Amnesty or Abolition?

Abstract

Convicts and undocumented immigrants are similarly excluded from full social and political membership in the United States. Disfranchised, denied core protections of the social welfare state and subject to forced removal from their homes, families, and communities, convicts and undocumented immigrants, together, occupy the caste of outsiders living within the United States. This essay explores the rise of the criminal justice and immigration control systems that frame the caste of outsiders. Reaching back to the forgotten origins of immigration control during the era of black emancipation, this essay highlights the deep and allied inequities rooted in the rise of immigration control and mass incarceration.

Reimagining ‘justice’ in environmental justice: Radical ecologies, decolonial thought, and the Black Radical Tradition

“…Most scholarship was on post-1848 history that centered the Chicanx experience on the US—Mexico borderlands. The focus was on White and Chicanx relations, it evacuated other groups even as scholars have shown that this mapping was more complicated (Gomez, 2008; Guidotti-Hernández, 2011). Of course, a broader reading of history in Las Americas—one that acknowledges the African diaspora that enabled US and European capitalism to flourish as a world system—necessitates placing Blackness as central to Latin American history.…”

“…Formed in 1987, CR’s mission is to abolish prisons. While deeply rooted in the BRT, CR reaches out to all persons and groups interested in fighting the prison-industrial complex, including Latinxs, as they are now the largest racial/ethnic group in Federal prisons (Hernández, 2011). CR also has chapters in Los Angeles and New Orleans.…”

Political Detentions, Political Deportations: Repressive Immigration Enforcement in Times of Trump

“…Although people of every racialized category are imprisoned, the majority of state and federal prisoners in the US are Black and brown; just 35% of sentenced prisoners in the US were white in 2019 (Carson, 2020). The “alienated citizens and criminalized immigrants” targeted with these forms of control together constituted what Kelly Lytle Hernández (2011: 55) calls a “racialized caste of outsiders,” disproportionately subject to state-sanctioned force in the criminal punishment and immigration enforcement systems.…”

“…Resistance to imigration enforcement has a long history in the US (cf. Hernández, 2010; Loyd & Mountz, 2018; Ordaz, 2021). In the twenty-first century, these consolidated into a movement that gained mainstream and national attention.…”