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10 Books that Fueled Us This Year

Hey there!

This year was a busy one for us at IDP. We worked with nearly 1,000 individuals targeted by the criminal and immigration systems, filed 10 briefs arguing for rulings that benefit immigrants with convictions everywhere from the Supreme Court to New York State courts, and spent hundreds of hours advocating to elected officials with and for immigrants with convictions. Getting all this done takes perseverance and IDP has always been fueled by a vision of justice that centers the dignity and inherent worth of every person.

The list of 10 book recommendations we put together back in August reflects that vision. With the holiday season coming up and the new year approaching, we thought it would be a great idea to re-share that list with you! So why not take a look at the list and see if any of these books are a fit for someone on your gift list this year? Pick out a book for your loved one and send it along with a donation in their name to the Immigrant Defense Project.  

Happy reading, and we hope you have a wonderful holiday season!

Through the stories of those caught in the system, Alina Das traces the ugly history of immigration policy to explain how the U.S. constructed the idea of the “criminal alien,” effectively dividing immigrants into the categories “good” and “bad,” “deserving” and “undeserving.” 

Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change generating mass dispossession worldwide. 

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.

Becoming Abolitionists shows that abolition is not solely about getting rid of police, but a commitment to create and support different answers to the problem of harm in society, and, most excitingly, an opportunity to reduce and eliminate harm in the first place.

This moving autobiography narrative is the true-life story of Edwidge Danticat's father, Mira, and his brother, Joseph. Danticat’s father decides to immigrate to the United States, while her Uncle Joseph chooses to remain in Haiti. Years later, Danticat faces the impending death of her father, the birth of her first child, and fears for her Uncle Joseph and his son Maxo, who are seeking safety in America and come face to face with the complications of the U.S. immigration system.

Aarti Namdev Shahani, now an NPR correspondent, tells a heart-wrenching memoir about her immigrant family's American Dream, the justice system that took it away, and her fight to get it back.

Both memoir and manifesto, Leonard Peltier chronicles his life in Leavenworth Prison, exploring his suffering and the insights it has borne him while locating his experience within the history of the American Indian peoples and their struggles to overcome the federal government's injustices.

Through fierce, agile poems, Reginald Dwayne Betts tells the story of the effects of incarceration--canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace--and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. He confronts the funk of post-incarceration existence in traditional and newfound forms, from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume's radiant conclusion.

Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.

An evocative picture book debut that tells the true story of the author's immigration from Kuwait to the United States.