government. So whether it’s your city council or your county commissioner that do have actually a lot of say of what happens in their community, if ICE is going to be using a county jail, or potentially putting in a new facility, or using a nearby military base. All of those things are so important and it’s so important that we’re doing the work to make sure people are educated.

I also think, I know it feels sometimes really disheartening to try to influence what’s happening with the federal budget, but I really do believe if this budget bill passes, it could mean over the next four years, $45 billion going to expanding the system. And, again, we’re going to do everything we can to stop that, but it’s so important that members of Congress know what is happening, what this will mean, how much damage this could do. Again, detention is one of the drivers and key facilitators of deportation. So doing everything we can to stop the system, both because they’re horrendous conditions, it’s incredibly dehumanizing, and more and more people are dying in detention and there’s really scary things happening. We don’t want people to go into the detention system, but also if they have more detention capacity, they’re going to be able to deport more people.

And so I think those pieces, from my perspective, finding in your local community what’s happening, how are people fighting back against ICE raids? How are people doing work to understanding how detention is working in their community? We have a lot of political education we’ve been doing on the use of federal prisons, for instance, or the use of military bases, and trying to understand that history. And this is like a long-haul fight. I do think that it’s going to be hard. And I know it can be very disheartening to feel like, “Oh, we tried to stop this, but it didn’t work.” But I said this earlier, working on this issue for so many years, there were many years where we led campaigns and lost. And the question is, how do you lose in a way that you get to a win eventually?

And so this is the time to bring people in, do that political education, make sure we’re going deeper on these questions around these carceral systems, around these sort of narratives around public safety and national security, and not buying into that, and doing the work to educate people and making sure we move beyond that so that we can be prepared when there are openings, be prepared to fight back and offer a different path, a different vision. I think that is what we need to be doing right now. And I’ve just been so blown away and encouraged by how much we’re already seeing that with the protests in LA, for instance, or across the country. And yeah, I think people say this a lot, there’s opportunity in crisis, and I think in this moment there’s a real opportunity for us to dig deeper on the problems with immigration enforcement and the prison-industrial complex and the way that it’s built up in existence over decades now has led us to this point.

KH: I deeply appreciate those insights. And I also just want to encourage folks to be sure that we’re not framing our efforts as an attempt to return to the status quo. As you’ve been alluding to throughout this conversation, Democrats played a big role in paving the path to this moment. And as much as we talk about the right fantasizing about a return to a sort of mythologized past, we need to make sure that our side isn’t mythologizing the past either. When we emphasize the nightmarish nature of this moment, we cannot erase the role the Clinton, Obama or Biden administrations played in delivering us to this moment.

SS: Well, a lot of people say they are grateful to have my book, Unbuild Walls, as a resource right now. And so much of what I write about in Unbuild Walls is how the Democrats helped us get here and how much the Democrats… I think these particular narratives around the good immigrant versus the bad immigrant, the old immigrant versus the new immigrant, the leaning into criminalization, especially by the Obama administration and giving fodder to the Republicans during that period of time, opened up space for this. And I think similarly with the Biden administration and then Kamala Harris’s campaign last year, I mean, she was running as more hardline than Trump, and just opening up space for… I do really strongly believe that a lot of the way that campaign was run and a lot of the moves that they were making in the last couple years gave much more… I think those moves actually really created the conditions to get us to this place.

And one of the things that happened even before Trump came in office just… And the first bill that Trump signed [during his current term] was the Laken Riley Act, which was, again, this tale as old as time when it comes to the criminal system in the U.S., where you have a sort of moral panic, a crime panic around one very specific tragedy to exploit. And then what they ended up doing was expanding mandatory detention significantly, the most it’s been expanded in 30 years, where they denied due process to even more immigrants. And the Democrats supported that. Many Democrats supported that. And so I think it’s really important that we… I think, like you’re saying, there is this perception of, “Oh, it was so great a year ago.” No, it wasn’t so great. In fact, a lot of the moves that Biden was making around the border, and capitulating to Republicans and accepting their frame, set us up for this moment, because it did the work to dehumanize immigrants.

There’s always this perception in immigrant rights work where… And this goes back to the push for comprehensive immigration reform, which tried to get legalization for large numbers of immigrants, some 11 million immigrants, and so trying to get legalization. But the whole strategy is, “We’re going to get legalization, but actually we’re going to have more criminal bars, more border militarization.” And what those things did was dehumanize immigrants more. So they’re trying to pass affirmative relief for large categories of immigrants while at the same time dehumanizing immigrants. And it doesn’t really work that way, because then it made it that much harder for them to do the good things for immigrants.

And so this is what we’ve seen time and time again with the Democrats. And many years of this have turned into the Trump administration and the right just saying all immigrants are a problem. And that is why it’s so, so essential that we don’t fall back into these innocence narratives and these carceral framings around immigration or this lie about public safety and national security. We really, really have to break from that, because that’s the only way we’re going to get to a place where we will have immigrant justice, where we will have migrant justice and racial justice.

KH: Absolutely. Well, I want to thank you so much for all of your insights, Silky. This has been such a valuable conversation, and I always learned so much from you. So, thank you for making the time, amid everything that’s happening, to have this conversation today. I’m sure our listeners appreciate it.

SS: Thank you so much for having me. I’m just so grateful for the offerings that you’ve had, that Truthout has had, that in this moment. I think we so desperately need to be clear about the conditions that we’re in and how we’re responding so that we can strategize better. And I feel that “Movement Memos” and a lot of what you’re sharing has been really essential to that.

KH: Thank you, that means so much, especially coming from you. I look forward to talking again soon.

SS: Yeah, me too. Thank you.

[musical interlude]

KH: I am so grateful for Silky’s work and wisdom. Before we close out this episode, I also want to take a moment to extend some love and solidarity to a group of organizers in my own community. Organized Communities Against Deportations is a beloved and essential force in the city of Chicago. Last week, when ICE seized 10 people in Chicago’s South Loop, one of those taken was Gladis Yolanda Chavez Pineda — a longtime OCAD organizer. Gladis was arrested after showing up for an immigration check-in. In a petition for Gladis’ release, OCAD stated:

Gladis has been living in the U.S. for over 10 years while actively pursuing asylum … [She] is a devoted mother and grandmother who works in construction and spends her time supporting others through her leadership in Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD). She has mentored countless members and continues to be a source of strength and care. Detaining Gladis is unnecessary, harmful, and inhumane.

If you would like to join OCAD and the Chicago organizing community in demanding the immediate release of our friend and co-struggler, you can find OCAD’s petition linked in the show notes of this episode.

I know these are upsetting, disorienting, and discouraging times. I want to say that what we have is each other, but honestly, that’s a decision we have to make. We have to decide whether to support each other, whether to reach for each other, and whether or not we will reject the stigmas and scapegoating that would divide us. We can rage against the culture of forgetting that this administration is expanding. We can refuse to forget our stolen neighbors, and reject our own potential erasure. If we make the right choice, we will still face a great deal of tumult and loss, but we will also find comfort in solidarity and reciprocal care. For now, I want to send my love to everyone who is organizing community defense, protesting, and doing the work of collective survival. Your efforts are the stuff that hope’s made of, so please, keep reaching out, keep building, and never give up on each other.

I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today. And remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

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