Despite campaign promises to pursue a pro-immigrant agenda, the Biden administration quickly retreated as Republicans, backed by sensational media coverage of the southern border, commandeered the narrative. With no countervailing impulse from the White House, the politics of immigration has moved alarmingly to the right, especially over the last year. Texas governor Greg Abbott’s strategy of busing migrants arriving at the border to sanctuary cities across the United States, among other ploys during the Biden years, has succeeded. Liberals have fallen into his trap. Democratic officials now scapegoat migrants as the reason why communities are struggling—rather than drawing attention to the weakened social safety nets and the failure of the federal government to provide basic needs to immigrants and nonimmigrants alike.
As support for immigration has waned, Donald Trump, in his most tried and true political move, has stoked a moral panic over rising “migrant crime,” fearmongering and pitting communities of color against each other to gain votes. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has not only gone along with the narrative, but his administration has gutted the asylum system and outsourced immigration enforcement to Mexico, exacerbating the U.S.-manufactured crisis at the border and leading to more senseless deaths and precarity in the borderlands and beyond. Vice President Kamala Harris has followed the lead of the president she hopes to succeed.
I have organized around immigration for over two decades, during which Democrats repeatedly succumbed to their opponents’ playbook and positioned the issue as a national security and public safety issue. Yet even in this climate, there is no escaping how surreal this moment is. In Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition, I write about how moral panics and so-called “tough on crime” policies have facilitated the expansion of immigrant detention. The Democrats’ play on immigration feels akin to the Clinton era in the nineties, when Republicans took hold of Congress for the first time in decades. The 1994 crime bill, along with immigration laws passed by Congress in 1996, solidified the merger of the criminal legal and immigration enforcement systems, doubling the capacity of the immigrant detention apparatus.
Later during President Barack Obama’s tenure, his administration expanded collaborations with local police and ramped up border enforcement to make the case for comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. As a result, deportations skyrocketed, earning him the moniker of “deporter-in-chief.” But as I write in the book, years of accepting border militarization and criminalization as a strategy to bring relief to “innocent” immigrants in the United States has only resulted in more dehumanization of migrants in general, thus creating more barriers to securing legalization for the 11 million undocumented people living here. Despite this lesson, many organizations are falling back into the good-immigrant-versus-bad-immigrant frame—or in this case the old immigrant versus the new immigrant, making the case for some at the expense of others.
It all feels incredibly bleak. But I try to remind myself that there have been numerous moments when anti-immigrant sentiment has ruled the political discourse only to retreat as movements fought back: California in the nineties after the passage of the harsh ballot measure Proposition 187; the 2006 immigrant rights marches that brought millions to the streets in response to the post-9/11 immigration crackdown; and more recently the boycotts of the state of Arizona protesting SB 1070, the “show me your papers” law that gave the state unconstitutional immigration enforcement authority. In some of our most dire political moments, immigrant communities, organizers, advocates, and ordinary people have stepped up to fight back, opening space for crucial movement victories.
After the gut punch that was the 2016 election result, organizers and advocates have more seriously engaged in scenario planning. Sometimes these sessions only serve to cause more anxiety. But they have also been critical spaces to figure out how our movements can prepare. It is important to recognize that we have lost ground since the 2020 onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the near-simultaneous mass uprising for Black lives, which produced significant leftward shifts on mass incarceration, policing, and immigration enforcement. Since then, the backlash has been building and opportunities for major victories are now out of reach. In many ways, the current conditions require us to return to the basics of organizing and movement building. There are no easy solutions, and broadening the base of support is our best bet for combating the harmful narratives about immigrants and immigration.
Since the release of Project 2025, much has been written about what a second Trump term would look like on immigration. His administration would strip status from millions of undocumented people who benefit from programs such as Temporary Protected Status, which allows them to live and work in the United States. This would make them even more vulnerable to deportation. Along with local, state, and federal police forces, a second Trump administration plans to deploy the National Guard to round up immigrants already residing in the United States and warehouse them in detention camps across the country. The proposals conjure up images from World War II, when Japanese Americans were labeled “enemies of the state” and incarcerated in “relocation centers.” In addition to the full-on attack of immigrants currently living in the country, the plans include a more robust Muslim and African ban and other efforts to shut down the border to people seeking refuge. Other proposals that have been floated, such as ending birthright citizenship, are more outlandish and difficult to accomplish, but the intent is clear. Right-wing politicians have embraced the racist “great replacement” theory, and the goal is to end immigration as we know it.
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In the case of a Trump election win, demanding that the Biden administration dismantle the detention and deportation systems and rescind harsh border policies will be imperative. So far Biden has received a pass from liberals and even some immigration advocates on his ramping up of enforcement, but the short period of time between the election and inauguration will require a united front to make Stephen Miller’s dark agenda that much harder to implement. Once Trump is in office, there will no doubt be a relentless onslaught of executive orders requiring rapid response. Many will turn to litigation, but there are obvious limitations given the makeup of the courts. And if we want to build for the long-term, it is critical that we invest in organizing and base building.
It may seem difficult to imagine a Trump administration being affected by mass mobilization, but in 2018, after widespread public outrage, he ended the zero-tolerance policy separating families at the border. Separations continued, but not at the same scale. As immigrant communities are targeted, going local in our strategies will also take center stage to mitigate the harm of his administration. Creating spaces for sanctuary and community defense networks, limiting collaboration between police and ICE, and waging campaigns to prevent detention expansion will be essential to throwing a wrench in their plans. We must also create on-ramps for those newly engaged or returning to the fight, fortifying the movement to protect communities now and build for the future when there may be openings.
As for Harris, her recent trip to the border made clear that she is positioning herself as tough on immigration and will continue to campaign around what both parties like to call “border security.” Depending on the makeup of the House and Senate, an immigration bill could move in Congress in 2025. The bipartisan Senate border bill proposed earlier this year, and scuttled by Trump, created a new floor for how much Democrats are willing to trade off to get something passed. Before this point, legalization for a large portion of undocumented immigrants was always on the table, but in this instance the tradeoff was more funding for military aid to Ukraine and Israel, and nonpunitive reforms to the system were minimal.
The border panic has divided the movement, but it’s imperative for us to understand that anti-immigrant sentiment is driven in part by rampant and widening social inequality. Solidarity across movements for racial and economic justice and against U.S. militarism will be essential as we tackle the rightward lurch on immigration. Now is the time to offer an alternative approach, one grounded in a vision of a world without cages that embraces the freedom of movement—one in which all our communities can thrive.
In addition to border policy, we should anticipate a Harris administration to follow Biden’s approach to interior enforcement. Despite Biden proclaiming a hundred days into his presidency that there should be “no private prisons, period,” his administration is still contracting with private prison companies and expanding their use. As of this summer, ICE has put out feelers for at least seven new detention centers in the Chicago, El Paso, Harlingen, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Seattle jurisdictions. Much as if Trump were to win, similar strategies of ending ICE–police collaborations and preventing detention expansion would be paramount.
Already sanctuary policies are being attacked, as a moral panic is stoked over “migrant crime.” In an attempt to debunk these claims, many organizations have emphasized data showing that immigrants commit fewer crimes than do citizens. But this only serves to accept public safety as a metric for immigration and ends up throwing those with criminal records under the bus, effectively pitting working-class communities against each other. A better understanding of the criminal legal system and its intersections with immigration enforcement has helped the movement limit deportations. Given the backlash moment we’re in, we must continue to challenge the whole system and not fall into the moral panic over crime.
Just as concerning is how conservative states have acted under Biden, which we can expect to continue under a Harris administration. From Texas to Florida, states across the country are enacting some of the harshest anti-immigrant legislation we’ve ever seen. Through these efforts, such as Operation Lone Star and SB 4 in Texas, states are commandeering state-level criminal legal systems to target and prosecute migrants as well as people providing aid to migrants. SB 4, for example, includes a ten-year minimum sentence for “human smuggling” or “harboring” undocumented immigrants. Governor Greg Abbott and Texas officials are essentially dictating immigration policy for the whole country. By filing lawsuits against forms of administrative relief such as DACA, deploying its own deportation force, and busing migrants to sanctuary cities, Texas has gone on a rampage and Biden has done very little to intervene. If Harris wins, the question remains whether, given her history as a state attorney general, she will be more likely to push back on Texas and other states. But based on her recent comments on immigration, it is clear that she will need to be pushed, and we need to prioritize building up grassroots capacity to protect immigrant communities and fight back in these states.
The coming months will undoubtedly bring more heartache and confusion for immigrant communities. Regardless of who is president, educating people about their rights and expanding our base will be essential to building power toward longer-term change. Across the country organizers and advocates are already planning for either outcome, hoping to be more prepared than we were in 2016. Dozens of organizations have gathered in multiple forums, such as Democracy 2025 and the Immigrant Movement Visioning Process, to develop strategies for preventing mass deportations if the worst were to happen. In this environment, abolition is a helpful tool for analysis and guidance. We must reject the reduction of immigrant lives to “public safety” and “national security” frameworks, and we must instead put forth a narrative of belonging and collectivity that helps bridge our struggles for racial and migrant justice. In this moment of political fervor, now is the time to start planting the seeds for a more grounded and accountable movement.
This essay was written in the author’s personal capacity. The views expressed are her own and and do not necessarily represent the views of Detention Watch Network.
Image: Greg Bulla/Unsplash/Inquest
