Unbuild Walls

"""Unbuild Walls provides a crystal clear, readable, story-based account of what the immigration enforcement system is, how the migrant justice movement has been fighting it, and why we must fight to abolish it, not fix it. Based in decades of her front line work to stop imprisonment and deportation of criminalized migrants, stop the opening of new prisons and close existing ones, Silky Shah provides a grounded survey of the complex political terrain on which the fight to abolish border enforcement and imprisonment of all kinds takes place. This book is an essential tool to build abolitionist analysis within the migrant justice movement, and to bring people who are already mobilizing for police and prison abolition into the fight for migrant justice. Anyone interested in social change and in the most pressing questions about social movement tactics needs to read this book."" —Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) ""Silky Shah’s excellently crafted book, Unbuild Walls, refreshingly busts through the persistent and predictable debates about border and immigration enforcement. Shah builds off of her years of experience as director of the Detention Watch Network, applying first-hand knowledge of the immigration detention apparatus in the US. Shah details the innards of the enforcement apparatus like no one else can, and the wins that movements have achieved against them. This fast-paced read is well-written, well-researched, often personal and insightful, and is a must for anyone concerned about immigration and connections to struggles for economic and racial justice. Shah offers an insightful solution to immigration detention, not only sharing creative, new ideas, but also a concrete proposal for how to implement an abolitionist perspective to the concurrent degrading and inhumane system of immigration enforcement."" —Todd Miller, author of Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders"