upEND Demands the Abolition of ICE and Immigration Detention

“Empires crumble, capitalism is not inevitable, gender is not biology, whiteness is not immutable, prisons are not inescapable, and borders are not natural law.”

— Harsha Walia

 

The Trump administration has been accelerating ICE deportations across the country and responding with militarized force to protestors in cities like LA. This is the latest escalation in decades of ongoing bipartisan facism that violently tears apart our communities. We condemn these acts of state-sanctioned violence. 

Family policing abolition includes immigrant justice, and upEND demands the abolition of ICE and an end to immigrant detention, deportation, and surveillance. For immigrants, the ability to move across borders is often about connecting with or providing safety for their families. For capitalists, criminalizing and restricting movement creates a vulnerable labor force to be brutally exploited. 

It is no coincidence that the United States government maintains the world’s largest immigration detention system and the highest rate of prison incarceration in the world. As abolitionists, we believe that no human should be caged, no matter who owns the cage or who it targets. These carceral systems work together to separate families and cause generational trauma while the capitalist ruling class profits from mass incarceration, wage theft, and extractive systems designed for maximum profit with no regard to human costs.

We must vehemently resist the criminalization of immigrants, and we should be mindful of the language we use at this critical juncture. We should avoid making distinctions between good immigrants and bad immigrants. Using words like legal, hard-working, and law-abiding just plays into the oppressors hand’s. Legality is a construct of the state, not a reflection of justice. To rely on these descriptors is to accept the terms of a system designed to criminalize, exclude, and control. These words don’t liberate us, they reinforce the idea that worth and safety must be earned within structures that were never meant to protect us in the first place. Anyone can be criminalized at any time by the state – including queer, Black, Indigenous, pregnant, disabled, and trans people. At this moment, anyone even suspected of being an immigrant or fitting the racial profile can be abducted at any time by ICE agents. 

Reforms aren’t enough. Every facet of the carceral state (prisons, policing, family policing, ICE, the military) must be abolished because they threaten and harm every marginalized group. This is all of our fight. The carceral state is not inevitable – ICE was just created in 2008. Abolition is necessary and possible. Abolition NOW!

 

Get Informed and Get Involved

• Support the Stolen Children’s Month campaign that calls for the abolition of all systems that steal children and separate families, including the family policing, adoption, and foster industries; the ICE detention and deportation machine; and the prison-industrial complex.
• Listen to “Unbuild Walls” with Silky Shah on The upEND Podcast. 
• Listen to “In Solidarity” with Jennefer Canales-Pelaez on The upEND Podcast. 
• Learn more about Detention Watch Network’s #CommunitiesNotCages campaign. 
• Learn about Tsuru for Solidarity, a Japanese American led abolitionist org founded by U.S. concentration camp survivors that works toward abolishing immigration detention.