Transcript

Jaison Oliver

Coming up this episode on the upEND Podcast. 

Silky Shah 

Obama really perceived fixing the system by going after those people who were caught up through the criminal legal system. The largest prison apparatus in the world, like this is where we’re at and really tied immigration even that much more closely to local jails, to private prisons, to sheriffs, to local police departments. And we had some of the highest level of formal deportations we had ever seen under Obama and it was because there was this use of the criminal legal system.

Jaison Oliver

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the upEND Podcast. Today, we’ll be discussing the intersections between family policing and immigrant justice. Conversations around Trump’s zero tolerance policy at the border that separated migrant children from their parents highlighted the trauma of family separations that people who have experienced family policing understand well. 

I’m going to say conversations around the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy at the border that separated migrant children from their parents highlighted the trauma of family separations that people who have experienced family policing understand well. Today, we’re talking with a guest who understands that the road to abolition requires solidarity and coalition building between our movements.

Josie Pickens 

Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. She is also the author of the recently published Unbuild Walls, Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. She has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for over 20 years. Welcome, Silky.

Silky Shah 

Thanks so much for having me. It’s really wonderful to be here with you both.

Josie Pickens 

We’re so excited that you’re here with us and want to jump right into this conversation because we have so many questions and so many things that we want to talk to you about. And I guess we should begin at the beginning. Can you tell us about your journey to where you are now? In your book, you write about growing up in Houston, Texas, which is also where upEND is based. What were some of your formative experiences that led you to organize around this work.

Silky Shah

I grew up in Houston in the eighties and nineties. And as y’all probably know, it was a booming city at that point. A lot of population growth. My parents had actually come in 1973 to Houston. And so they’ve been there for a very long time. And when they first arrived, there weren’t a lot of, my family’s South Asian my parents are from India, there weren’t a lot of Indian immigrants, but as time went on and because of laws passed in 1965, more and more South Asian immigrants started coming and I think a lot of immigrant communities started coming to Houston and it became a very vibrant immigrant community. 

By the time I was in middle school and high school, both my middle school and high school were majority Latine communities and on the west side of Houston. So many of my formative experiences were about being with the immigrant community, with my family, with my aunts and uncles and cousins and et cetera who came, and feeling just really the sense of belonging there. You know, we would be at the Colosseum or the Astros Arena or other places, we’d have these massive dances for like traditional Gujarati dance where like 10,000 people would come out and we’d stay dancing till the middle of the night till 2am in the morning and come home and our feet would be totally black and it would just be this beautiful experience. So just to say so much of growing up there just felt like actually a lot of belonging.

The idea of immigration was very normalized for me, obviously coming from an immigrant community, even if myself, I wasn’t an immigrant. And so when I was in high school, I started to kind of understand things, got connected with different groups doing different social justice efforts. Also, it was a large Latine population in my school. At the time it was Lee High School, now it’s called Margaret Wisdom High School.

There was a large undocumented population. One of my closest friends was undocumented and it was something that they revealed to me at some point. And I started to feel this sense of concern and worry that something could happen to her. And so over time those experiences stayed with me and I went to college at University of Texas at Austin.

It was a time when there was, you know, 1999, 2000, right before 9/11, a lot of rise in social movements, anti-globalization movements. There was a lot of conversation happening on college campuses around that and I was like an activist kid and I started going. I remember one of the first protests I actually went to was at the state capital in Austin where Rodney Reed had been put on death row. And there was just this, you know, there was like a lot of people protesting the death penalty started really starting to understand how the state of Texas was really a leading incarcerator, death row was very in the media, very understanding of how these systems are being formed. 

And so I think that combined with the post 9/11 moment, I was still in college then and seeing how the criminal legal system was starting to be used to target Muslim, Arab, South Asian people. Those were really defining moments. So it was all these different pieces, seeing how actually the criminal legal system was not just, you know, it wasn’t there necessarily to prevent harm. It was there actually to extend state power and control and it was being applied to so many different communities. And Texas was such a clear place where that was happening. And I think at that point started to learn a lot more and, and read a lot of different things and got connected to groups like critical resistance and started to understand abolition.

Josie Pickens 

Thanks for that, Silky. It’s very similar to my own journey. I think we kind of grew up around the same time in Houston and my introduction to my move towards abolition actually began organizing around the death penalty with local organizations in Houston as well. So it’s amazing to look back now and see all of these intersections that were not clear when we were younger and when we were baby organizers, just trying to figure things out. We just knew that Texas, as you said, was leading in jails and punishment and incarcerating folks. And we knew that that felt wrong. I think for me, it came around with the war on drugs and how that was affecting my community and family and people that I knew. So yeah, those intersections.

Now that I’m thinking about migrant families and these types of things, it’s another intersection as I’m reflecting back that we were also kind of thinking about, and I’m so glad that I have so much more information on that now. You talk also in your book about how family detentions increased during the Obama administration which a lot of folks don’t know and many more folks don’t want to talk about. Talk about how the state intentionally uses family separation as punishment.

Silky Shah 

Yeah, so family detention, know, actually this was such a specific Texas experience. After college, I started organizing with a group called Grassroots Leadership, which is still in Texas and Austin, Houston. And we were doing organizing against private prison companies, but then we started to see this rise in basically a post 9/11 prison boom happening.

And so, really in Texas, it was so interesting because at the time I was considered a criminal justice advocate at my, you know, the way that it was approached, but actually all the prisons I was fighting were filled with immigrants. And so that’s the reality in Texas. So much of this is not, it’s completely intertwined and actually across the country, it’s completely intertwined, but there it started to become more clear and clear. And so it was, the post 9/11 period, and one thing to understand, and you talked about the war on drugs, Josie, like the way, like what we’ve seen over time, the way immigration policy and immigration enforcement policy has changed, actually has happened in these acute moments where the war on drugs, the height of the war on drugs in the late 1980s with the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act is when we saw mandatory detention become law in the first place. 

And similarly after 9/11, we think about the war on terror and sort of what happened abroad, but the way that domestic war on terror operated was actually through the criminal legal system. And so what we saw was a rise in prosecutions at the border, people entering the country and getting six months in a US Marshals jail facility. And so one of the first facilities I fought was actually in Laredo, Texas. Which was a massive super jail they were trying to build for people who are being prosecuted and actually by 2004, immigration crimes became the number one crime in the federal courts. And for many years it stayed that way until the pandemic. 

And then the next of course was drug crimes and now it’s drug crimes and then immigration. And that’s really what we see at least in the federal system. And so at that point, as a response to families coming out to the border and there being a sort of clamp down after 9/11, they started separating families and putting kids in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement and sending parents to ICE detention, the newly formed agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement at that point. As a response, advocates were like, you’re separating families. This is so harmful. 

They actually said, okay, we’re gonna start detaining families together. And there had been a smaller facility in Pennsylvania, but then they actually expanded to this former medium security prison in Taylor, Texas called Hutto, which is operated by the Corrections Corporation of America, now called CoreCivic. And then it was this 500 bed medium security prison where they would hold families, they would have prison onesies for babies, cribs and cells. Often if kids were a little bit older, they would be separated from their parent in the facility itself. And that, it galvanized a lot of movement and a lot of work. 

And so what was interesting about the Obama period, and I do write about this a lot in the book, because it was important to process how things shifted during that time, what was amazing is that in 2009, which is when I started working at Detention Watch Network, the Obama administration came in and said, we’re gonna do a ton of reforms. We’re gonna change the system. Like people shouldn’t be treated this way. They’re not there for serving a sentence for a crime necessarily. They’re there for immigration proceedings. 

And so that was their whole narrative, even though every prison and every detention center is either a former prison or jail or operated by a prison company. They are prisons and jails. That’s what they are. Detention is a misnomer. So what they did and one of the first real amazing reforms that the Obama administration implemented was ending family detention at Hutto. And it was remarkable. There’d been so much campaign work, so much litigation, so much advocacy work. A lot went into getting to that win. But it gave us a lot of some of that hope. It said, oh, wow, they’re really gonna change things. They’re not gonna detain children in this way at this really horrible facility. 

Fast forward to 2014 and all of a sudden there was this huge increase of families and children on their own coming to the border. And in response, and really as a deterrent strategy, the Obama administration said, actually, we’re going to re-expand family detention. And they went from having like 100 family detention beds to having 3,000 family detention beds in New Mexico and Texas, and then eventually these two Texas facilities that almost went up. One of them went up overnight. One of them actually had initially been built as a nice civil detention center. It had opened up a couple years prior in Karnes County, Texas. And they were like, we’re gonna build this really nice facility and we’re gonna call it a residence and we’re gonna have resident advisors and people are gonna wear khakis and they’re gonna have nicer materials and other things. And that was of course, they were like, well, let’s convert this into the family detention center, because it’s nicer. So that was their response. 

That was how they, often and so much of what I argue is the approach to reform ends up expanding the system often. And that’s what we saw, especially under the Obama administration. You were asking about family separation at that time. Family detention starts as a response to family separation. Then family detention grows and, of course, I think this is what a lot of people know now about the 2018 period where there was a zero tolerance policy under President Trump. But at that time in 2014, it was actually Tom Homan, was at Immigration and Customs Enforcement who had proposed family separation. And they said, no, we’re not going to do that. We’re just going to expand family detention. But then they eventually succeeded in implementing the policy in 2017 and 2018 is when families started to be separated en masse. 

I think we should talk about this more. I’ll talk a little bit about what happened during the Trump era, but from my perspective, all incarceration is family separation. So I think that’s one really important argument to be made here, but at least at that point there was this systemic family separation happening. What was wild was not just how harmful, heartless, terrible, violent it was, they also just did it in this haphazard way where even now to this day, there are some families who have not been reunited because they didn’t have the information. They weren’t taking information about who was being sent where and which families were connected and whatnot. And so it was, it was unbelievable. And I think one thing I really write about the family separation moment, some 5,500 families were separated under the period of time where it was like in the height. And parents were sent to US Marshals jails or BLP prisons or ICE detention centers and kids were sent to detention camps or shelters often far away from each other.

I think there’s this perception that it was Trump or at the time the attorney general Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, these really racist, horrible people, which, you know, yes, but also these institutions just went along with it. These institutions just accepted it. And I think that shows the moral bankruptcy of the Department of Justice, of DHS and those people who just accepted the policy and did this. And I think that’s an important sort of piece of this story that sometimes gets overlooked. We see Trump as an aberration, but in reality, he was just building upon systems that Clinton, Bush, Obama had really built up. 

Yeah, I appreciate that point about like, this is the norm and then anything that moves us away from harm seems to be an aberration. And we need to be focusing on expanding these aberrations and moving away from the norm. I’m also thinking about how during the pandemic, like at the beginning of the pandemic and even before, this conversation about our jails and how everybody was saying, you know, our jails are expensive and that’s the argument for depopulating our jail. Like, we’re too many people. 

I remember even on the ballot, we have so many judges in Harris County and all of them, regardless of party, were saying, I’m running to go through trials faster and decrease the population in the jail. What we end up seeing happen early on in the pandemic is this rapid expansion of electronic monitoring. Where you end up with so many more people that are being brought into the system, as opposed to letting people go and live their lives. And that’s what we saw under Obama. That was the other thing. The detention reforms ended up not only expanding detention, but it expanded alternatives to detention, which are really alternative forms of detention. you know, ankle monitors, ankle shackles, or, you know, they’ve also have this phone app that monitors people called SmartLINK. And now they’ve rolled out wristwatches in some places as well. And sometimes they have multiple, like they’ll have both the ankle shackle and they’ll have the phone app. 

Jaison Oliver 

I’m sure they’re connected. Now they’re connected via Bluetooth. So it’s smart technology.

Silky Shah 

It’s just like so many levels. And it applies to all households. So you’ll have one person, but then it’s applied if you’re like a parent with like three children or something, it’s applying to them.

Jaison Oliver 

You had mentioned briefly Trump’s zero tolerance policy and I absolutely want to talk about that more and how that became a flash point. Can you share more about what organizers did in response and what some of the successes may have been in organizing against this zero tolerance policy?

Silky Shah 

Yeah, I think at some level, that moment was a little bit disorienting for those of us who’ve worked on this issue for a really long time, because family separation sort of blew up. And there were a lot of people who galvanized around strategies for litigation or for just sort of like mass mobilization and with this group called Families Belong Together but also there was this bigger conversation happening around “Abolish ICE.” And so there was this moment where that became sort of a litmus test for Democrats as well. And I think that, from my perspective, the policy started in 2017. They already started separating families in 2017 and then the zero-tolerance policy came out in spring of 2018. 

And then it started happening sort of rapid fire. And then there was like a lot of media attention, that actually a lot of really young children were being separated from their families. And there were mass mobilizations, there was a lot of, you know, like Families Belong Together for sure. And a lot of different groups kind of like calling attention to it. 

Jaison Oliver 

I was in all kinds of rapid response networks. There were Signal groups that became, yeah…

Silky Shah 

Yeah, yeah, and supporting specific individual cases. So the policy actually ended fairly quickly. It ended in late June of 2018, but so much damage had been done at that point. And one of the things that we were seeing was that actually they didn’t have enough space, quote unquote, to hold immigrant parents. And so they were shipping a lot of parents to BOP facilities, Bureau of Prisons facilities in a lot of Western states. And so actually our response was to start sort of fighting to like free individuals from those facilities and get people out of detention. 

And there were so many groups that did both a combination of, and this has always been our most successful strategy, work with people who are detained, provide legal services, get money, as much money as you can to help post bond for people. In addition to helping those sometimes people were organizing on the inside, amplify the demands of those people who are organizing on the inside, whether they were going on hunger strike or work strike. And then also on the outside, doing a lot of work to expose the conditions of detention and calling for closure. 

What was so important about that moment is that we actually shifted to saying, okay, people are saying Abolish ICE. People are saying all these things, but actually we need to have a local strategy to go after this. At that point we, we Detention Watch Network launched a campaign called Communities, Not Cages, where we started working with groups all across the country to either shut down detention centers or prevent expansion. 

Trump had this plan to build, like, 15,000 more detention beds that summer. And that was where it sort of galvanized. We’re like, okay, we have to do this. We have to actually have some national strategy, even though the work has to be really embedded in local work, and local work to both work with people who are detained, focus on those specific facilities and the harms that they’re doing, but then also think about that broader advocacy demand. 

So we had that campaign and we also had a campaign that had launched a year prior called Defund Hate that was looking at how these things were being funded and how Trump was asking for all this money for the border wall, but also with embedded in those supplemental funding requests were more money for border patrol, more money for more agents at the border, and then also more detention beds. And so we were like, hey, you can talk about the border wall all you want, but actually look, these are the tools, policing and prisons. 

Those are the tools to control immigration, to enforce immigration, and we have to actually move away from that. And so I write about this in the book. I think the family separation moment was tough because so much of it became this like savior complex mentality and this idea of innocence. It’s like, these are innocent children and they have no agency of their own and we have to help them. But I think it failed to see that actually what was happening was that people were being prosecuted through the criminal legal system. They were because of a law called 1325, unlawful entry, that actually became a law in 1929. Criminal versus non-criminal didn’t actually mean anything here in this context. And actually what was happening was the criminal legal system was, and the Department of Justice was prosecuting people and they were ending up in prison while their kids were being sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. 

I think there’s just so much of that narrative lended itself to this innocence frame that didn’t actually help us get at the core of what these systems are doing. And so my take on that moment was that it was an important moment in amplifying the demand to abolish ICE and like gave us some space to push these anti-detention campaigns, which actually really started to succeed over the coming years, especially in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and also the George Floyd uprisings. But in some ways it was very surface-level. I think we, from my perspective in those moments, have to really, in those catalyst moments, we have to really think the on-ramps of bringing people in, but also the analysis that we’re offering in that moment to really show how the system itself is the problem and not just these like particular bad actors.

Jaison Oliver 

So for our listeners, we’re recording this in July of 2024. What’s the current landscape as we’re here in this moment?

Silky Shah

I think it’s a really tough landscape right now. I’m very curious for those who are going to be listening to this, listening from the future. I think what’s wild is that period under Trump…the Obama era so much reinforced the frames of the good immigrant versus bad immigrant. So Obama really perceived fixing the system by going after those people who were caught up through the criminal legal system. 

The largest prison apparatus in the world, like this is where we’re at and really tied immigration even that much more closely to local jails, to private prisons, to sheriffs, to local police departments. And we had some of the highest level of formal deportations we had ever seen under Obama and it was because there was this use of the criminal legal system. Trump actually gave like at that period of time and it was horrible in so many ways, but we were able to break free from the good versus bad immigrant frame because I think people were understanding the sort of inherent racism of these systems and what they did. 

And so we were able to say, no, actually we need to abolish, we need to shut down these systems themselves at the core, they’re fundamentally unjust. They’re not, you know, they work to control people and to punish people. I think under Biden, what’s been so challenging is that early on this administration was really ready to respond and actually ended some detention contracts and had a moratorium on deportations and had some things, but then immediately once there started to be a panic around what was happening at the border, the Biden administration completely faltered and has done very little around these issues in every way. This is very true of the Democrats generally just has not been bold in any way. And the Republicans have taken back the narrative. So right now the conversation has wildly has actually just become this narrative of a major quote unquote, migrant crime wave. And what it is doing actually, and this is what Republicans do time and time again, is distracting from mass social inequality, distracting from state repression and blaming and scapegoating migrants as the problem when actually it’s, you know, the conditions for people here aren’t great. And it’s like, okay, let’s blame migrants as opposed to the government that’s actually not providing and offering those people who are in need and et cetera. 

And I think, you know, speaking of Texas and where up end is, it’s like, Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas has really been dictating immigration policy in so many ways. Not only through Operation Lone Star, which is this policy in Texas that has just kind of seized the criminal legal system to prosecute migrants or laws like SB4 that is actually kind of taking SB1070, which was this law in Arizona in 2010 that was called the Show Me Your Papers law. But the whole point is like making states authorities on immigration as opposed to the federal government. 

And so Abbott’s really taking that further and saying like local police, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, all the other things locally are actually gonna control immigration and just moving ahead with that. You have things like in that bill in particular, there is a policy that says there’s a 10-year mandatory minimum if somebody is quote unquote smuggling or aiding a migrant. And so people who are citizens or people who, you know, everybody is really impacted by this. If you’re driving with somebody who is undocumented, you could be prosecuted. 

And I saw this actually when I was in Texas after Operation Lone Star was implemented and I was at the border. I witnessed a hearing and there was somebody who was a US citizen, early 20s, a new father who had been caught with two migrants in his car. And sure, there’s a good chance he was making some money off people like transporting people because our system is so restrictionist that this is how it operates. It actually fuels this idea that, they’re clamping down on the quote unquote smugglers. It’s actually US policy that gives more power to these things happening in this way. So this young man, he had had I think a prior conviction. And so his bond was $400,000.

And he even said, he was just like, is this it? Am I just gonna be locked up forever? And that gives you the sense of what these laws do and what they’re doing, not just to immigrant communities, to all those people who are part of immigrant communities, which is all of us, because they’re very vibrant and they are, like I said before. But the other thing I would just name really quickly is Greg Abbott has also really taken control of the narrative through this scheme to bus migrants to quote unquote sanctuary cities like New York and Chicago. Where actually those cities are kind of struggling in a pandemic era where social safety nets really came down. 

And so all these communities, there are housing crises in these places so a lot of…Abbott has succeeded, Biden hasn’t intervened in any way. And the reality is now all these liberals are really taking in this idea that there is a quote unquote migrant crisis when in fact it’s very much manufactured. And so I think that’s what’s, you know, such a challenge about this moment is that we are, there’s a lot of crises, immigration is connected to multiple of them and it’s hard to make the case. And part of what I argue in the book and what I believe so strongly is that having like abolition helps us have that analysis and understands why we’re in these conditions. 

As opposed to just accepting the frame, like so much of right now, everyone’s just like, well, immigrants commit less crimes than US citizens. And it’s not helpful because it’s inherently anti -black, but also it accepts the frame that it is a public safety issue, which it’s not. When it’s about family and seeking refuge and seeking opportunity. And so I think that’s, we’re in a really tough spot, but I, during this podcast, I think there are still so many people who have come into this work that there is a lot of possibility there is some work we can do to continue to hold the line on this.

Jaison Oliver 

One thing I want to make sure, so for people who may not be a surveyor with Texas or aren’t following Texas laws closely, and please correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding of SB4, you talked about, modeled after this show me your papers law, basically any law enforcement in the state can initiate deportation proceedings. So whether you are your regular Houston police officer, state police, school district police…anybody, constable, anybody, anywhere, they can start this. It’s putting us all in, you know, cause how are they to know? It’s literally just legalizing discrimination because how do you know whether someone is here legally or not?

Silky Shah 

Yeah, no, I think that and you know, a lot of it is it’s in litigation, there’ll be questions about where it’ll go to the Supreme Court. And that is also terrifying, given the state of the Supreme Court. So yeah, it’s really scary just to see the scale of which and the thing is, Texas is leading the way and you have like a dozen other states that have copycat legislation in Louisiana, Florida, Arizona, across the board. There is a lot of push for anti-immigrant policy. And then on the other side what we’ve so successfully done is sanctuary policies in states like New York or Chicago, I mean, in Illinois or California. And, you know, there’s people trying to challenge some of those as well, given the sort of narrative of the quote unquote migrant crime wave.

Jaison Oliver

Looking more directly into our jails especially, how do…for listeners, Harris County Jail is very large and we have a very large immigrant population in Houston in general. So ICE actually has a physical presence in the jail and they get access to booking information, date of birth, citizenship status, all that. Can you share a little bit about how police and jails collaborate with ICE to target immigrants for detention?

Silky Shah

I think this is actually one of the more, the things that a lot of folks don’t understand is that it is through the criminal legal system that a lot of people in communities are targeted. So there’s this narrative, there’s a lot of different narratives, but there’s this perspective, like ICE does do raids and raids are much more common under Republican presidents than under Democratic presidents. When Obama came into office there had been these massive raids under Bush that really just like completely destroyed communities. Like 400 community members being incarcerated at once. What does that do to families and communities in general? So the response by the Obama administration was to more closely focus on quote unquote criminals and then expand those ICE police collaborations. And they look like a lot of different things. 

Like you were saying, Jaison, there is this very specific program where you have ICE in county jails. And a lot of folks have fought against this, but that is probably one of the things that is the most successful at bringing people into deportation proceedings because you have an ICE agent who’s kind of checking with people, talking to people, doing all the things. You also have, there was a program where a lot of local police, it was called 287g, where local police could be immigration enforcers.

For the most part, that doesn’t happen. It happens more at the jail where that program still exists. And like you were saying before, these policies like SB4, these new laws are intending to sort of bring back that thing where any law enforcement officer can be an immigration enforcer. But then there’s also the sharing of databases. And this is where we saw some of the most increase under the Obama administration, where more and more people were funneled into the system. Where somebody, they would just connect the FBI and DHS databases. And once people came in and through the booking process and they digitized it more to make it more effective. And so many people were going through. And so there was this idea that this system was going to protect people from the quote unquote criminals or the bad immigrants.

But the reality is that we have a massive criminal legal system in our country at the state, local and federal levels. And people are interacting with the criminal legal system just all the time. It constantly happens. And whether it’s a traffic stop or whether you have a hot check or whether this or that, or any reason, or like you’re arrested for some reason, you’re just interacting. People are interacting with the criminal legal system all the time. So many more people ended up in the system. And you had some 400,000 formal deportations under Obama through that. And it was through these jails that this happened. And in addition, the one thing I’ll say about the formal deportations, which is still happening and still happens at a couple hundred thousand a year, but yeah. 

Jaison Oliver

Can you say what you mean by formal deportation versus informal?

Silky Shah 

So I think the really important distinction there is that formal removals, quote unquote, are when somebody is deported from the country, they have a five year bar to reentry. And then if they try to reenter the country, they can be prosecuted for a two year prison sentence. Or sometimes if they have additional convictions, like maybe there’s a drug crime, they could have up to 20 years in prison for reentering the country. And so part of the argument I’m making is it was through this expansion of formal deportations that you started to actually see a lot more immigrants coming into the federal prison system. They would leave, but they have family here. They had a reason, they had their livelihoods here. They would come back and then be prosecuted and end up in prison for sometimes years. And so I think that was, you just see this growth and growth and growth of the prison industrial complex during that time around immigration. 

The pieces that I mentioned are a lot of how ICE and local police and jails interact, but also you have jails that just, you know, they’ll hold immigrants for 48 hours, even if they’re ready to be released. So ICE can come pick them up. They’re called quote unquote ICE holds or detainers. A lot of our work has been trying to end that practice because it’s actually technically unconstitutional. Also, a lot of jails have contracts with ICE, Intergovernmental Service Agreements, where they’ll hold immigrants for ICE and make a lot of money off of these contracts. So it’s not just private prison companies, but jails across the country are used for ICE detention and also US Marshals detention, which includes large immigrant populations as well. And so I think there’s just in every way the jail system and if there’s like expansion of the jail system that usually impacts the immigration enforcement system as well. 

Sheriffs in so many ways are the beneficiaries of immigration enforcement. Sheriffs are such a bizarre entity, but they really see their role as really central on immigration enforcement. And that’s been really harmful. And you see it even in, in surveys of sheriffs, they see, it doesn’t matter where they are. They can be in Nebraska, or Kansas. It doesn’t matter. They really see their role as like protecting the homeland.

Josie Pickens 

The family policing system requires parents to go through lengthy and convoluted processes to attempt to regain custody. We know this. What do detained or deported migrants experience when trying to reunite with their families? Can you tell us a little bit about that, Silky?

Silky Shah 

I don’t have a broad swath of information about how that always works. It’s different in different contexts, but I think it’s important to understand. In that moment that I was talking about in the Obama administration where there were so many people being deported, actually, there was a study done by the Applied Research Center that showed that over 5,000 kids were in the foster care system. And so you saw already just the scale of deportations happening that you started to see more and more kids ending up in the system. I think in so many ways, and a lot of what I argue in the book is that all detention is family separation. 

Every single time somebody is detained, a lot of times they have family members. So I think there’s this perception around family separation in that moment that it’s like this unique moment. But I think the work that upEND does, the work that has happened around the family policing system, the work that’s happened to kind of like expose how many people within prisons and jails are actually parents and parents that are living or ending up really far away from their children is something really important to keep in mind. 

In terms of the reuniting, there was a family reunification task force and I think they’ve been successful at doing some reunifications. But again, not all of them, there’s still people who are separated from their kids. So much of that information was haphazard and people didn’t know how to like what, like who, who needed to be reconnected and whatnot. But yeah, I do think that so much of this involves just a lot, a lot of advocacy work to get the administration to help coordinate, help make these things happen, work where you’re supporting families on the ground with resources. Folks are deported or sometimes they’re here. It just depends on where people are and how, like, there’s so much civil society infrastructure that it takes. And it’s like, if you could just not do this, we wouldn’t need to have this many resources to do all the work to reunite families.

I think that a lot of what we’ve seen is that there’s not like an intentional like, okay, this is about family reunification. So much of it is just like fighting against the deportation case, doing what we can to get people out. I think what’s really hard is on the child detention side, there’s,

I don’t know how many kids are in child detention right now, but you know, at some points there’s been like 11,000. And what we see at the border, and I sort of talked about this before, is because the policies have become so restrictionist, a lot of parents will send their kids, usually teenagers on their own, to journey to the US. And legally, the US is required to take them in and give them shelter and kind of do the processes.

Again, these processes create potentially more exploitation. And we saw that with child migrant labor happening in the US and other things. I don’t know if I have a full answer to your question in terms of the process of getting folks reconnected, but I do think that the way we understand the system, often we see immigration as this separate thing that happens in a separate system and it’s about different things. But in actuality, it’s like the ways that these things are being approached are very similar across the board, whether you’re looking at the PIC more broadly or you’re looking at federal system, state system, whether you’re looking at the child welfare system or family policing system. 

And the response, and this is what I’ve experienced a lot in the immigration detention context. There’s been a real big push for things like case management, where you would put a lot of money and resources into having a social worker or a lawyer for people and for families in particular. But instead of that actually reducing detention, the programs have been really small. They’ve done okay work. I’m not saying that it hasn’t been important to have some sort of resources, they don’t actually reduce the system. And so I think that’s part of a question I have. I think like for us, we wanna provide those services, but I also think, I feel like Jaison maybe you said this earlier, people could just be in community and be okay and get the resources they need if they’re able to take care of themselves as opposed to being caught up in a system that’s making their lives that much harder.

Jaison Oliver 

I think you started going in this direction, but I’m wondering about the ways that you bring intersectionality into your work and then where you found strong possibilities for collaboration. What are the building blocks that family policing advocates can build upon from those working to end immigrant detention?

Silky Shah 

Yeah, it’s such a good question. And I think it’s something we’re constantly trying to figure out. Because I think one thing, and so much of what I’m trying to do with the book, with Unbuild Walls, is say we can’t be in our silos, because it’s actually hurting us to be in silos. So if we, as an immigrant justice movement, really take on abolition, we understand the bigger frame. So much of the way the immigrant rights movement has operated for years is to like exceptionalize immigrants and inadvertently put them against other community members. So immigrants are more productive and they are patriotic or they’re all these things that aren’t actually grounded in our values of anti-imperialism or abolition. 

So much of our work to bridge has to be first about having that shared analysis and that shared understanding, and then also having the vocabulary to talk about it and not fall back on arguments like immigrants are, you know, like so much of those years of doing this work, I would just constantly hear, especially after 9-11, like, we are not terrorists, we are not criminals. And it’s not good messaging, first of all, but it also doesn’t unpack why these systems exist as they do. They don’t exist to prevent harm, they exist to extend state control. As we understand that more, I think then we can find those particular connections. And on immigration in particular and family policing, I think there’s no question that immigration is intersectional in every way. 

It touches everything which is sometimes overwhelming, because actually a lot of things have to be changed in the world for things to fully get better. But at the same time, there is some opportunity there. I think, I imagine in any city you go to, there are immigrant communities that are also caught up in the family policing system. And what does that look like? And what does that mean? And how are we talking about that? In addition to looking at families who are coming to the border and what the response to them is and children in the child detention system or young people in the child detention system. 

So I think what are the best responses? And I don’t totally have the answers to that, but I do think because so much of it, at least from my perspective in the immigrant rights world has fallen into this, either humanitarian or sort of more like charity mindset and savior complex. It lends itself to this idea that we’re not like working alongside each other and actually we’re there just to provide resources. And I think when we see our struggles aligned and see the agency of the people that we’re working on behalf of, that is so central. And it doesn’t end up in these arguments of like paternalistic case management programs. It feels like sometimes these solutions or alternatives tend to be like other forms of policing, you know, other forms of surveillance. And so, yeah, I’d be curious to hear more from upEND about what are some ways that we can move away from it or what are some of the tools that have been used in the family policing context that could kind of help us reframe or reorient the way we talk about families arriving at the border and how to respond.

Josie Pickens

It’s so interesting that you bring that up. Our work here at upEND is taking a look at reforms and these policies that others are trying to implement that are supposed to fix this broken system. But is the system broken or is it working in the exact way that it’s designed to work? That’s one of the questions that we continue to ask. And one of the founders of upEND created this wonderful framework tool that helps evaluate whether proposals to reform the family policing system will either strengthen and fortify the system or give power back to families and communities. It’s the same thing that you were just discussing. It’s what you said the reforms quote unquote that were presented by the Obama administration were missing. In your book, you talk about developing similar questions towards immigration justice. What are the steps you propose towards abolition?

Silky Shah 

Yeah, no, think that so much of it is about having a lens. I think for me, it’s a vision, but it’s also a guide. It helps us think through how we do this. I think it’s exactly what you were saying, Josie, like what are the systems that are gonna fortify the system or reforms that are gonna fortify the system versus the abolition of steps that are actually gonna start to chip away and start to free people from cages? 

I think in the immigrant detention context, a lot of our strategy has been to focus locally and really focus on particular detention centers. The harms that they’re doing and have that groundswell of support. I mentioned the Communities Not Cages campaign we work with groups in 20+ states that are trying to fight detention expansion or end detention contracts. And through those efforts, we’ve actually seen more than 20 detention centers end contracts in the last five plus years. And so that has been really remarkable. And I think what’s so important about that is that once a detention center is no longer in a community, because of the way detention works, less people are targeted in that community, because often they’ll have empty beds and they’ll say, okay, let’s round up more people. 

We actually have data to share this. We’re like, look, it’s good to close detention. And I think a lot of people worry about things like transfers to other places, but there’s this perception often when you’re thinking about it from a technocratic angle is that like, we have control over what an agency is going to do. We don’t, we have no control over what an agency is going to do. And so we actually have to start chipping away so that can throw a wrench in their plans and prevent them to do what they’re trying to do. So that’s been one of our biggest strategies. We’ve also tried to do work around the budget. It’s a little harder in the federal context. We had a campaign called Defund Hate that, like I said, was kind of going after the money for detention and border patrol agents and the wall. 

It was successful at really mitigating the harm of the Trump administration for those years, but in this backlash moment, it’s been really hard to…I think, especially in that moment, whenever in 2020, the uprisings for Black Lives, I mean, we got to a place where we actually had members of Congress leadership in appropriations committee saying, we’re going to cut detention to 10,000 beds. Right now, it’s something like 40,000, and they’re trying to raise it up to 50,000. So it was significant. It was a very significant reduction. 

And to me it’s, again, why it’s so important that our movements are connected because I really think in the moment that we’ve had the most power to do anything, it was actually in 2020 when people were questioning the system as a whole, not just immigration, but the system as a whole. And so that to me is so essential. Yeah, and so I think it’s like having that lens, thinking through those pieces, thinking about state and local level shifts that can be made that can meaningfully help communities. I think so much of the work that’s been done around sentencing reform sometimes ends up applying to immigration and that means that more people get out, but then there’s still an immigration proceeding. 

So it just opens up space for us to see there’s actually a lot of different shifts to the system that can happen that can help all the different things and like, what are those, what are those pieces that we can align around? And we have so little resources and so little capacity actually as a movement. We need to be as focused as possible about the things that are gonna chip away as opposed to the things that are gonna end up expanding surveillance or just keeping us with the size of the system that we have now. 

But yeah, I would love to see some of those questions around family policing and thinking about how maybe there can be some shared conversation there just to see how to talk about the question of migrant families and how we might wanna kind of approach that. Because I think similarly with the family policing system in the US, so much of that history is embedded in colonization and slavery and histories of imperialism. And I think that is definitely no question those pieces are at play with having an increase in migrant families coming to capitalism, of course. So I think just having that sort of shared analysis could be so useful.

Jaison Oliver 

As you mentioned before, immigration touches everything. And we’ve touched on a bit of it in this conversation, but I want to just open up the space here for if there’s anything that we haven’t discussed or that you feel like is important to add to this particular conversation that you wanted to include here.

Silky Shah 

We’ve discussed a lot, so I’m not sure if there’s actually a lot.

Jaison Oliver

Yeah, no, I just wanted to open it up. But okay, so if we’re fine there, where can people find you and how can they stay connected with you and your work?

Silky Shah 

Detention Watch Network, we’re detentionwatchnetwork.org and we’re on social channels as @DetentionWatch. And we’re an organization that’s been around since 1997 and over time has taken on an abolitionist stance. Definitely not there at that point, but I think we’ve over time gotten to that place. And we work with groups across the country who are fighting detention expansion, fighting to shut down detention centers. Trying to do that cross-movement work to say, actually, what does it look like if we move away from a carceral economy and, you know, transition to resources for the things that we need. I encourage folks to check us out. On our website, we have a member directory. You can see if there are groups in your area. And yeah, we’d love to. 

Jaison Oliver

Beautiful. Well, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate it.

Silky Shah 

Yeah, thank you. And thanks so much for the work you do. I’m excited to connect here and hope it continues.

Jaison Oliver 

Absolutely.

Josie Pickens

Yes, we hope the same. We definitely want to. You’ve opened my mind and eyes to so many things in this conversation, so many intersections and already thinking about ways to collaborate in the future. So thanks again for joining us, Silky.