“It’s inherently a racial justice and economic justice fight,” says Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network. In this episode, Shah and host Kelly Hayes discuss the threats posed by the incoming Trump administration, how organizers are preparing to defend immigrant communities, and what actions we can take to prepare and respond.

Music by Son Monarcas, Curved Mirror & David Celeste

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about solidarity, organizing and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. In our final episode of 2024, we are talking about Donald Trump’s ominous plans for mass deportations and how activists and organizers can prepare and respond. I will be joined today by author and organizer Silky Shah. Silky is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, which is a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the United States. Silky is also the author of Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. I know that a lot of us are deeply concerned about Trump’s xenophobic agenda, and the dangers our communities will soon face. It’s important to remember in this moment that, however these attacks unfold, we will have the capacity to fight back. As Silky wrote in a recent article for Truthout:

Despite the right-wing capture of the immensely destructive machinery of state, we can mount an effective resistance. And we’ve done it before. Now is the time to build up community networks to defend immigrants and other marginalized communities who will bear the brunt of the attacks from the new administration.

If, after hearing this conversation, you find that you need some guidance about how to get involved, or where to begin with your efforts, we will be including a list of resources in the show notes of this episode.

If you appreciate this podcast, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to “Movement Memos” on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help. As a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you, so thanks for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

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KH: Silky Shah, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Silky Shah: Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

KH: How are you doing today?

SS: I am doing okay. About to have a little bit of a break, which I think will be helpful to fortify as we prepare for what’s to come. But yeah, I think I’m doing as well as I can be. I think in a lot of ways, the pre-election moment was unbelievably depressing, and hard, and sort of confusing. And I think in this post-election moment, I’m feeling a lot more like I know what I have to do. There’s a clarity of purpose, and steps, and an approach to take, and I’m sort of ready to get to work. So that’s kind of where I’m at right now.

KH: That really resonates. I am in a similar place, in that, while I am obviously upset about what our communities are up against, I am also really focused on what I know I can do to be useful in these times. And I think that’s so important, because we’re not all going to formulate all of the solutions, and we shouldn’t pressure ourselves to have all of the answers right now. This is a time for learning and planning and figuring out what we can contribute. And like you, I also have a break coming up soon. This is actually our last episode of the year, and I am so glad that you were available to talk, because I know that a lot of people are really anxious about Trump’s mass deportation plans, and wondering what we can do to support and protect our neighbors. I know you are very busy right now, tending to that work, so I want to thank you so much for making the time, amid everything that’s happening, to join me today.

SS: I’m a really big fan of this podcast and your work, so really honored to be here.

KH: Well, coming from you, that means a lot.

Before we dive in, could you take a quick moment to introduce yourself and tell the audience a little bit about your work?

SS: So my title is executive director of Detention Watch Network, which is a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the U.S. We’ve been around since the late ’90s after there were some really harsh immigration bills that had passed, and over the years we have evolved. And now our network of organizations across the country, over 100 organizations doing both local grassroots organizing to end detention and also policy work, advocacy work at the state level and federal level. We work with people who have formerly been detained and their loved ones, and do a lot of capacity building. And we also do a lot of narrative work around these issues. And so that’s the range of stuff that we do.

I’ve been organizing around prison issues, prison-industrial complex issues, and immigration for over 20 years now. I’m from Texas and I started organizing around these issues in the aftermath of 9/11 when there was this sort of prison boom happening, especially at the border. And at the time, sort of referred to as a criminal justice advocate or organizer, but actually so much of the work I was doing was trying to stop new jails and prisons that were meant for immigrants in the post-9/11 aftermath. And so that’s how I started doing this work. A lot of work to stop expansion over the years, and in moments when we’ve had some openings, actually doing a lot of work to shut down existing detention centers. And yeah, that’s a bit about me.

KH: So, obviously, many of us are deeply concerned about Trump’s mass deportation agenda. A lot of people have been asking me what we should expect and what we should be doing to prepare. So let’s start by talking about what we should expect. What do we know and not know about what’s about to happen with regard to immigration, and how do you expect Trump’s policies to differ from those of previous administrations?

SS: So there’s a lot we know, and like you said, there’s a lot we don’t know. In terms of what we do know is that the way that immigration enforcement has worked in moments when there have been really large-scale deportations of people currently living in the U.S., it’s often happened through the criminal legal system. And it’s happened through relationships between local sheriffs and the federal government. There’s this sort of symbiotic relationship where actually the way the federal government operates both in terms of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Marshals Service is by outsourcing a lot of their detention capacity to local jails and then of course private prisons, which gets a lot more attention. But often these local counties have a stake in whatever type of contract, whether it’s a county jail or private prison.

And local sheriffs are also often or have been in the past deputized to be immigration enforcers through a program called 287(g) that came about in the ’90s and was implemented after 9/11. And right now, actually a lot of the 287(g) programs that exist happen through jail enforcement, really only happens at the jail level. But we could see under Trump a sort of re-implementation of local police who are in the field having immigration authority, which is a huge concern.

And so much of the way that the deportation pipeline has worked is that people are caught up in a lot of different ways, whether they are stopped for driving without a license or a tail light, or they are arrested for a crime and are in the booking process at the jail, and there is an ICE hold put on them. They might be in the jail awaiting trial and they might interact with an ICE agent who works at the jail and [who] has a conversation with them, and sort of determines their immigration status and proceeds to put them into immigration proceedings after they go through their hearing or potentially after a sentence.

So there’s just a lot of different moments in the process of interacting with the criminal legal system where somebody could be turned over to ICE. And of course, for most, what we’re seeing right now is that people who currently live in the U.S. who are in immigration detention often are people who have had a criminal conviction, a criminal record, they’ve been in jail or in prison, and then after completing a sentence being turned over to ICE. And that is a large portion of who is in jail — people who’ve been out of community to some degree. And so I think that something to understand is that so much of this is about how different law enforcement agencies interact and ICE is really, really highly dependent on local and local police to carry out the deportation process, which I can talk more about how we can throw a wrench in that. But that’s what we know. We know that that’s going to be a big part of the way this happens.

In terms of the other things we know and they’ve already sort of indicated is a massive expansion of the detention system. In the first Trump term, we saw basically detention go up to a height of 55,000 beds, a capacity to hold 55,000 people at any given time. And over the course of 2019, we had half a million people go through the detention system. Sometimes, people will be in detention for two weeks, sometimes 30 days. For people who are appealing the case or can’t be returned, they could spend months or years in detention, or they’re awaiting a hearing on their case. And so it’s really a range. But we anticipate an expansion, and already ICE under Biden is expanding detention in New Jersey and put out proposals to expand detention in the Midwest, in the Southwest, on the West Coast.

And so we know that ICE is already planning to expand. And with the sort of political will under Trump, we could see a lot more expansion. Potentially, I think what they’re hoping for is a doubling of the detention capacity, which is roughly around 40,000 right now. So those things we know.

I think the thing that’s really going to be different between Trump and previous administrations — and this is sort of the difference between the Democrats and Republicans at this stage, especially since the second Obama term — is that for a long time, immigration enforcement, the deportation machine and the way it operated in the U.S. and of people who are currently living here (already here, not necessarily at the border), it happened through the criminal legal system like I said, but it also happened through raids and potentially large raids, worksite raids. Some famous ones happened in Mississippi and Iowa. Often they’re in the Southeast and Midwest.

And they’re really just incredibly disruptive. Hundreds of people in a community being taken all at once, many of whom are parents who are separated from their children. Children sometimes ending up in foster care because of them. People getting charged around their immigration violations, but sometimes also being prosecuted for immigration violations. So they might have both a civil immigration proceeding and a criminal proceeding at the same time. People will end up in jail for months, sometimes longer. And it really can fully destroy a community and have long-term impacts.

And so I think that is probably the big sort of difference that you might see. The worksite raids are something that the Obama administration really moved away from, because of a lot of concerns around the impacts, and it sort of resulted in the Obama administration really more closely tying the criminal legal system and immigration system together.

Under Trump, they try to do a lot of these, all the things and the worksite raids. And then under Biden we have seen — both because of a lot of wins, which I can talk about in sanctuary policy and affirmative relief, and also because of this hyperfocus on the border — there’s been less raids and attention to focusing on targeting people within the interior of the country.

So I think that’s the big difference. I think ultimately, one of the things that we were able to do, especially with the level of mass deportations that were happening under Obama where it was rampant, and hundreds and thousands of people in community were being taken each year, it became politically unpopular. And I think that’s the big difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. The way the Dems have approached this has very much been through the criminal legal system in this “good immigrant versus bad immigrant” frame, whereas the Republicans are very much in let’s just target everyone, and everyone is perceived as a problem, and all immigrants are scapegoated in this way. And so both the raids and the criminal legal system strategies are in place.

And that’s a lot of what we know is going to happen: It’s going to be large-scale raids that are going to be a spectacle and a lot of law enforcement targeting community members. There’s been a lot of talk about the role of the military and the use of the National Guard, which has happened to some degree. But I think right now, that’s harder to say what scale that’s going to be at, and also the use of military bases for detention. I think those are things that are a little… Again, I think it’s going to be a lot of........

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