by Geo Maher
Abolishing the police means abolishing ICE and Border Patrol, and it starts the same way: by cracking the foundations of their power. Pressure should immediately be brought to bear within the labor movement to disaffiliate the so-called unions representing ICE and Border Patrol from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and its parent federation, the AFL-CIO. For journalist Kim Kelly,
a genuinely radical labor movement should group police, prison guards, border patrol agents, and ICE agents in the same category … They are an occupying military force, sworn to serve only the interests of capital and the state to the detriment of humanity. They protect and serve property, not people, and the only solidarity they feel is with their own kind.44
Pressure to disaffiliate is already building, and as growing sectors of the labor movement, including the New York Teamsters, embrace sanctuary and refuse to enable ICE raids on their members, Kelly foresees a “divorce in the making.”
Disaffiliating and abolishing the ICE and CBP unions is a first step toward targeting the institutions more directly. Building on calls from the grassroots, we must demand the immediate abolition of ICE—not the restructuring of its “essential” functions under a new name: we must abolish enforcement and removal, abolish investigations, and abolish the legal apparatus underpinning both. Abolition cannot be limited to ICE and CBP, either. We must also demand the immediate abolition of the overarching monstrosity that is DHS, which coincides with and has only further naturalized the idea that we should look upon borders primarily as a security threat to be closed off.45 We must demand an immediate, total, and unconditional amnesty for all migrants as a step toward the full decriminalization of the border and those symbolically associated with it by race and language. Doing so would eliminate, in a stroke, the leverage the border provides to drive down the wages of all workers.
Demands are one thing, however; making it happen is another. If one thing is clear, it’s that we can’t expect solutions from policymakers. As the specter of Trump recedes, President Biden and the Democratic Party will offer little more than empty words at best, technologically rationalized border fascism at worst. While every minute of the twenty-four-hour news cycle is dedicated to the insistence that change comes only from above, from backroom deals, pragmatic negotiation, and congressional horse-trading, no amount of ruling-class propaganda can conceal the fact that we are only talking about ICE today because of the intransigent demands and direct action from the grassroots. The imperative for radical change can only come from below. Luckily, this strategy doesn’t have to start from zero. Movements for and by migrants have a long history of direct struggle against the border and its police stretching back long before the #AbolishICE encampments.
Recent years have seen a variety of escalating campaigns to discredit, defund, and isolate ICE and border enforcement. Under legal and public pressure, city and county jails nationwide have ended ICE contracts; under pressure from residents, cities have declared noncooperation with ICE raids. Corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group that have made billions from private migrant detention have come under increased scrutiny for neglect and widespread abuse, leading JPMorgan Chase to cut off financing streams to both in 2019.46 Around the same time, workers at the furniture giant Wayfair opted to walk out rather than supply ICE detention centers. Movimiento Cosecha, which campaigns for permanent legal protections for undocumented migrants, has spearheaded a consumer boycott of ICE-related business, and universities have come under pressure for their collaboration with the deportation apparatus.
The machinery of border policing is particularly vulnerable when it comes to technology. DHS has the largest tech budget of any government agency, Amazon is notoriously friendly with ICE, and almost all major tech companies also have contracts with border enforcement agencies. But in 2018, Google employees pressed the company to break ties with the Defense Department; and the next year, alongside workers at Microsoft and Amazon, they began to target ICE cloud contracts as well. Amid the public scrutiny of recent years, defunding ICE itself is squarely on the table, and efforts to do so are being spearheaded under the banner of the Defund Hate Campaign. In 2018, the campaign mobilized sufficient grassroots energy to pressure Congress into blocking a special request for $1 billion by ICE, and it continues to push for defunding the agency.47
Our task today is to build on the spontaneous and organized efforts of communities nationwide while continuing to break down the boundaries dividing abolitionist movements. Here the ultimate horizon is the same as it is for police abolition: to make ICE and Border Patrol obsolete by building strong communities. For years, organizers across the Southwest and beyond have been deepening resistance networks in undocumented communities, beginning with an everyday culture of resistance and disobedience: neighbors warn neighbors when they see ICE in the neighborhood, some with papers refuse to show them, and it’s not uncommon to see someone on the side of the road with an improvised sign warning of checkpoints ahead. Other, more organized efforts have seen the establishment of nascent rapid-response networks that have sought to directly prevent deportation raids from being carried out.
Even before Arizona leapt to national attention with the approval of the anti-migrant SB 1070 legislation in 2010, ICE was actively carrying out raids with the support of local law enforcement, and communities were organizing to resist them. One organization involved at the time is Arizona’s Repeal Coalition, which came together in 2007 around the demand to repeal all anti-migrant legislation, coupled with the sweeping insistence that all communities be able to “live, love, and work wherever they please.” Cecilia Sáenz Becerra, a member of Phoenix Repeal at the time, explained to me how Repeal’s capacity to resist ICE didn’t emerge overnight, but was built gradually over time through the slow work of relationship-building with undocumented women in a trailer park community: “by accompanying folks to get state benefits for their children, helping find loved ones in the deportation system, being there emotionally, playing with children, and sharing meals.”
According to Repeal member Luis Fernández, those organizing further north in Flagstaff began with a door-knocking campaign in those communities most likely to be targeted by raids. “The night we held a community meeting with some eighty people, ICE raided the neighborhood that Repeal was working in. As an immediate response, young activists in town organized an ICE watch, driving around the neighborhoods and observing the movements of the ICE officers.” Communicating by text message, organizers and community members formed a rapid-response network that alerted neighbors and sought to obstruct raids when they happened. According to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, ICE admitted that community resistance had dramatically limited the agency’s ability to carry out raids. Building strong communities can make ICE’s work impossible.
Further north in Canada, Vancouver’s No One Is Illegal network was simultaneously engaged in an inspiring display of mass civil disobedience to prevent the deportation of a paralyzed refugee, Laibar Singh. Through a combination of street protest and direct action, organizers quickly mobilized 2,000 supporters to blockade Vancouver’s international airport on December 10, 2007, forcing the government to back down by surrounding the vehicle in which Singh was traveling.48 While Singh ultimately self-deported due to state harassment and racist demonization by Canadian society more broadly, the case was a flashpoint for struggles around Canadian immigration and deportation policy. In the words of Harsha Walia, a key organizer in the blockade to defend Singh: “Direct action is not only an effective form of resistance, but an inherent part of the broader process of nurturing our individual and collective revolutionary consciousnesses. In this sense, direct actions aren’t simply about militancy but about building our collective power to feel emboldened rather than disempowered.” Feeling emboldened means building a culture of resistance that only leads to more power in the long run. For Walia, the task is not simply to prevent deportations, but to abolish “bo
rder imperialism” as a whole.49
Direct action against deportation works—not only tactically, by hindering ICE’s ability to function while concretely protecting some from the hell of deportation, but also politically, as a tool for mass mobilization and for provoking a broader national debate. Moving forward, organizations with deep roots in local communities will prove crucial relay points for a broader anti-deportation strategy, building the local infrastructure needed to shepherd volunteers into mobile flying squads capable of obstructing ICE’s work by warning communities and physically preventing raids. Direct action means gradually weaving this dense fabric of community out of thousands of existing threads. It means transforming rescue and recovery missions like Águilas del Desierto into channels for safe passage across the desert, demanding more than the right to simply provide food and water, but to provide sanctuary as well. In the short term, it means redirecting 911 calls to grassroots organizations—today, 911 operators often route calls directly to Border Patrol without informing the caller. Just as we advocate rerouting 911 calls away from the police, border rescue needs to be taken out of the hands of the enforcers.
Direct action against the deportation machine is a dangerous undertaking, however. From the scorching sun beating down on those aiding and rescuing migrants to targeted repression by the state and murder by white vigilantes, the risks are many. In the early years of the sanctuary movement, activists were subjected to FBI harassment and federal prosecution. In the late 1980s, eight organizers were convicted for “running a modern-day underground railroad,” but the prosecutions backfired, and the movement only grew further.50 Today, organizers are being targeted similarly: in 2018, nine No More Deaths volunteers were charged with federal misdemeanors, including Scott Warren, who faced twenty years on felony charges before his acquittal in 2019.
After several weeks camped out at the #OccupyICE protests in San Antonio, a young activist known as Mapache was snatched off a nearby street the day after his DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) application was scheduled for renewal. His application had been denied, an agent told him, because he was a “bad person,” and officers pressured Mapache to hand over information about other local organizers. At eighteen years old and barely speaking any Spanish, he eventually opted for deportation to Monterrey, Mexico.51 Mapache’s fate was not new: as Uhlmann writes, “ICE has a long-standing—and intensifying—practice of silencing activists.”52 In recent years, ICE has detained several organizers from the New Sanctuary Coalition in New York, and in 2020 Nancy Nguyen, executive director of Philadelphia-based VietLead, was arrested after protesting outside of the home of the acting ICE director, himself a Vietnamese refugee.
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For A. Naomi Paik, the ultimate horizon for these struggles is what she calls “abolitionist sanctuary,” which stitches together the history of sanctuary movements with the abolitionist tradition, past and present. The Trump years saw an explosion of sanctuary cities, counties, and even states, provoking unhinged Twitter attacks and threats to withhold federal funding from the president. By refusing to participate in the policing of migrants and even directly disrupting the operations of ICE, Paik argues, sanctuary spaces provide “a ground floor for survival and a strategy of resistance” while also “forging thicker connections” with movements to abolish policing and the prison-industrial complex.53
When cities refuse to participate in ICE enforcement, they are also withholding matching resources in a way that severely hinders ICE’s ability to seize and deport, and local strategies like the decriminalization of street vendors and providing driver’s licenses to migrants can have a major impact on keeping them out of the waiting hands of ICE. For instance, Chicago’s sanctuary city status has meant that the number of people held in Cook County Jail who were handed over to ICE fell from 1,400 annually to zero almost overnight. However, ICE has developed a host of administrative workarounds, and sanctuary doesn’t apply to those listed in the city’s sprawling gang database, making sanctuary more image than reality.54 A truly abolitionist vision of sanctuary, in contrast, points us toward a world in which la migra, and indeed all police, are obsolete. Drawing inspiration from first-wave abolitionism, abolitionist sanctuary looks to the safe passage provided by the Underground Railroad and local jurisdictions that blocked enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act—not to mention those who freed slaves through direct action.
Abolitionist sanctuary means reinforcing the already-strong bridges that connect migrant struggles to struggles against anti-Black police violence; and it means understanding that Black–Brown solidarity is a two-way street. On the one hand, organizers from Mijente, the UndocuBlack Network, and other groups have increasingly come to recognize and center anti-Blackness within the migrant struggle and to insist that ICE cannot be abolished without abolishing policing as a whole. And on the other hand, the Movement for Black Lives platform demanded an “end to all deportations, immigrant detention, and ICE raids.”55 Abolitionist sanctuary means a proliferation of know-your-rights trainings, legal workshops, and support escorts for ICE appointments—all of which are also essential to the broader police abolition struggle. It means refusing the double bind of criminalization that seeks to divide so-called good migrants worthy of status from bad “criminal aliens” earmarked for removal. Abolitionist sanctuary, moreover, is explicitly anti-colonial and builds outward toward broader solidarities with Indigenous struggles, including resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline and the global struggle against US imperial power.
Abolitionist sanctuary, in other words, is about far more than migration, seeking instead to actively tear down the walls that separate our struggles. And like all abolition, Paik reminds us, border abolition means
striv[ing] not only to break down the forms of oppressive power we don’t want, but also to build the world we want in its place—where bans, walls, and raids are no longer needed … The goal is to make the whole world a sanctuary for all, everywhere. It seeks to create a world where cages, removals, and policing—whether of immigrants, migrants crossing national borders, people of color, gender nonconforming people, or any person made into a criminal by the laws of the state—no longer exist.56
A world in which the border, and its police, are obsolete.
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What will we do without the border? Who and what will protect us from the nightmarish realities that lay on the other side—the faceless demons of MS-13, the heartless traffickers of drugs and of people who, we are told, have made the borderlands a veritable hell for so many? As with the police, the answer is far simpler than it seems, because we are asking the wrong question.
Like the police, the border doesn’t protect against violence—it creates violence. In the words of geographer Reece Jones:
The existence of the border itself produces the violence that surrounds it. The border creates the economic and jurisdictional discontinuities that have come to be seen as its hallmarks, providing an impetus for the movement of people, goods, drugs, weapons, and money across it. The hardening of the border through new security practices is the source of the violence, not a response to it.57
The border, moreover, drives up the prices of illegally smuggled drugs, and it is in the space of this profit that violence becomes profitable, too. As with the police, this is the violence of armed impunity, which leverages racial dehumanization to abuse the most vulnerable. So it comes as no surprise that the victims are the same: people of color, women, children, and queer and trans people, all of whom are subject to disproportionate physical and sexual abuse at the hands of border police. Abolition removes the entire incentive structure for border violence on the part of both state and extra-state forces. Abolition wipes away the leverage used by capitalists to drive wages down in maquilas on the Mexican side and for those left undocumented in the US. The partial legalization of marijuana, for example, has already led to a collapse in marijuana prices, undermining the profitability and role of cartels. Abolition would destroy this ince
ntive and reduce border violence in the process.58
If police abolition means thinking harder about the causes of violence, it also means thinking harder about the causes of migration, and confronting the legacies of colonialism and US intervention that have impoverished communities, dislocated their inhabitants, and sown chaos across the hemisphere and the world. And just as policing and mass incarceration has created closed circuits from the ghetto to the prison and back, the same could be said of US imperialism and the deportation regime. Indeed, it was Bill Clinton’s mass deportations that created MS-13—“bastard offspring” of the IIRIRA—while a decade later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton oversaw a coup in Honduras. As with the cycle of carceral violence, the impact of these twin interventions came full circle in the a mass exodus of Central Americans and widely publicized migrant caravans that have reverberated against the border in recent years.
The border doesn’t solve any problems; it is the problem to be solved, and the solution is abolition. Once there was no border—and that day will come again.