Unbuild walls Why immigrant justice needs abolition

This illuminating and eloquent book illustrates the connections between injustices in the U.S. immigration system and prison-industrial complex while advocating for the abolition of both. Immigration activist Shah begins by walking readers through the recent history of immigration. American systems of mass incarceration and mass detention of immigrants have supported each other and grown in parallel, often in response to key inflection points like 9/11. Efforts at reform have fallen short of their intended goals, as politicians sacrificed key asks in the name of bipartisanship. Even when reforms do get passed, their impact has typically been to expand, rather than reduce, the number of people caught up in the dragnet of government surveillance, control, and imprisonment. Highlighting the successful efforts of pro-immigration organizations across the country, Shah argues that the truly needed reforms are those that can halt and reverse the persistent expansion of the U.S. detention system. Only by using the lens of abolition and working in partnership across movements, she argues, can activists lead the country into a more just future.

An immigration detention abolitionist explores the ties between America's criminal justice and immigration systems. For Shah, mass imprisonment and mass detention are two symptoms of the "American obsession with punishment and incarceration." She traces the start of both to the explosive rise in prison building that began at the end of the 1980s and continued into the new millennium. Shah argues that the components underlying this trend--systemic racism, the failing war on drugs, and misguided national security concerns--carried over into sometimes brutal policies affecting immigrants and their status within American borders. Republican nativism was not entirely to blame for these developments, however. Bill Clinton "solidified the relationship between the criminal legal system and immigration enforcement system," while Barack Obama focused on policies that criminalized and deported those immigrants deemed "unacceptable." The connections thereby fostered between police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement culminated in Trump's inhumane family separation policy, as well as the increased moral panic about the threats represented by immigrants. Shah argues persuasively that this panic also led to increased prosecutions and detentions, especially for people coming from Central America. She further notes that some entities--most notably, private prisons--have profited handsomely from immigrant detention. As long as the demand for detention exists, so does the "need" to build more facilities, a situation Shah believes can only be ended by grassroots activism. At the same time, however, heightened awareness of police brutality brought about by the Black Lives Matter movement has helped spotlight how police and ICE collaborations have created dangerous situations for those immigrants made even more vulnerable by virtue of sex or gender identification. Shah's intersectional approach to the immigrant justice struggle will interest those interested in immigration reform as well as individuals working on behalf of any marginalized community disproportionately affected by the current carceral system. Informative reading for activists and policymakers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.