Abolition Feminisms, Volume 1, edited by Alisa Bierria, Jakeya Caruthers, and Brooke Lober, 2022
Through an analysis of government documents, media sources, migrant and activist testimonies, mad... more Through an analysis of government documents, media sources, migrant and activist testimonies, made objects, and acts of resistance, this essay explores stories of QTGNC migrants in detention and their collaborators since the eighties. I ask how stories in various forms serve either to fuel or to counter state violence, and how QTGNC migrants and collaborators wield them to forge what I call abolitionist imaginaries—alternate archives that illustrate both vision and praxis for a world without violence. Beginning with an analysis of the contestation of narratives surrounding Mariel Cubans detained on US military bases and in prisons in the eighties, and feminist, queer, and migrant rights organizing against Haitian detention through the HIV/AIDS crisis of the eighties and nineties, it explores the ways in which queer and trans people resisted from the inside and led “inside-outside” and coalition organizing on the outside to challenge detention in its entirety. Finally, I consider the role of storytelling in personal and activist responses to detention and calls for abolition in the late 2010s—and its relationship to trauma.
Abolition and Resistance in the Borderlands: Confronting Trump's Reign of Terror, edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Jessica Ordaz, 2024
As abolitionist scholars and organizers, we reflect in this essay on our efforts in resistance ar... more As abolitionist scholars and organizers, we reflect in this essay on our efforts in resistance archiving, defined here as the intentional practice of documenting stories that counter the violent logics of prisons and borders, during the Trump era. Through a discussion of the creation of IMM Print, a digital archive of immigration detention stories launched by Tina during her time as a Soros Justice Fellow at Freedom for Immigrants in 2016–18—and drawing also on Jamila’s work as founder and former executive director of the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project (QDEP)—we reflect on the challenges of resistance archiving within the “cramped political spaces” of the immigrant rights movement and the process of navigating the continuities and ruptures of Trump-era enforcement violence.
This article posits border abolition as a radical alternative to the Anthropocene. It convenes a ... more This article posits border abolition as a radical alternative to the Anthropocene. It convenes a group of eleven activists, organizers, scholars, practitioners, educators, and storytellers to discuss their work building cross-border solidarities along the US-Mexico border and in US immigration detention, Puerto Rico, Ghana, and the Bengal Delta. Participants provide critical analysis of the origins of environmental injustice and border violence and discuss how a confluence of ecological crisis, environmental racism, and border militarization since the 1980s disproportionately impacts BIPOC and queer/trans communities and exacerbates migrant precarity and displacement worldwide. Participants share ways they have built alternatives to border and ecological violence through migrant accompaniment, legal and policy advocacy, divestment activism, storytelling, education, and sustainability projects. The discussion is organized around three key themes: environmental injustice, racism, and ...
This article posits border abolition as a radical alternative to the Anthropocene. It convenes a ... more This article posits border abolition as a radical alternative to the Anthropocene. It convenes a group of eleven activists, organizers, scholars, practitioners, educators, and storytellers to discuss their work building cross-border solidarities along the US-Mexico border and in US immigration detention, Puerto Rico, Ghana, and the Bengal Delta. Participants provide critical analysis of the origins of environmental injustice and border violence and discuss how a confluence of ecological crisis, environmental racism, and border militarization since the 1980s disproportionately impacts BIPOC and queer/trans communities and exacerbates migrant precarity and displacement worldwide. Participants share ways they have built alternatives to border and ecological violence through migrant accompaniment, legal and policy advocacy, divestment activism, storytelling, education, and sustainability projects. The discussion is organized around three key themes: environmental injustice, racism, and borders; strategies adopted by organizers to build environmental and migrant justice; and visions of border abolition.
Author(s): Shull, Kristina Karin | Advisor(s): Rosenberg, Emily S | Abstract: In 2013, the United... more Author(s): Shull, Kristina Karin | Advisor(s): Rosenberg, Emily S | Abstract: In 2013, the United States detained approximately 400,000 people in immigration custody in a network of 250 local, federal, and private jails across the country as they awaited deportation or release, at a cost of over $1.7 billion. This dissertation situates the rise of the current U.S. immigration detention system in the early 1980s within the broader context of Ronald Reagan's Cold War foreign policies and growing public xenophobia after the Vietnam War. When President Reagan entered office, he sought new ways to curtail a perceived "mass immigration emergency" caused by an increasing flow of Cubans, Haitians, and Central Americans to the United States. As the American public continued to express "compassion fatigue" towards new migrant populations, the Reagan Administration established a new security state that included the building of immigrant detention centers throughout the ...
Through an analysis of government documents, media sources, migrant testimonies, made objects, an... more Through an analysis of government documents, media sources, migrant testimonies, made objects, and acts of protest, this essay examines the impact of the United States' indefinite detention of Mariel Cubans-and their resistance-on immigration detention policy and the rise of the carceral state during the Reagan administration. As the United States first detained Mariel Cubans on military bases and then in US prisons, Cubans continually challenged their indefinite detention and US attempts at deportation through legal, political, and poetic claims, as well as uprisings-culminating in a two-week takeover and standoff at two prisons in Atlanta and Louisiana in 1987, the longest prison uprising in US history. Throughout, the Mariel migration remained at the center of the Reagan administration's immigration and prison policy discussions, ushering in a new era in detention and immigration restriction. This essay also considers the role of Mariel Cuban storytelling as a powerful form of resistance to detention, and the extraordinary anti-Blackness, queerphobia, and criminalization surrounding this migrant group, then and now. It concludes by reflecting on contemporary coalitional efforts to uplift the stories of Cubans recently-or still-imprisoned, some having arrived with the Mariel Boatlift, and possibilities for abolitionist futures.
Through migrant and activist testimonies, media coverage, and government documents, this article ... more Through migrant and activist testimonies, media coverage, and government documents, this article explores the modes of resistance inside and outside of immigration detention that arose in response to new, more punitive detention policies enacted by the Reagan administration that specifically targeted Caribbean and Central American asylum-seekers in the early 1980s, and the modes of retaliation adopted by the administration in response. It argues migrant detention operates as a form of counter-insurgency, re-centering the geopolitics of asylum within the transnational scope of counter-insurgent warfare and its role in the rise of carceral trends more broadly. Reagan’s “Cold War on immigrants”—defined as a suite of new immigration enforcement measures that was adopted by the Reagan administration during its first term and buttressed the subsequent growth of the detention system—sparked mass resistance. Mounting public dissent against Reagan’s foreign and immigration policies, as evidenced by “inside-outside” and transnational activism, Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, and the Central America peace and Sanctuary movements, prompted the administration to wage a total war against its opponents to maintain its immigration control and foreign policy aims. The contemporary US immigration detention system emerged, and continues, out of this dialectic of resistance and retaliation.
The U.S. immigration detention center is both a transnational space and a foreign policy microcos... more The U.S. immigration detention center is both a transnational space and a foreign policy microcosm. Its detainees reside physically within the nation yet legally outside, while its walls, fences, and doors clearly demarcate those bodies that do not belong to the nation from those that do. The detention center is not merely a domestic place where foreign policy is executed. It is a place both locally and globally defined, where social interactions and cultural narratives transcend concrete walls and nation-state boundaries. Bodies are controlled, marked, and contested in this liminal space. This essay explores the detention and processing of Mariel Cubans at Fort Chaffee in 1980-1 as exercises of biopolitical management in the era of President Ronald Reagan’s revitalized nationalism. Through a process of inclusion and exclusion, a previously welcomed “anticommunist” exile group suddenly became cast by the media and politicians as “undesirable.” While some Cuban refugees were rendered acceptable additions to the national body through “American” cultural training, sponsorship, and resettlement, nonnational “excludables” were simultaneously rendered invisible through the act of detention.
Abolition Feminisms, Volume 1, edited by Alisa Bierria, Jakeya Caruthers, and Brooke Lober, 2022
Through an analysis of government documents, media sources, migrant and activist testimonies, mad... more Through an analysis of government documents, media sources, migrant and activist testimonies, made objects, and acts of resistance, this essay explores stories of QTGNC migrants in detention and their collaborators since the eighties. I ask how stories in various forms serve either to fuel or to counter state violence, and how QTGNC migrants and collaborators wield them to forge what I call abolitionist imaginaries—alternate archives that illustrate both vision and praxis for a world without violence. Beginning with an analysis of the contestation of narratives surrounding Mariel Cubans detained on US military bases and in prisons in the eighties, and feminist, queer, and migrant rights organizing against Haitian detention through the HIV/AIDS crisis of the eighties and nineties, it explores the ways in which queer and trans people resisted from the inside and led “inside-outside” and coalition organizing on the outside to challenge detention in its entirety. Finally, I consider the role of storytelling in personal and activist responses to detention and calls for abolition in the late 2010s—and its relationship to trauma.
Abolition and Resistance in the Borderlands: Confronting Trump's Reign of Terror, edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Jessica Ordaz, 2024
As abolitionist scholars and organizers, we reflect in this essay on our efforts in resistance ar... more As abolitionist scholars and organizers, we reflect in this essay on our efforts in resistance archiving, defined here as the intentional practice of documenting stories that counter the violent logics of prisons and borders, during the Trump era. Through a discussion of the creation of IMM Print, a digital archive of immigration detention stories launched by Tina during her time as a Soros Justice Fellow at Freedom for Immigrants in 2016–18—and drawing also on Jamila’s work as founder and former executive director of the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project (QDEP)—we reflect on the challenges of resistance archiving within the “cramped political spaces” of the immigrant rights movement and the process of navigating the continuities and ruptures of Trump-era enforcement violence.
This article posits border abolition as a radical alternative to the Anthropocene. It convenes a ... more This article posits border abolition as a radical alternative to the Anthropocene. It convenes a group of eleven activists, organizers, scholars, practitioners, educators, and storytellers to discuss their work building cross-border solidarities along the US-Mexico border and in US immigration detention, Puerto Rico, Ghana, and the Bengal Delta. Participants provide critical analysis of the origins of environmental injustice and border violence and discuss how a confluence of ecological crisis, environmental racism, and border militarization since the 1980s disproportionately impacts BIPOC and queer/trans communities and exacerbates migrant precarity and displacement worldwide. Participants share ways they have built alternatives to border and ecological violence through migrant accompaniment, legal and policy advocacy, divestment activism, storytelling, education, and sustainability projects. The discussion is organized around three key themes: environmental injustice, racism, and ...
This article posits border abolition as a radical alternative to the Anthropocene. It convenes a ... more This article posits border abolition as a radical alternative to the Anthropocene. It convenes a group of eleven activists, organizers, scholars, practitioners, educators, and storytellers to discuss their work building cross-border solidarities along the US-Mexico border and in US immigration detention, Puerto Rico, Ghana, and the Bengal Delta. Participants provide critical analysis of the origins of environmental injustice and border violence and discuss how a confluence of ecological crisis, environmental racism, and border militarization since the 1980s disproportionately impacts BIPOC and queer/trans communities and exacerbates migrant precarity and displacement worldwide. Participants share ways they have built alternatives to border and ecological violence through migrant accompaniment, legal and policy advocacy, divestment activism, storytelling, education, and sustainability projects. The discussion is organized around three key themes: environmental injustice, racism, and borders; strategies adopted by organizers to build environmental and migrant justice; and visions of border abolition.
Author(s): Shull, Kristina Karin | Advisor(s): Rosenberg, Emily S | Abstract: In 2013, the United... more Author(s): Shull, Kristina Karin | Advisor(s): Rosenberg, Emily S | Abstract: In 2013, the United States detained approximately 400,000 people in immigration custody in a network of 250 local, federal, and private jails across the country as they awaited deportation or release, at a cost of over $1.7 billion. This dissertation situates the rise of the current U.S. immigration detention system in the early 1980s within the broader context of Ronald Reagan's Cold War foreign policies and growing public xenophobia after the Vietnam War. When President Reagan entered office, he sought new ways to curtail a perceived "mass immigration emergency" caused by an increasing flow of Cubans, Haitians, and Central Americans to the United States. As the American public continued to express "compassion fatigue" towards new migrant populations, the Reagan Administration established a new security state that included the building of immigrant detention centers throughout the ...
Through an analysis of government documents, media sources, migrant testimonies, made objects, an... more Through an analysis of government documents, media sources, migrant testimonies, made objects, and acts of protest, this essay examines the impact of the United States' indefinite detention of Mariel Cubans-and their resistance-on immigration detention policy and the rise of the carceral state during the Reagan administration. As the United States first detained Mariel Cubans on military bases and then in US prisons, Cubans continually challenged their indefinite detention and US attempts at deportation through legal, political, and poetic claims, as well as uprisings-culminating in a two-week takeover and standoff at two prisons in Atlanta and Louisiana in 1987, the longest prison uprising in US history. Throughout, the Mariel migration remained at the center of the Reagan administration's immigration and prison policy discussions, ushering in a new era in detention and immigration restriction. This essay also considers the role of Mariel Cuban storytelling as a powerful form of resistance to detention, and the extraordinary anti-Blackness, queerphobia, and criminalization surrounding this migrant group, then and now. It concludes by reflecting on contemporary coalitional efforts to uplift the stories of Cubans recently-or still-imprisoned, some having arrived with the Mariel Boatlift, and possibilities for abolitionist futures.
Through migrant and activist testimonies, media coverage, and government documents, this article ... more Through migrant and activist testimonies, media coverage, and government documents, this article explores the modes of resistance inside and outside of immigration detention that arose in response to new, more punitive detention policies enacted by the Reagan administration that specifically targeted Caribbean and Central American asylum-seekers in the early 1980s, and the modes of retaliation adopted by the administration in response. It argues migrant detention operates as a form of counter-insurgency, re-centering the geopolitics of asylum within the transnational scope of counter-insurgent warfare and its role in the rise of carceral trends more broadly. Reagan’s “Cold War on immigrants”—defined as a suite of new immigration enforcement measures that was adopted by the Reagan administration during its first term and buttressed the subsequent growth of the detention system—sparked mass resistance. Mounting public dissent against Reagan’s foreign and immigration policies, as evidenced by “inside-outside” and transnational activism, Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign, and the Central America peace and Sanctuary movements, prompted the administration to wage a total war against its opponents to maintain its immigration control and foreign policy aims. The contemporary US immigration detention system emerged, and continues, out of this dialectic of resistance and retaliation.
The U.S. immigration detention center is both a transnational space and a foreign policy microcos... more The U.S. immigration detention center is both a transnational space and a foreign policy microcosm. Its detainees reside physically within the nation yet legally outside, while its walls, fences, and doors clearly demarcate those bodies that do not belong to the nation from those that do. The detention center is not merely a domestic place where foreign policy is executed. It is a place both locally and globally defined, where social interactions and cultural narratives transcend concrete walls and nation-state boundaries. Bodies are controlled, marked, and contested in this liminal space. This essay explores the detention and processing of Mariel Cubans at Fort Chaffee in 1980-1 as exercises of biopolitical management in the era of President Ronald Reagan’s revitalized nationalism. Through a process of inclusion and exclusion, a previously welcomed “anticommunist” exile group suddenly became cast by the media and politicians as “undesirable.” While some Cuban refugees were rendered acceptable additions to the national body through “American” cultural training, sponsorship, and resettlement, nonnational “excludables” were simultaneously rendered invisible through the act of detention.
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