Table of Contents
Table of Contents
1. HOW DID WE GET HERE?
This chapter traces a history of US intervention in Latin America, mapping the way the US has created the very migrant crisis it now decries. Migration is explored in the context of the US overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz, its funding of right wing death squads, and the deportation --into the very power vacuum the US created-- of gang members. This is how MS-13 and Barrio 18, the two gangs that now hold much of Latin America hostage, came to be.
2. BILL CLINTON BUILT THE WALL
This chapter details the Democrats’ complicity in US immigration policy. From Obama, who immigration activists have branded “Deporter in Chief”, to Clinton’s disastrous implementation of NAFTA that sent thousands of people on the migrant trail, the cruelty of US immigration policy is a wholly bipartisan affair.
3. IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT, THEN AND NOW
This chapter traces a history of US immigration enforcement beginning with the country’s first naturalization law of 1790, which limited citizenship to “free white persons” of “good moral character.” Though the language of enforcement may have changed, this racialized standard has underpinned US immigration policy throughout its history--it was not until the Hart–Celler Act of 1965 that its Eurocentric quota system was abolished. Even then, the impetus to preserve a white, able bodied state remains––see, HIV/AIDS travel and immigration bans as late as 2009 and racial profiling under the auspices of the War on Terror. And yet, while US immigration enforcement has always been racist, it is now bolstered by new advancements in technology --and the Trump administration’s wholesale endorsement of ICE terror.
4. ABOLITION
This chapter puts forth the case for abolishing ICE and argues that not only is it morally necessary in the face of US intervention, it is also an achievable policy demand. It maps strategies to constrain and ultimately dismantle the agency, such as targeting contractors who do business with ICE, addressing local detention quotas, organizing against broken windows policing and ultimately, defunding the agency.
