Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network, a twenty-seven-year-old coalition working to abolish immigrant detention in the United States, sees the criminal legal system and immigration enforcement as two sides of the same carceral coin.
Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition
By Silky Shah
Haymarket Books, 256 pages
Release date: May 7, 2024
Both, she writes in Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition, have been stoked by anti-Black and anti-brown racism, the war on drugs, and a national security framework that posits unlawful entrants as threatening to the safety and security of everyday Americans.
“The prison boom that took place over the last half century is central to the story of immigrant detention,” Shah explains. Indeed, she argues that the prison-industrial complex has been fortified by developments including “increased funding for enforcement, harsher sentencing laws at the state and federal levels, and the promise of revenue derived from a growing prison economy.” This, she writes, has made the construction of new prisons—and the jobs they promise—appealing to cash-strapped cities, towns, and suburbs throughout the country.
The upshot? The United States not only has the highest incarceration rates in the world, but we’ve also reached the highest number of deportations in our domestic history.
Shah is unabashedly appalled by this. But Unbuild Walls is more than a recitation of horrors, and offers a substantive year-by-year dissection of the ever-changing laws that regulate immigration. Her critique of the regulations governing who can enter and when is potent. At the same time, she offers a searing critique of mainstream organizations that have allowed political discourse to divide newcomers into two cohorts: good immigrants who enter the country through legal channels and bad immigrants who don’t.
What’s more, she says that numerous groups, among them the National Immigration Forum and Community Change (formerly the Center for Community Change), have accepted incarceration as the inevitable punishment for undocumented entry. She further lambastes these groups for what she sees as an excessive focus on improved carceral conditions. While better food, access to medical care, and an end to family separation would, of course, be beneficial, she argues that organizing for improved conditions should not replace organizing for the abolition of immigrant detention and the defunding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Haymarket Books
These strategic disagreements hit their apex during the Obama Administration, she writes, when advocates expected progressive policy changes to be imminent. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is a case in point.
According to Shah, many organizations characterized those deemed DACA-eligible as “innocent and hard-working” youth who had been brought to the U.S. “through no fault of their own.” This, they argued, entitled them to work permits and protection against deportation.
For Shah, this concession was of limited value—albeit beneficial for thousands of qualifying individuals—because it did nothing to contest rhetoric about a “border surge” or stop the two million deportations that took place during the Obama Administration.
And that’s not her only criticism. “The immigrant rights movement has failed to meaningfully address the root causes of migration, and often reinforces pro-military agendas,” she writes. “A notable example is the emphasis on legalizing immigrants who serve in the military in legislation such as the DREAM Act. The need to be pro-American in order to secure legalization erases the history of U.S. militarism that has resulted in increased migration from Central America, the Middle East, and beyond.”
Shah is a wise analyst, and her pairing of immigration detention and the growth of prisons is insightful, convincing, and well-presented. Unbuild Walls is also an important organizing tool, a fierce reminder of the centrality of migrant justice in promoting peace and civil and human rights.