On October 5, 2017, in an act of civil disobedience, undocumented members of the Los Angeles–area Immigrant Youth Coalition (IYC) put their bodies and futures on the line by setting down ten metal prison bed frames to block rush hour traffic in Westwood, Los Angeles. They strategically positioned themselves at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Veterans Avenue across from the Federal Building. Several IYC members, with megaphones in hand, leaped on top of the plywood bases of the bunks. Screen-printed logos of the private for-profit prison giants GEO Group and CoreCivic and the data-mining corporation Palantir hung on the rails of the prison beds.
Another group of activists linked to each other with chains stepped off the sidewalk onto the road to surround them. Demonstrators lined the sidewalks. They had marched from California senator Dianne Feinstein’s office, holding hand-painted signs that declared, “All of Us or None,” “Defend the Criminalized,” “Border Patrol Out of Our Communities,” and “Black Lives Matter.” The day marked the tight deadline for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients to apply for a two-year renewal of their status. This civil disobedience, done without a police permit and featuring prison abolition messages, was different from many other pro-DACA marches across the country.
The IYC, with undocumented queer youth at the forefront, organized the civil disobedience. The youth were supported by a new coalition, JusticeLA, which included activists from the local chapter of Black Lives Matter and other local organizations working to dismantle correctional control. The coalition was formed to fight the city’s new spurt of prison expansion, estimated to cost $3.5 billion. In the tradition of civil disobedience, the IYC activists risked arrest and deportation to expose the violence of the penal and deportation systems in the United States. The main message—“ All of Us or None”—telegraphed their solidarity with all those who are fodder for the carceral system.
Predictably, police sirens soon filled the air, as did the blaring horns of enraged commuters stuck in the blockade. The commuters vociferously complained about missing their hospital appointments in Westwood and getting delayed for work, oblivious to the ways the blockading activists suffer every day from the criminalization of their mobility. They live with the daily fear of arrest because they or their loved ones are forced to drive to work, school, and appointments without a license. They wanted to disrupt business as usual.
As they confronted cars full of angry commuters and armed police officers amid Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions’s war on migrants and people of color, the organizers enacted a common call-and-response: “Sin Papeles / Sin Miedo,” “No Papers / No Fear.” Helmeted Los Angeles Police Department officers wielding their batons announced the assembly unlawful. They arrested nine activists, several of them undocumented, and cleared the intersection within half an hour of the takeover. It was not until the evening that the last of the nine arrested was released from police custody.
Local media reports framed the shutdown as a protest against Trump’s rescission of DACA, which it was. But the coverage glossed over IYC’s unambiguous resistance against criminalization and carcerality. For nearly a decade, advocates and sympathetic lawmakers had represented innocent migrant youth as the most viable subjects of proposals to legalize migrants—a narrative unfitting for the stark imagery of prison beds these youth had created. The Westwood protest dramatically linked prison expansion to the expansion of detention centers, the routinization of deportation, and the dangers of data collection, algorithmic analyses, and data sharing for criminalized U.S. citizens and noncitizens.
Contemporary anti-deportation organizing spaces such as IYC represent a shift in the immigrant rights movement because they center the most “indefensible” of migrants and refugees—those labeled as criminal aliens. The analyses of these activists are unclouded by the settler myths of immigrant success pursued and eventually achieved; rather, their counternarratives reveal deportation and crimmigration as technologies of U.S. settler carceral power. Settler colonial logics course through deportation policies, which rely heavily on criminalization and incarceration—two potent assertions of U.S. sovereignty over a space that, in actuality, is animated by Indigenous politics of self-governance.
Settler colonialism works by making invisible the appropriation of Indigenous lands and oceanic spaces. It severs the caretaking relations of Indigenous people to land, water, and the elements and eliminates their presence through a range of technologies that relegate them to the past. Settling requires evolving legal regimes that maintain territorial and social control. In this century, the United States consolidates its territorial control through new immigration penalties created to remove undocumented people and legal permanent residents for committing or being charged with deportable crimes. It projects its sovereignty as omnipresent by simultaneously managing transnational migration and deepening its control over Indigenous people and governance.
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Struggles to assert Indigenous self-determination are jurisdictional and territorial, exposing U.S. imperialism and colonialism. As critical ethnic studies scholar Manu Vimalassery points out in the article “The Prose of Counter-Sovereignty,” “settler invocations of sovereignty require acknowledgment of Indigenous sovereignty . . . in order to maintain any semblance of stability or coherence.” In the tradition of critical Indigenous studies, the migrant justice movement interrogates the legitimacy of U.S. power. Activists, many of whom are directly impacted by discriminatory policing and deportation, testify to the most intimate aspects of their day-to-day existence to show how correctional control and forced removal have turned their lives upside down. In doing so, they scramble the discursive divides commonplace in the mainstream immigrant rights movement—innocent versus criminal, families versus felons, violent versus nonviolent, straight versus queer, deserving versus undeserving, documented versus undocumented, migrant versus citizen, and Native versus non-Native—and generate sometimes actualized, other times aspirational, solidarities with Indigenous struggles.
These activists challenge anti-Blackness, anti-Indigenous racism, homophobia, and transphobia within immigrant communities at the same time that they combat the state-driven war on migrants fed by such violence. The migrant youth activists express strong and loving relationships with their parents and elders, consciously connecting themselves to their families and communities. They have refused to throw their undocumented or “criminal alien” elders under the bus, so to speak, at a time when they stand to benefit from narratives painting them as unwitting participants in their border-crossing parents’ lawlessness, subterfuge, and incompetence.
Anti-deportation activism and the contours of the immigrant rights movement may be quite different in border communities in Texas and Arizona, in a Midwestern metropolis like Chicago, in the New South (where the demographics are no longer Black and white), and, most certainly, in U.S.-occupied Hawaiʻi. The activists recognize this. In their trainings, they account for these specificities to build local capacity for resistance. Their activism emerges from the local ecologies of social movements, the anti- or pro-immigrant politics of elected officials, and laws governing crime and corrections—while simultaneously remaining connected to U.S.-wide and transnational campaigns such as the Southeast Asian Freedom Network’s 1LoveMovement, National Day Laborer Organizing Network’s #NotOneMore campaign, and Mijente’s #FreeOurFutures actions, to name a few.
A week before the IYC Westwood action, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had detained 101 individuals in the LA area as part of Operation Safe City, a program endorsed by the Trump administration. These arrests had failed to send the intended chilling message to this group of deportable migrant activists, who were veterans of unpermitted civil disobedience. They had already built audacious power through collective action under Barack Obama, whose administration deported people at record numbers. Under the unapologetically white supremacist Trump administration, they simply continued their resistance.
In doing so, the migration justice movement challenges the adage that the two administrations were as different as day and night. Today, as we enter a second Trump presidency—this one with an even more vicious anti–civil-rights and anti-immigrant political agenda—we can understand their struggle is an invitation to resist casting Trump as an exception to the basic principles of U.S. democracy. As veteran immigrant rights activist and prison abolitionist Hamid Khan often reminds organizers, we must not mistake current (or forthcoming) practices of policing, surveillance, and deportations as a “moment in time.” Instead, migrant justice organizers confirm, continuing legacies of resistance requires us to turn our attention to enduring strains of violence perpetuated by the U.S. racist, colonial, and capitalist history.
These activists’ courage, militancy, dedication, and tenacity sustain them in the enormously difficult work of fighting deportation. Their campaigns have freed individual deportees from detention, stopped individual deportations, reduced deportations, and leveraged Democratic administrations to provide relief for groups such as DACA-eligible youth. Their persistence has sparked and sustained protest politics that today has mainstreamed the call to abolish ICE, which people outside of the movement now recognize as a cruel and repressive agency. Yet they maintain that, in the words of IYC member Johnathan Perez, anti-deportation organizing cannot stop at calls to abolish ICE. That generator of human misery, corporate profits, and votes for politicians is part of the massive punishment industry; these activists fight to abolish the entire punishment industry—and the system of settler carcerality that upholds its enduring power.
Excerpted from All of Us or None: Migrant Organizing in an Era of Deportation and Dispossession by Monisha Das Gupta. Copyright Duke University Press, 2024.
Image: Daniel Arauz/Flickr/Inquest