Contemporary US Bordercraft: History, political economy, and organizing (HYBRID)

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

How are immigration enforcement strategies, detention, and deportations shifting under the second term of the Trump Administration? The Trump Administration campaigned on an anti-immigration platform to galvanize support for a growing number of disenchanted people in the U.S., in the midst of heightened inequality and insecurity in conditions of social reproduction. As pointed out by Naomi Paik, the alarming and draconian policies adopted during the first term, were deeply rooted in longer settler colonial histories and racial apartheid. There were also continuities with previous Democratic and Republican administrations, and histories of immigration enforcement in the US.

This panel will examine recent developments in bordering, immigration enforcement, deportation, and detention under Trump in 2025. We will look at the rollout of mass deportations, the deepening of the criminalization of migration, the prospect of workplace raids, the strangling of asylum, and more that will unfold across the year. Speaking from their standpoints as historians, geographers, and organizers, panelists will provide context for understanding these developments, address the following concerns:

-In what ways are the enforcement priorities, infrastructures, and techniques unleashed under the second Trump administration building upon those of previous administrations? How have the work of ICE, Border Patrol, and the Department of Justice changed?
-How can we situate contemporary and emerging trends in relevant histories of detention, deportation, and immigration enforcement? For example, are there lessons from the 1920s restrictionist era, mid-20th century Red Scares, or 1980s buildout of immigration enforcement infrastructure that are helpful for interpreting the contemporary moment?
-How can we situate contemporary and emerging trends in their political economic context? This might include topics like the regulation of labor; the maintenance of racial hierarchies and social control; the expansion and complexification of the circuits that connect the criminal punishment system with the immigration enforcement system; social movement struggle and political organizing; and political repression.
-How are people on the ground working to protect immigrants, border crossers, and the freedom to move?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Jenna Loyd, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Panelists

• Marlene Nava Nava Ramos, CSULB

• Leah Montange, University of Toronto

• Tania Mattos

Virtual Accommodation Panelists

• Rachel Ida Buff, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

• Abraham Paulos

Comment

• Silky Shah, Detention Watch Network

Biographical Information

Organizer and Panelist: Marlene Nava Ramos
Marlene Nava Ramos is a geographer by training and Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Her research is on the immigration enforcement, detention, labor, and abolition in immigrant rights movements. Her dissertation research focused on the history of immigration detention in county jails in New Jersey.


Organizer: Leah Montange.
Leah Montange is a human geographer and the Bissell-Heyd Lecturer and Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream of American Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work is on bordering, detention, immigration enforcement and resistance in the US and Spain.

Panelists:

Abraham Paulos
Abraham Paulos has extensive experience advocating for racial justice and equity policies, criminal legal system abuses, and immigrants’ rights in the US. Abraham is currently the Deputy Director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI). Before joining BAJI, Abraham was the Executive Director of Families for Freedom (FFF), a position he held after facing immigration detention at Rikers Island and becoming a member of FFF. Earlier in his career, Abraham was a researcher at Human Rights First, focused on immigration detention. He also served as Program Director at Life of Hope, a Brooklyn community-based organization that provides services to low-income immigrants. As a journalist, Abraham reported on urban policy and human rights for City Limits, the NYC civic affairs magazine, and the Foreign Policy Association, writing about foreign policy and global issues. Abraham is a Stateless Eritrean refugee, born in Sudan and raised in Chicago.


Tania Mattos
Tania Mattos is of Aymara descendent, born in Bolivia, raised in Queens, and the Executive Director of Unlocal, Inc., a legal aid organization based in NYC. Tania is a longtime organizer and strategists in the immigrant rights movement. She previously worked as the Northeast Policy and Monitoring Manager for Freedom For Immigrants; the Legislative Coordinator for the New York State Youth Leadership Council, the first undocumented-led organization in New York State and helped organize the first Education Not Deportation program in New York that stopped the deportation of numerous undocumented youth. She is also co-founder of Queens Neighborhoods United, a grassroots anti-gentrification collective that fights against undemocratic use of land, police abuse and ICE in the immigrant-welcoming borough of Queens.

Rachel Ida Buff
Rachel Ida Buff is a writer, organizer, and immigration historian currently teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her most recent book is the bilingual glossary, A is for Asylum; Words for People on the Move/A de Asilo: Palabras Para Personas en Movimiento (Fordham: 2020); she has words in a variety of places, including Against the Current, the Boston Review, and Jacobin. Currently, she is working on a project about Jewish safety, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism entitled The Gangster Buffs of Charleston, WV: 20th Century Jewish Safety in an Appalachian City

Commentator: Silky Shah
Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. She is also the author of the recently published book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket Books, 2024) and has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over twenty years.

Chair: Jenna Loyd
Jenna M. Loyd is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has three main strands: 1) the production and politics of health inequities in the United States; 2) U.S. detention, asylum, and refugee policies and (geo-) politics; and 3) connections between abolition and migrant justice. Her most recent work brings interests in health and migration together in a new project that examines how immigration law is as a structural determinant of health for migrants in the context of climate change. She is the author of Health Rights Are Civil Rights: Peace and Justice Activism in Los Angeles, 1963-1978 (2014, University of Minnesota Press), co-editor, with Matt Mitchelson and Andrew Burridge, of Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders, and Global Crisis (2012, University of Georgia Press), and co-author, with Alison Mountz, is Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention the United States (2018, University of California Press).