"In the wake of post-9/11 xenophobia, Obama's record-level deportations, Trump's immigration policies, and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, the US remains entrenched in a circular discourse regarding migrant justice. As organizer Silky Shah argues in Unbuild Walls, we must move beyond building nicer cages or advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. Our only hope for creating a liberated society for all, she insists, is abolition. Unbuild Walls dives into US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, from the last forty years up to the present, showing how the prison-industrial complex and immigration enforcement are intertwined systems of repression. Incorporating historical and legal analyses, Shah's personal experience as an organizer, as well as stories of people, campaigns, organizations, and localities that have resisted detention and deportation, Shah assesses the movement's strategies, challenges, successes, and shortcomings. Featuring a foreword by Amna A. Akbar, Unbuild Walls is an expansive and radical intervention, bridging the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition." --

"How successfully families in the U.S. navigate various institutional contexts frequently relies on a parent's ability to be continuously available for and capable of supporting their children. But what happens when one or both parents are immigrants who have limited English proficiency? This us the case for two-thirds of immigrant families in the U.S., and more often than not the children in these families must support their parents by acting as "language brokers," or translators, often in high-stakes situations. In Language Brokers, Hyeyoung Kwon shines a light on these lived realities for working-class Mexican- and Korean-American youth in Southern California. Focusing especially on healthcare and criminal justice contexts, Kwon shows that the work of translating is about much more than just words. These children learn early about the harsh financial realities their parents face. They are burdened with portraying their parents as "normal" Americans who deserve full citizenship rights, not as inassimilable and undeserving free riders of social welfare. Kwon's stirring account proves that, as long as immigrants' values and behaviors are blamed for what are actually structural problems, children of immigrants will have to perform Americanness to cultivate a sense of belonging"--

"A probing work of narrative history that reveals the hidden story of immigrant detention in the United States, deepening urgent national conversations around migration. In 2017, many Americans watched in horror as children were torn from their parents at the US-Mexico border under Trump's "family separation" policy. But as historian Ana Raquel Minian reveals in In the Shadow of Liberty, this was only the latest chapter in a saga tracing back to the 1800s--one in which immigrants to the United States have been held without recourse to their constitutional rights. Braiding together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homelands for the promise of America, In the Shadow of Liberty gives this history a human face, telling the dramatic story of Central American asylum seeker, a Cuban exile, a European war bride, and a Chinese refugee. As we travel alongside these indelible characters, In the Shadow of Liberty explores how sites of rightlessness have evolved, and what their existence has meant for our body politic. Though these "black sites" exist out of view for the average American, their reach extends into all of our lives: the explosive growth of the for-profit prison industry traces its origins to the immigrant detention system, as does the emergence of Guantanamo and the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Through these narratives, we see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, and at what cost. But as these stories demonstrate, it doesn't have to be like this, and a better way might be possible"--

"Grounded in the illuminating stories of immigrants facing deportation, the family members who support them, and the attorneys who defend them, this book invites readers to question matters of fairness and justice in immigration court and beyond"--

"This book argues that punitive federal immigration policies in the United States lead to "medical legal violence" that unites criminal law, immigration enforcement, and healthcare policy in ways that undermine the health of many Latinx immigrants and implicate the safety-net healthcare institutions and personnel that provide their care"--;"An urgent study on how punitive immigration policies undermine the health of Latinx immigrants. Of the approximately 20 million noncitizens currently living in the United States, nearly half are "undocumented," which means they are excluded from many public benefits, including health care coverage. Additionally, many authorized immigrants are barred from certain public benefits, including health benefits, for their first five years in the United States. These exclusions often lead many immigrants, particularly those who are Latinx, to avoid seeking health care out of fear of deportation, detention, and other immigration enforcement consequences. Medical Legal Violence tells the stories of some of these immigrants and how anti-immigrant politics in the United States increasingly undermine health care for Latinx noncitizens in ways that deepen health inequalities while upholding economic exploitation and white supremacy. Meredith Van Natta provides a first-hand account of how such immigrants made life and death decisions with their doctors and other clinic workers before and after the 2016 election. Drawing from rich ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews in three states during the Trump presidency, Van Natta demonstrates how anti-immigrant laws are changing the way Latinx immigrants and their doctors weigh illness and injury against patients' personal and family security. The book also evaluates the role of safety-net health care workers who have helped noncitizen patients navigate this unstable political landscape despite perceiving a rise in anti-immigrant surveillance in the health care spaces where they work. As anti-immigrant rhetoric intensifies, Medical Legal Violence sheds light on the real consequences of anti-immigrant laws on the health of Latinx noncitizens, and how these laws create a predictable humanitarian disaster in immigrant communities throughout the country and beyond its borders. Van Natta asks how things might be different if we begin to learn from this history rather than continuously repeat it." -- Publisher's description

"What becomes of men the US locks up and kicks out? From 2009 to 2020, the US deported more than five million people -- over 90 percent of them men. Banished Men tells 186 of their stories. How, it asks, does forced expulsion shape men's lives and sense of themselves? In this book, a team of thirty-one Latinx students and an award-winning scholar of gender and migrant exclusion uncover a harrowing system that weaves together policing, prison, detention, removal, and border militarization -- and overwhelmingly targets men. Guards and gangs beat them down, both literally and metaphorically, as if they are no more than vermin or livestock. Their ties with family are severed. In Mexico, they end up banished: in limbo and stripped of humanity. They do not go "home." Their fight for new ways of belonging, as people of both "here" and "there," forms a devastating, humane, and clear-eyed critique of the violence of deportation"--

"In December 2017, U.S. immigration authorities shackled and abused 92 African refugees for two days while attempting to deport them by plane to Somalia. When national media broke the story, government officials lied about what happened. Shackled tells the story of this harrowing failed deportation, the resulting class action litigation, and two men's search for safety in the United States over the course of three long years. Through Abdulahi and Sa'id's firsthand accounts, immigration lawyer Rebecca Sharpless brings to life the harsh consequences of the U.S. deportation system and how racism and antiblackness operate within it. Sharpless follows the money that ICE funnels into local jails, private contractors, and charter jets, exposing a sprawling system of immigration enforcement that detains and abuses noncitizens at scale. Woven with the wider context of Abdulahi and Sa'id's stories, this immigration odyssey reveals disturbing truths about Somalia, asylum, and the U.S. court system. Shackled will galvanize readers-activists, attorneys, scholars, and policymakers alike-to call out and dismantle this brutal infrastructure"--

"The 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was supposed to be a stepping stone, a policy innovation announced by the White House designed to put pressure on Congress for a broader, lasting set of legislative changes. Those changes never materialized, and the people who hoped to benefit from them have been forced to navigate a tense and contradictory policy landscape ever since, haunted by these unfulfilled promises. Legal Phantoms tells their story. After Congress failed to pass a comprehensive immigration bill in 2013, President Obama pivoted in 2014 to supplementing DACA with a deferred action program (known as DAPA) for the parents of citizens and lawful permanent residents and a DACA expansion (DACA ) in 2014. But challenges from Republican-led states prevented even these programs from going into effect. Interviews with would-be applicants, immigrant-rights advocates, and government officials reveal how such failed immigration-reform efforts continue to affect not only those who had hoped to benefit, but their families, communities, and the country in which they have made an uneasy home. Out of the ashes of these lost dreams, though, people find their own paths forward through uncharted legal territory with creativity and resistance"--

"A powerful argument for separating immigration enforcement from the criminal legal system, by one of the nation's foremost "crimmigration" experts"--

"First book to argue that immigrant and refugee rights are part of the fight for racial justice; offers a humanitarian approach to reform and abolition"--

"Fleeing war and violence, many refugees dream that moving to the United States will be like going to heaven. Instead, they enter a deeply unequal American society, often at the bottom. Through the lived experiences of families resettled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Blair Sackett and Annette Lareau reveal how a daunting obstacle course of agencies and services can drastically alter refugees' experiences building a new life in America. In these stories of struggle and hope, as one volunteer said, "you see the American story." For some families, minor mistakes create catastrophes-food stamps cut off, educational opportunities missed, benefits lost. Other families, with the help of volunteers and social supports, escape these traps and take steps toward reaching their dreams. Engaging and eye-opening, We Thought It Would Be Heaven brings readers into the daily lives of Congolese refugees and offers guidance for how activists, workers, and policymakers can help refugee families thrive"--

"Through an examination of the historical development and contemporary outcomes of the "aggravated felony" category of deportable crimes, From Criminalization to Deportation provides new understanding of the ways that criminal justice system inequities are reproduced through processes of immigration enforcement and deportation. The severe, expansive, and racially disparate outcomes of the aggravated felony are met with innovative legal responses, bolstered by networks of community-based resistance-with key implications for those concerned with creating equal systems of justice and protecting the rights of immigrants nationwide"--

"The Border Reader is an anthology which gathers previously published foundational works of humanities and interpretive social science scholarship on the U.S.-Mexico border. Edited by anthropologist Gilberto Rosas and American and Latinx studies scholar Mireya Roza, this Reader brings together essays that mobilize feminist, queer, Indigenous and critical ethnic studies perspectives to theorize the border region as a site of epistemic rupture and knowledge production"--

"Offers a novel contribution to immigration legal scholarship by rewriting Supreme Court immigration law opinions from a critical immigration legal theory lens. Contests fundamental presumptions in doctrinal immigration law and shows how entrenched system of power, alongside racism, sexism, and stereotypes, have marred the immigration law landscape"--

More children than ever are crossing international borders alone to seek asylum worldwide. In the past decade, over a half million children have fled from Central America to the United States, seeking safety and a chance to continue lives halted by violence. Yet upon their arrival, they fail to find the protection that our laws promise, based on the broadly shared belief that children should be safeguarded. A meticulously researched ethnography, Precarious Protections chronicles the experiences and perspectives of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the US asylum process. Chiara Galli debunks assumptions about asylum, including the idea that people are being denied protection because they file bogus claims. In practice, the United States interprets asylum law far more narrowly than what is necessary to recognize real-world experiences of escape from life-threatening violence. This is especially true for children from Central America. Galli reveals the formidable challenges of lawyering with children and exposes the human toll of the US immigration bureaucracy--Publisher's description.

Living in a mixed-status immigrant family might mean that your grandmother could be deported at any moment, your son could be arrested at work, or your mother's deportation hearing is postponed--again. Such uncertainty and fear are the reality of life for mixed-status families--those that include both undocumented immigrants and US citizens. In Contested Americans, Cassaundra Rodriguez explores how members of mixed-status families experience and articulate belonging in the United States. The sixteen million people in the US who fall under this classification share the fear of a family member's possible deportation or the anxiety of leaving behind a child or elderly relative. Rodriguez highlights how different members of the same mixed-status families mediate undocumented statuses while maintaining the collective whole of a family. For many young adults, this may mean negotiating the sponsorship of their immigrant parents, and for the parents, planning for the emotional, physical, and financial well-being of their children in case of deportation. Contested Americans is a timely book, filled with vivid storytelling, that shows how immigration policies, racism, and privilege collide in the backdrop of the lives of millions of mixed-status families--Publisher's description.

"In recent years, dozens of counties in North Carolina have partnered with federal law enforcement in the criminalization of immigration-what many have dubbed 'crimmigration.' Southern border enforcement still monopolizes the national immigration debate, but immigration enforcement has become common within the United States as well. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations are a major part of American immigration enforcement, Felicia Arriaga maintains that ICE relies on an already well-established system-the use of local law enforcement and local governments to identify, incarcerate, and deport undocumented immigrants"--

"After fleeing homophobia and threats to her life in her native El Salvador, 'Carla' was detained for two years inside the Buffalo Federal Detention Center. Her letters provide a powerful and unique account of a queer woman's experience inside America's asylum system. Letters from Inside a US Detention Centre reconstructs Carla's story from the correspondence between Carla and Jane Juffer, a professor at Cornell University, and from excerpts from the legal decisions made while she was being held in immigration detention. Contextualised with explanation and analysis of detention in the United States, the book examines how detention exacerbates the trauma many migrants experience and becomes another site of fear, intimidation, and uncertainty. Carla's narrative is a powerful story, and one that illustrates grievous injustices in the U.S. immigration and asylum system. The book will be of immense value to immigration activists and scholars alike, especially in feminist studies, queer studies, and those studying the intersections of prisons and detention centres"--

"After fleeing homophobia and threats to her life in her native El Salvador, 'Carla' was detained for two years inside the Buffalo Federal Detention Center. Her letters provide a powerful and unique account of a queer woman's experience inside America's asylum system. Letters from Inside a US Detention Centre reconstructs Carla's story from the correspondence between Carla and Jane Juffer, a professor at Cornell University, and from excerpts from the legal decisions made while she was being held in immigration detention. Contextualised with explanation and analysis of detention in the United States, the book examines how detention exacerbates the trauma many migrants experience and becomes another site of fear, intimidation, and uncertainty. Carla's narrative is a powerful story, and one that illustrates grievous injustices in the U.S. immigration and asylum system. The book will be of immense value to immigration activists and scholars alike, especially in feminist studies, queer studies, and those studying the intersections of prisons and detention centres"--

"America's Arab Refugees is a timely examination of the world's worst refugee crisis since World War II. Tracing the history of Middle Eastern wars - especially the U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan - to the current refugee crisis, Marcia C. Inhorn examines how refugees fare once resettled in America. In the U.S., Arabs are challenged by discrimination, poverty, and various forms of vulnerability. Inhorn shines a spotlight on the plight of resettled Arab refugees in the ethnic enclave community of "Arab Detroit," Michigan. Sharing in the poverty of Detroit's Black communities, Arab refugees struggle to find employment and to rebuild their lives. Iraqi and Lebanese refugees who have fled from war zones also face several serious health challenges. Uncovering the depths of these challenges, Inhorn's ethnography follows refugees in Detroit suffering reproductive health problems requiring in vitro fertilization (IVF). Without money to afford costly IVF services, Arab refugee couples are caught in a state of "reproductive exile"--Unable to return to war-torn countries with shattered healthcare systems, but unable to access affordable IVF services in America. America's Arab Refugees questions America's responsibility for, and commitment to, Arab refugees, mounting a powerful call to end the violence in the Middle East, assist war orphans and uprooted families, take better care of Arab refugees in this country, and provide them with equitable and affordable healthcare services." -- Amazon.com.

"In Disappearing Rooms Michelle Castaneda lays bare the criminalization of race enacted every day in U.S. immigration courts and detention centers. She uses a performance studies perspective to show how the theatrical concept of mise-en-scene offers new insights about immigration law and the absurdist dynamics of carceral space. Castaneda draws upon her experiences in immigration trials as an interpreter and courtroom companion to analyze the scenography-lighting, staging, framing, gesture, speech, and choreography-of specific rooms within the immigration enforcement system. Castaneda's ethnographies of proceedings in a "removal" office in New York City, a detention center courtroom in Texas, and an asylum office in the Northeast reveal the depersonalizing violence enacted in immigration law through its embodied, ritualistic, and affective components. She shows how the creative practices of detained and disappeared peoples living under acute duress imagine the abolition of detention and borders. Featuring original illustrations by artist-journalist, Molly Crabapple, Disappearing Rooms shines a light into otherwise hidden spaces of law within the contemporary deportation regime. Duke University of Press Scholars of Color First Book Award Recipient"--

"A new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity"--;"Latino" is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States. Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of "Latino" assembles the Pulitzer Prize winner Hector Tobar's personal experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants and the stories told to him by his Latinx students to offer a spirited rebuke to racist ideas about Latino people. Our Migrant Souls decodes the meaning of "Latino" as a racial and ethnic identity in the modern United States, and seeks to give voice to the angst and anger of young Latino people who have seen Latinidad transformed into hateful tropes about "illegals" and have faced insults, harassment, and division based on white insecurities and economic exploitation.

"Immigration presented a constitutional and political problem in the nineteenth-century United States. Until the 1870s, the federal government played only a very limited role in regulating immigration. The states controlled mobility within and across their borders and set their own rules for community membership. This book demonstrates how the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery shaped immigration policy as it moved from the local to the national level. Throughout the antebellum era, defenders of slavery feared that if Congress had power to control immigration, it could also regulate the movement of free black people and perhaps even the interstate slave trade. The Civil War removed the political and constitutional obstacles to a national immigration policy. Admission remained the norm for European immigrants until the 1920s, but Chinese immigrants fell into a different category. Starting in the 1870s, the federal government excluded Chinese laborers, deploying techniques of registration, punishment, and deportation first used against free black people in the antebellum South. To justify these measures, the Supreme Court ruled that authority over immigration was inherent in national sovereignty and required no constitutional justification. The federal government continues to control admissions and exclusions today, while the states play a double-edged role in regulating immigrants' lives, depending on their politics and location. Some monitor and punish immigrants; others offer sanctuary and refuse to act as agents of federal law enforcement. By examining the history of immigration in a slaveholding republic, this book reveals the tangled origins of border control, incarceration, deportation, and ongoing tensions between local and federal authority in the United States"--

"The term 'sanctuary city' gained a new level of national recognition during the 2016 United States presidential election, and immigration policies and debates have remained a top issue since the election of Donald Trump. The battle over immigration and deportation will be waged on many fronts in the coming years, but sanctuary cities - municipalities that resist the national government's efforts to enforce immigration laws - are likely to be on the front lines for the immediate future, and social workers and others in the helping professions have vital roles to play. In this book, Melvin Delgado offers a compelling case for the centrality of sanctuary cities' cause to the very mission and professional identity of social workers and others in the human services and mental health professions. The text also presents a historical perspective on the rise of the sanctuary movements of the 1970s and 2000s, thereby giving context to the current environment and immigration debate. Sanctuary Cities, Communities, and Organizations serves as a helpful resource for human service practitioners, academics, and the general public alike"--Publisher's website.

Sanctuary cities, or localities where officials are prohibited from inquiring into immigration status, have become a part of the broader debate on undocumented immigration in the United States. Despite the increasing amount of coverage sanctuary policies receive, the American public knows little about these policies. In this book, Loren Collingwood and Benjamin Gonzalez O'Brien delve into the history, media coverage, effects, and public opinion on these sanctuary policies in the hope of helping readers reach an informed decision regarding them.

"Just days after taking the White House, Donald Trump signed three executive orders targeting noncitizens-authorizing the Muslim Ban, the border wall, and ICE raids. The new administration's approach towards noncitizens was defined by bans, walls, and raids. This is the essential primer on how we got here, and what we must do to create a different future. Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary shows that these features have a long history and have long harmed all of us and our relationships to each other. The 45th president's xenophobic, racist, ableist, patriarchal ascendancy is no aberration, but the consequence of two centuries of U.S. political, economic, and social culture. Further, as A. Naomi Paik deftly demonstrates, the attacks against migrants are tightly bound to assaults against women, people of color, workers, ill and disabled people, queer and gender non-conforming people. These attacks are neither un-American nor unique. By showing how the problems we face today are embedded in the very foundation of the US, this book is a rallying cry for a broad-based, abolitionist sanctuary movement for all"--

"The city of El Centro is located in southern California's Imperial Valley, near the US-Mexico border. Surrounded by desert, sand dunes, and mountains, it is isolated and difficult to reach, but has long been an important place for Mexican migrants attracted to the valley's agricultural economy and proximity to the border. The Shadow of El Centro tells the story of how the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp of 1945 evolved into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Service Processing Center of the 2000s and became a national model for detaining migrants-a place where the policing of migration, the racialization of labor, and detainee resistance coalesced"--

"In 1965, the Hart-Celler Act abolished the national origins quotas of the 1920s that had severly limited immigration to American from everywhere but Western Europe. The result was mass immigration from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. The wave of immigration and the restrictionism it produced led to a bitter political struggle over immigrants' rights that continues to this day. This book is a history of the post-1965 political battles between advocates of expansive admissions policies, rights, and benefits for immigrants and their anti-immigration, or restrictionist, opponents. Coleman argues that as immigration rendered what had once been seen as hard boundaries of the physical nation-state into something more porous, the rights of immigrations became crucial to immigration control. Restrictionists sought to limit immigrants' access to the American welfare state by arguing that they were a burden to the state and taking jobs from working- and middle-class Am ericans. However, the legacies of the civil rights movement, a growing commitment to deregulation, unusual political alliances, and institutional structures provided significant barriers to anti-immigration efforts. By the end of Reagan's presidency, restrictionists efforts to reverse the flow of immigration rights failed at the national level. In the 1990s, however, with national policy-making gridlocked, restrictionists focused their efforts on the state level. States acquired new powers in driving immigration policy and curtailed the expanded notion of alienage rights that had been forged over the previous decades. Coleman provides a new way of understanding the political history of immigration, looking not at borders and admissions policy but at the broad, internal battles over domestic policy that resulted from immigration. The author draws on a wealth of new sources from the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations as well as from immigration and civil rights organizations. Th is book reveals that the current wave of anti-immigration sentiment seen in the electoral success of Donald Trump is not a recent phenomenon but has deep roots in the post-1965 immigration battles"--

"A deeply reported, newsbreaking account the humanitarian crisis of our time by the journalist who has been at the center of the story: MSNBC correspondent Jacob Soboroff, winner of the 2019 Walter Cronkite Award, offers a chilling expose of the human cost of the Trump administration's border and immigration policies"--;In June 2018, Donald Trump's most notorious decision as president--the systematic separation of thousands of desperate migrant families at the US-Mexico border--had secretly been in effect for months before most Americans became aware of the astonishing inhumanity being perpetrated by their own government. Jacob Soboroff was among the first journalists to expose this reality after seeing firsthand the living conditions of the children in custody. His influential series of reports ignited public scrutiny that contributed to the president reversing his own policy and earned Soboroff the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Broadcast Journalism and, with his colleagues, the 2019 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism. Soboroff has spent the past two years reporting the many strands of this complex narrative, developing sources from within the Trump administration who share critical details for the first time. He also traces the dramatic odyssey of one separated family from Guatemala, where their lives were threatened by narcos, to seek asylum at the U.S. border, where they were separated--the son ending up in Texas, and the father thousands of miles away, in the Mojave desert of central California. And he joins the heroes who emerged to challenge the policy, and who worked on the ground to reunite parents with children.

"Through extensive ethnographic study of the aftermath of an ICE raid in one Latino community in Michigan, the author details the incredible strain that it placed on the community, the families, and the individuals left behind. Lopez's case study reveals the public health impacts of ICE raids on stable immigrant communities in the heartland of the country"--