Silky Shah has been organizing for immigrant rights for more than a decade. As a prominent voice in the immigrant justice movement in the United States, she has argued that the movement should oppose both border militarization and the carceral system, thus understanding the immigrant struggle as connected to other struggles against racial and economic oppression. She argues this in her recent book Unbuild Walls, published by Haymarket Books. She is also the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition of organizations that oppose immigrant detention.

In the following interview with Left Voice editor and immigration reporter Samuel Karlin, Shah discusses the attacks that President Trump is carrying out with support from both the Republican Party and Democratic Party, the build-up of the war on immigration over decades, and how those resisting the attacks can unite with other struggles of the oppressed.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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Why do people migrate?

There is this perception, especially because of the narratives around public safety and national security, that people are migrating for nefarious reasons. That’s totally absurd, and it’s a lie that we’re constantly told, that immigration is a public safety issue or immigration is a national security issue, when that’s just not true at all.

The main reason people are migrating is often family relationships, so reunification with family that is here in the United States. And also, probably the most major reason for labor, for opportunity, that’s the reason that my parents came. And then, you know, the sort of narrative we hear so much now is about people seeking refuge, but the context in which we talk about people seeking refuge or people seeking asylum is a complicated one. There isn’t as much context for the reasons people might be coming which the United States is directly involved in, sometimes indirectly. But because of globalization, because of climate catastrophe, because of violent conditions in other parts of the world, and especially in places like Central America, in terms of U.S.-backed wars in those regions, especially in the 1980s. So just seeing sort of the disruption that’s happened because of U.S. involvement, because of things like the North American Free Trade Agreement and economic agreements, there’s a lot of devastation that’s happened in communities in Mexico and Central America and then beyond, because of the conditions that we’re in.

I think those are all the different contexts in which people are coming, and I think in a lot of ways, the immigrant rights movement has shied away from talking about some of those root causes. But I think it’s so essential that we tell a bigger global story when we’re talking about what’s happening with immigration.

We’re a little over one month into Trump’s second presidency. How would you characterize some of the attacks from him, the Right, and even the Democratic Party? How do these attacks compare and contrast to what we saw under the first Trump presidency?

One of the biggest challenges right now is that for so many years under the Obama administration, we had been fighting mass deportations and fighting the expansion of the immigrant detention system. The narrative during that period was very much: there are a set of immigrants who are deserving, who are good, who are productive and aren’t doing anything wrong, and who are relatively innocent, and then there’s a set of people who are a problem. The Obama administration positioned it as there’s a set of immigrants who are undeserving and who have had contact with the criminal legal system, and therefore we should deport them. That was the narrative.

It was a “good versus bad immigrant” narrative, and it made it hard for us to make the case against some of the policies that the Obama administration was putting in place, like Secure Communities, which tied police or local county jails more closely with ICE. And so what happened when Trump came in in 2017 is, actually, it gave us room to do a couple things. One is to really break from the “good versus bad immigrant narrative.” There was more space to say “No, we don’t want ICE to engage at all with local police, and we don’t want immigration detention centers.” The other thing we were able to do is that the Democrats had often seen a lot of money and resources going to ICE or ICE detention as a way to create better conditions for immigrants. So we argued, “No, actually, you give more money to ICE, they’re not going to make better conditions. They’re just going to grow the detention system.”

So Trump’s first term was sort of a remarkable time to kind of shift the way people thought about these things. It was the emergence of the “Abolish ICE” framework, and people started understanding the harms of ICE as this entity in and of itself. And that’s not to say that things were great prior to ICE’s existence, but more just to say that here’s this agency that exists just to arrest and detain and deport immigrants, let’s actually move away from that.

What’s so challenging now is that the Democrats have moved to the right. It’s been happening over the last couple years, and especially through the campaign that Kamala Harris ran for president, where we just saw Democrats trying to be more hard-line to some degree than Trump on the issue in order to garner more votes. You saw a bunch of Democrats caving on the Laken Riley Act, which is this really harmful piece of legislation. There has been an abandonment of a pro-immigrant vision from the Democrats.

I’m glad you mentioned the Laken Riley Act. I don’t want to get ahead of your analysis of it, but it’s an example of how exposing more immigrants to detention or to the carceral system or policing paves the way for all sorts of horrific developments. But what could this legislation mean for more attacks on immigrants, and what previous legislation does it build off of?

In terms of my bigger-picture analysis, understanding the way that the U.S. became the world’s leading incarcerator with the largest prison system in the world, and then eventually the largest immigration detention system in the world, that’s a history that’s really tied to moral panics around crime.

In the 1980s, the Democrats started to learn that being tough on crime was actually good for winning elections. And so then you see, from that point where there’s so much harsh legislation being passed in the 1980s and the war on drugs is happening. In the 1990s, you go from the U.S. having 1 million people in prison to 2 million people in prison over a decade. In many ways, that’s how I feel about this moment.

Laken Riley was this young woman in Georgia who was killed by somebody who’s Venezuelan, and who is a migrant who had previously committed a theft. It’s an awful story, but this is not common. It’s quite rare. And here’s this really horrible tragedy. But political actors took this horrible tragedy and applied it to whole, huge categories of people, like anybody who is an immigrant and who has committed theft. And so then this becomes this narrative to justify mandatory detention and mandatory deportation without any sort of due process.

This idea of the good immigrant vs. the bad immigrant, which you’ve written about and mentioned, is so prevalent. I’m seeing a common refrain from right-wingers where they say Trump’s not going after immigrants, he’s going after criminals. Talk more about how essential that sort of framing is for these attacks, but also some of the ways we see it being applied even within immigrant justice spaces.

I really do think it’s by design to separate communities. The narrative in the immigrant rights movement, for so long, has been centered around this framework of comprehensive immigration reform. It was this idea to get legalization for a large number of undocumented immigrants by making a tradeoff for more border militarization, more criminalization. That also creates this push for immigrants to sort of be like the pinnacle of a human being, like so productive, so perfect. It was very in line with respectability politics. Often the narrative becomes that immigrants are not criminals.

The thing is, the U.S. has a long history of racism and obviously a history of slavery. When you look at the prison system in the U.S., and you look at who is disproportionately targeted, it’s Black, Brown, Indigenous, working class, and poor people. So when you’re saying “we are not criminals,” often the assumption, even if people aren’t naming it, is, “Well, we’re not those individuals who are Black or poor or undeserving.” So it separates people, and it doesn’t help us. It continues to make the connection between immigration and public safety, which, again, as I said earlier, is a lie. And there’s an underlying narrative of anti-Black racism.

I think that is a real challenge for us as a movement, because, yes, you want to point out that ICE is rampantly targeting people who might not be a “priority,” but at the same time, the way these systems work is to expand the scope of who can be considered criminal.

This framing also fails to recognize that a lot of these carceral systems grew, as we saw, out of the destruction of the welfare state and the fact that more and more stratification was happening in society. You see the reduction of the middle class and the resources that people need, and people aren’t getting what they need. It’s also why immigrants are being scapegoated right now, and the fearmongering is effective because people are really struggling, and they’re looking for somebody to blame. Immigrants have become the target.

What is the role of border states and the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border in the development of these repressive systems?

What was sort of remarkable about those years under Obama is that Arizona became this really incredible site of organizing and resistance to what was happening. There were attacks both by Obama and by conservative actors. In places like Arizona, conservatives passed SB 1070, which was this bill that was sort of dubbed the “show me your papers law,” which was eventually ruled unconstitutional. But it advanced this idea that states have the right to engage in immigration enforcement in a particular way.

We see this in Texas governor Greg Abbott, who has really been a major player on immigration and sometimes flies under the radar. Abbott developed the busing scheme, where immigrants were bused to Chicago and New York and other sanctuary cities to exacerbate the social safety nets there and create those conditions where there were divisions in the community, which moved a lot of these cities to the right.

But also, Abbott implemented Operation Lone Star to kind of harness the state’s criminal legal system to target immigrants and use disaster declarations and other declarations to make certain misdemeanors even more severe. It used state prisons for immigration detention in counties where people are being targeted. There were just all these different ways they were using law enforcement and the criminal legal system and the state troopers and all these different entities to put that energy on focusing on immigrants and changing the law.

Another layer to this whole system is the role and expansion of private prisons and private immigrant detention. But in criticizing these companies, which profit from destroying people’s lives, how can we avoid illusions that this would be OK so long as it were the government doing detention instead of just private companies?

I mean, the thing about private prisons is that they came around in the period when neoliberalism was growing. So it was this moment when, during the Reagan era, there was this small-government mindset. It was an opportunity for these predatory companies to develop. Really, the state and private entities work together.

A lot of the narrative becomes “look at these private prison companies and how evil they are.” Which, sure they’re terrible, but the reality is that they would be nothing if the state weren’t willing to work with them.

Immigration enforcement and immigration detention have always been one of the central things that these companies do. There’s the private prison company, GEO Group, for instance. I think some people have called it like an immigration-enforcement conglomerate, because they just adapt to the different ways that the federal government wants to do this work.

Something we saw during the Obama administration was, for years, there were hundreds of county jails that were used across the country, which are in really terrible condition. Often, they’re meant for short-term stays, but people would be in them for months and not have any outdoor recreation and really, really bad conditions. And so what the Obama administration did, because they were so focused on conditions, was to say, “Well, let’s create nicer facilities.” And so GEO Group was like, “OK, we’ll play ball.” So, basically, what we saw during that period was an expansion of the use of private prisons, where you’ve had like 50 percent of the facilities privately operated, but by the end of Obama, it was 70 percent of the facilities privately operated, or 70 percent of the capacity privately operated. So, again, it shows you that it was all about these companies sort of working with the state.

I think privatization is a problem. But again, so many county jails are used, county jails are some of the worst conditions that we have. Of the facilities that ICE uses now that are owned and operated by ICE, a lot of those facilities are terrible, and a lot of those services are outsourced as well.

There’s this idea of, you know, here are these private prison companies giving local officials or elected officials in Congress money. But most of the time, what we see is that the reason why members of Congress support private prisons is that they have a private prison in their area. And if the private prison goes away, then there’s going to be a loss of jobs. So much of it is about the political economy, and that political economy is not just about privatization. It’s about all these facilities. Even in places like New Jersey or Illinois, where there have been fights to ban private prison and private immigrant detention, a lot of counties were hesitant to move away from these contracts because they would lose federal revenue. And so I think we just have to have that bigger picture.

That’s not to deny that private prisons are terrible. It would be a good thing for them to go away. But I think, ultimately, any of these facilities are bad because they’re imprisoning people in really horrible conditions.

We’re seeing a lot of protests happening all over the country. What potential is there for resistance in the face of this war on immigration?

It’s been really heartening and incredible to see those protests that you’re naming and to see the way people are showing up. There’s also a lot of behind-the-scenes work that people don’t see. For many years, we didn’t have this scale of interior mass deportations that we saw, especially under Obama and early Trump, where people were rampantly being targeted and funneled in through the criminal legal system. Now that’s starting to ramp up a little bit more, but a lot of the infrastructure that the immigrant rights movement had built, resources that we need to support people who are being caught up in the system, have been dormant. Sanctuary policies have also been important, and right now there’s a lot of attacks on that. Like the No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities Act in Congress. Right now that’s moving. So trying to make sure that there aren’t attacks on sanctuary cities, but also trying to expand sanctuary.

I think we’re also starting to really gear up to be ready for some of those fights. I know that things like the use of Guantánamo for immigrant detention and the return of family detention and other things have been sort of in the news. I think some of that stuff is going to be the ongoing fight that we’re in for over the next couple years.

What would it take to win not just these fights immediately, but to build a world that gets rid of detention, opens borders, organizes internationally, and stops keeping communities in struggle divided, but brings them together? How can we have a larger vision of ending these repressive systems?

I love that question, and I think the dreaming and vision is so essential right now.

In the future we might have opportunities that we don’t have right now, and we have to build toward those. And building toward those is building bridges across movement. And so a lot of what I write about and the intention of my work is to try to really have the immigrant rights movement see itself as a racial justice movement, and be working in line with people who are fighting prison expansion and fighting discriminatory policing. I also think that there’s a divide that keeps people from seeing immigrant communities as a part of the labor community, as workers, and it’s so, so essential that there aren’t those divisions.

We have to actually think about how we fight together, and what’s the way to break some of these silos. This is the way the state operates and intentionally divides people. More broadly, the point that you’re making about internationalism is important. I think these last couple years, as we’ve witnessed what’s happened in Gaza, there has been some opening to think about it.

I often think about the 1980s, when, actually, the sanctuary movement during that period was inherently international. People in the U.S. were really in communication with people in Central America and doing what they could to protect people and get them to the U.S., and get them to Canada and places where that they were going to be safer. And I think right now, especially after we’re seeing what’s happening in Panama and the third-country deportations to places like Panama and Costa Rica, we need to start building those relationships.

My hope is that some of the lessons we learn is to stop some of those divisions between movements, stop some of those silos, and think about some of that cross-movement work. Immigrants are an easy scapegoat in this moment because people are feeling economic insecurity, people are feeling that sort of scarcity mindset. But, actually, we need to say it’s the billionaires. It’s all this money going to U.S. militarism and detention and deportation. We need to divest from that and invest in the public good, and do that together and for everyone.