Mm-hmm

... which we see in places like Guatemala and, and beyond, but also now even more so these sort of third, qu- quote-unquote, "third country agreements," and I'll get into some of the third country deportations.

Like, all of that is even expanding more and more and more.

So it's, um...

Todd Miller actually has a great book on this called Empire Borders that's helpful [laughs] to kind of see the way it's extending everywhere.

So how did, how did we get here? I mean, I think, you know, what I argue in Undo Walls is that ICE detention is essentially a, a extension of the prison-industrial complex, and I do that in a few ways, and I'm gonna do a sort of, like, truncated [laughs] version of, of, like, some of my arguments here, which, you know, first and foremost, I think our work around migrant justice has to be, um, you know, grounded in an understanding of challenging anti-Black racism and the growth of ICE detention in particular.

And obvi- obviously, you know, these things aren't just, like, a moment in time.

Yeah.

Do you still see some progress from the Obama years?

The Obama years are so instructive to understand because it was a moment of real possibility.

And then actually what ended up happening, as I imagine a lot of viewers will know, is that Obama was labeled deporter in chief.

And we saw such an expansion of the number of people being deported.

incarcerated for reentering the country under Obama.

And also at the same time, you know, Black Lives Matter protests were growing and people started really understanding the role of police and prisons in the society.

And this really started shifting the immigrant rights movement to kind of say, how can we throw a wrench in this.

How could they center abolition into their work? And how could we elevate the conversation around abolition in activist circles and I guess in policy circles?

Silky, could you tell us a little bit about the way that the war on terror has impacted your political trajectory and shaped the work that you do at Detention Watch Network?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, just also really wonderful to be on with Direction.

I'm such a huge fan of Muslim for Just Futures and the work you are doing and the interventions y'all are making.

I mean, I think, so I have a few years on Direction.

I was 20 whenever, when 9-11 happened.

But I also really, I feel like actually, you know, elder millennial versus 9-11 generation, whatever, which one do I choose? But I very much feel like, you know, like on Friday, I'm speaking at UCLA for the 25th anniversary.

Yeah, one of the great contradictions of the moment that we live in, for sure.

What do you want people to see, to understand, and to do in the face of this crisis around detention?

It's a really hard time.

In my 20-plus years of organizing against immigration detention, I couldn't have imagined it getting as bad as we're seeing now in terms of both the scale of how big it's gotten and also the violence that's taking place inside.

And the conditions have always been bad in immigration detention.

That is just always the case when you put people in these types of settings.

And again, there's, there's so much inhumanity to the way immigrants are treated in ICE custody, in detention generally.

But, like, in this context where you have the federal government saying that this is not a place where we're gonna have any oversight, this is a place where there's less ability to kind of monitor and understand what's going on, I mean, that means it's just getting that much more severe.

And I, and I wonder how do you think we can reframe that? You know, we certainly we see pushback, certainly we see resistance to this idea, but what deeper do you think needs to happen?

They are massively increasing the Homeland Security and ICE budget.

Yeah, I mean, when...

The detention system is sprawling, people are detained in every single part of the country, there has been a massive expansion of detention for years.

And now what we're seeing under President Trump is even more expansion, which could be even that much more exponential if this budget bill passes.

And it really feels like a paradigm shifting moment.

After 9/11, we saw so much more money funneled into the system, into border security, into immigrant detention, and the detention system doubled.

We're in that situation again, where now the numbers are reaching close to 50,000, which is what it was back in 2019.

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