Authors Meet Readers: Shut It Down! Mobilizing Histories to End Migrant and Mass Incarceration

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This Authors Meets Readers roundtable brings together immigration historians and organizers to discuss how history can be mobilized towards collective goals of abolishing migrant detention and mass incarceration. Readers Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, Alexander Stephens, and Diana Laura Martínez-Montes will be in conversation with three authors and their books: Brianna Nofil’s The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration (Princeton University Press, 2024), Silky Shah’s Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024), and Tina Shull’s Detention Empire: Reagan’s War on Immigrants and the Seeds of Resistance (UNC Press, 2022).

The Migrant’s Jail presents a groundbreaking new perspective on the United States’s long history of incarcerating immigrants from the vantage point of the local jail. More than a mere outgrowth of the mass incarceration system, the practice of detaining migrants in local jails for profiteering has propelled intergovernmental policing and the system’s continued growth over the past century. Drawing on immigration records, affidavits, protest letters, and media sources, Nofil also shows how migrants have perpetually protested against their “civil” detention.

Unbuild Walls draws upon over two decades of Silky Shah’s local and national activism as a migrant and racial justice organizer and the current executive director of the Detention Watch Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to abolishing immigration detention in the United States. Making connections between the immigration detention system, mass incarceration, and other systems of oppression, Unbuild Walls details the history of the immigrant rights movement and campaigns against detention and deportation. Sharing practical strategies and successes, Shah makes a compelling case for abolition over comprehensive immigration reform.

Detention Empire globalizes the story of the rise of immigration detention and mass incarceration by examining the relationship between US foreign policy, war-making, and migration in Central America and the Caribbean, arguing that detention operates as a form of counterinsurgency. It traces how the Reagan administration’s development of a set of retaliatory enforcement measures in the 1980s targeting Mariel Cuban, Haitian, and Central American asylum-seekers galvanized subsequent carceral and imperial expansion. Yet Reagan’s war on immigrants also sowed seeds of mass resistance as migrants and allies resisted state repression through organizing hunger strikes, prison uprisings, caravans, and the Sanctuary movement.

As the United States remains committed to closing its borders and retaliating against social justice movements under the second Trump administration, these histories take on renewed urgency. This roundtable speaks to the current moment as participants will discuss how our research and experiences challenging mass incarceration and border enforcement is actionable in various arenas--journalism, policymaking, and non-profit advocacy. Panelists will share strategies for challenging borders and detention in the Trump era through our collective participation in digital history and archiving projects, podcasts and journalism, litigation and anti-deportation campaigns, sanctuary organizing, and direct action.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Panelists

• Alexander Stephens, SMU

• Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, University of Illinois Chicago

• Diana Laura Martinez-Montes, Yale University

Comments

• Tina Shull, UNC Charlotte

• Brianna Nofil, William & Mary

• Silky Shah, Detention Watch Network

Biographical Information

Author Bios

Brianna Nofil, The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Brianna Nofil is a historian of the modern United States, with a focus on migration, incarceration, and law. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2020 and holds B.A.s in History and Public Policy Studies from Duke University. Her first book, The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration is available now from Princeton University Press, and has been featured in publications including the New Yorker, El País, Texas Observer, and The Marshall Project. The Migrant's Jail demonstrates how a century of political, economic, and ideological exchange between the immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to the U.S.’s vast immigration detention system, and how an evolving network of individuals, municipalities, and private corporations profited from jailing. Brianna’s dissertation received the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Immigration & Ethnic History Society.

Silky Shah, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024).

Silky Shah has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2009, she joined the staff of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigrant detention in the United States, and now serves as its executive director. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Truthout, Teen Vogue, Inquest, and The Forge and in the edited volumes, The Jail is Everywhere (Verso, 2024), Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (Haymarket Books, 2024), and Transformative Planning (Black Rose Books, 2020). She has also appeared in numerous national and local media outlets including The Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC.

Tina Shull, Detention Empire: Reagan’s War on Immigrants and the Seeds of Resistance (UNC Press, 2022).

Tina Shull is a public historian of race, empire, immigration enforcement, and climate migration in the modern US and the World. Trained in interdisciplinary archival, oral history, digital humanities, social science, and participatory research methods, she holds a PhD in History from UC Irvine, a Master’s in Humanities and Social Thought from NYU, and a BA in History from UCLA. Her first book, Detention Empire: Reagan's War on Immigrants and the Seeds of Resistance, was published in 2022 by UNC Press and was named an honorable mention for the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s First Book award. It explores the rise of migrant detention in the early 1980s as a form of counterinsurgency.
Shull is the creator of the digital history projects IMM Print, Climate Refugee Stories, and Climate Inequality CLT, and lead curator of the Climates of Inequality: Charlotte museum exhibit. In 2016, she was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations for her work in immigration detention storytelling. Climate Refugee Stories has been awarded grants from the Institute of International Education, NC Humanities, National Geographic, and the University of California Critical Refugee Studies Collective.


Reader Bios

Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago specializing in the social and legal history of Latin American youth migration to the United States. The child of formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants, she is currently working on a book project that exposes the long history of child migrants’ cruel reception in the U.S., as well as the resistance and organizing by migrants, their children, and local advocates. Her book manuscript is based on her quadruple-prize-winning doctoral dissertation, which she completed in 2021 at Columbia University. Her writing and research have appeared in national media outlets, as well as peer-reviewed academic journals. Outside of academia, she has conducted research on child and family migration for the federal government and non-profits in the U.S. and Mexico. Her previous research experiences inform her work as a co-coordinator of the Newberry Library's Seminar in Borderlands and Latino/a Studies and a member of both the Migration Scholar Collaborative and the Sanctuary Campus Network.

Diana Laura Martínez-Montes (she/ her) is a History PhD student at Yale University. She writes about the history of migrant mass incarceration and migrant protest in the postwar New York metro area. She is currently tracing a transnational and local study of New Jersey’s first private immigration detention center, including moments of rebellion, prisoners’ litigation, and multiracial solidarity within and beyond the prison walls. Diana Laura also curates The Bushwick Archive, a Brooklyn-based digital community archive that documents testimonies of dispossession and migrant place-making in her home city. Prior to pursuing a PhD, she worked in the crimmigration legal field where she advocated for incarcerated and migrant New Yorkers in post-conviction criminal proceedings.

Alexander Stephens is an historian of policing, migration, race, and law in the U.S. and Caribbean. His dissertation tells the stories of Cubans who were confined in carceral institutions both before and after they left the island for the United States in the 1980 Mariel boatlift. Since 2019, he has coordinated engaged research initiatives with the Immigrant Justice Lab and Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan. The results of this collaborative work include Guides to Defending Yourself in Immigration Court, a series of “pro se” guides for people facing deportation without the help of an attorney. Alexander is also the co-producer of the podcast series, Hot Corner, an audio documentary about the evolution of segregation in Athens, GA, since the 1960s. His writing has been published by both scholarly and popular outlets, including Anthurium: A Journal of Caribbean Studies, the Washington Post, and Foreign Policy. Alexander will receive a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan in May 2025.