Janine Jackson interviewed Detention Watch Network's Silky Shah about the attack on immigrants for the January 24, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The Trump administration surprised none but the gullible by coming out of the gate with a spate of hateful, discriminatory and anti-democratic measures. Immigrants—that's to say, mainly brown and Black immigrants—have been in the sights of those who oppose the democratic project for years now. But with Day One orders and directives threatening roundups and mass deportations and curtailing sanctuary, the new White House looks to be defining “terrorizing people” as policy.
I wonder if major news media, day in and day out, reported immigration, not through politicians trying to outdo one another with hysterical claims, and perverse stunts like buses out of town, not through pundits whose ignorance of history and economics is matched only by their indifference to human rights, but instead through the voices of immigrants and their communities and advocates, would we be where we are today?
Silky Shah is executive director at Detention Watch Network. She joins us now by phone from Washington state. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Silky Shah.
Silky Shah: It's great to be back with you. Thanks for having me.
JJ: The Department of Homeland Security’s directives to rescind the Sensitive Locations Memo is so exemplary of the comic book cravenness: “There is no safe place. This chaotic routing out of human beings, this is really what we want to do.” If people don't know, or if they somehow think this is about isolating criminal actors, what should we understand as some of the key and foreseeable impacts of this slew of orders on communities, whether or not they or a family member is ultimately actually deported?
SS: I think the whole intention here is to cause fear and instability in people's lives, and the strategy of forced attrition, forced self-deportation. So it's like a combination of all the different orders that have been put in place. Some of them are being blocked, like the birthright citizenship order, again, [it's] just to cause panic in people, but it's very much unconstitutional. And there's other things that people are filing litigation against.
But we have a lot of the system in place already. There are thousands of ICE agents and thousands of CBP (Customs and Border Protection) agents, and they've already started doing roundups, and we've seen that across the country.
But we also know they work really closely with law enforcement at every single level, at the local level, at the state level, at the federal level. And so much of what people have done for many years to protect communities is by doing that work to get ICE out of those particular locations, out of churches, out of schools, out of hospitals, and also do that work to make it so that ICE and police aren't collaborating, because that’s actually how we saw a lot of people funneled into deportation proceedings, and into the detention system, especially during the Bush and Obama years.
For many years, we've been doing that, and everything this administration is trying to do is to undo a lot of that work, so that they can target people more easily. And so even now, we've seen that they've directed DoJ to start potentially looking into prosecution for states and counties and cities that aren't complying, which is also going to be challenged.
But I think that is the intent. The intent is to undo so much of the work we've done to protect immigrant communities and stop the really severe deportations we've seen.
JJ: You're sort of touching on it, but it seems worth pulling out: Elite media won't do it, but we can, ourselves, shift this idea that Democrats are by definition anti-Republicans, and that we're really in a Trump versus anti-Trump situation. And it's not to ignore partisan dynamics, but just to recognize bad ideas, whoever is pushing them.
SS: Yeah, I think one thing that was so challenging for us, coming into 2025, we were all bracing ourselves for what was going to happen a few days ago on January 20, but already, within the first days of the year, we saw the Democrats, both in the House and the Senate, capitulating and now officially passing the Laken Riley Act, which Trump is going to sign soon. And it's really disturbing, because it's a bill that was really created around a moral panic which exacerbates all these questions and scapegoats immigrants as the problem, around this really horrific tragedy, but saying, “Oh, we're going to apply these really harsh policies to all immigrants because of this one incident,” which we saw in the '80s with the story of Willie Horton. And then that was one of the things, of the many things, that led to the US being one of the world's leading incarcerated and the growth of mass incarceration.
And now we're seeing that again, where Democrats are capitulating because of the moral panic that was created around this one incident, and saying that immigrants are the problem, and equating them with criminality.
And I think that is something that was really hard to stomach, to see how much the Democrats accepted this really harsh bill that will require mandatory detention for people who are just charged with theft-related crimes. It would expand the number of people who would be forced to be in detention without any due process, without any ability to stand before a judge, “These are the reasons why I shouldn't be in here.”
And so we are really, really concerned, especially, that so many Democrats capitulated on this. It's the same old story. It's the moral panic that they capitalize on to gain political legitimacy. And then we see these really harsh policies in place that just balloon incarceration, balloon policing.
JJ: Yeah, and it's such a circle, because, for example, Associated Press, in reporting the House approving Laken Riley, notes matter of factly, well, yes, there was this crucial faction of 46 "politically vulnerable" Democrats who joined with Republicans. Why are they politically vulnerable? Because of this situation in which they feel themselves being pushed to align with Republicans in order to stay in office, which apparently is job one, and job only, for many folks.
SS: And one of the things around that that's so frustrating is that part of the reason they are feeling the need to do that is because the Democratic Party has really failed to offer any countervision to the Republicans, failed any countervailing vision. In fact, Harris ran a campaign where she was positioning herself as more hardline than Trump on immigration, and that opened up space for us to be in this place.
And so I think that is really one of the most important lessons right now is that, no, we have to offer something else. We have to not just throw immigrants under the bus, as the Democrats did in this election cycle, that have led us to this point, and enabled Trump and all of these other Republicans to move these policies. And yeah, no, I think absolutely there's no question that the Democrats also deserve equal blame for where we're at.
JJ: Right. I'm going to bring you back in a second to what we can be for, but I did want to step out and just say: A key part of your concern and your work is that, for many people, because it's how media frame it, the idea is, “Well, in one way or another, we're going to catch lawbreakers, or even spread a net that catches up some folks who aren't breaking the law, but then we're going to...do something with them.” And the story sort of ends there. And I wonder, what does your understanding of the actual immigrant detention system as it exists tell you about that as a solution, that maybe most people don't even know?
SS: The thing about detention is that it exists to warehouse immigrants. That's what it exists to do. And whether they have had interaction with the criminal legal system or not—yes, many people have, some people haven’t, some people are there because they're seeking asylum. But it tells you that's the bigger picture of the US, again, being so committed to incarceration, still having some 2 million people in jails and prisons and detention centers. And what we saw for many, many years is the growth of these systems, because there was this incentive to have some economic viability for rural communities. There was a prison boom that happened, and there was also the destruction of the welfare state, and many people being caught up in the system. And so people became more and more eligible for prison time. There was longer sentences, truth in sentencing and mandatory minimums and all these things where we balloon the system. And all those things started applying to immigration, and that's what we saw with the detention system.
And even to this day, when we try to make the case against immigrant detention and local officials can conveniently say, “Well, actually, we hear you. We don't think people should be in detention because they're just awaiting a hearing on their immigration case, or they're awaiting deportation,” but then they're still hesitant to end the contract, largely because they are still getting federal money to hold people in the detention system.
Even if they have a private prison in their community, they might be getting a dollar a day to hold a person in that facility. And so there are a lot of perverse incentives to the system, that include both the private prison industry, but also county jails, and just the way law enforcement works across the country. And so I think that's a really important piece of it.
And the other thing I would say is that there's just this constant lie that's told to us, that immigration is a issue of public safety and national security. And of course now we're hearing this a lot, in what the executive orders have put out.
But it's not true, actually. Immigration is about labor, of course. And I think that's going to become more of an issue as the crackdown happens, and people feel the impacts of losing that labor. But also, it's about family relationships, and it's about seeking refuge. And so we have to go back to that conversation of what is immigration about? What can we do instead of reinforcing these ideas that people are lawbreakers? Well, what does that mean in the context of the law right now, and how has the system changed to round up and warehouse more and more people, mostly people who are Black and brown?
JJ: Right? Well, we are seeing and we will see a lot of rightful and righteous “against” energy, and I wonder, what can we be for? What ideas can we shape conversations around that both resist the worldview of the MAGA set and their media enablers, but also maybe have nothing to do with them? What are some other ideas that can be coherent that we can work around, going forward?
Silky Shah: "Moving more away from the scarcity mindset, and making conditions for people in the US better, I think is going to be an important part of our strategy to make the case for immigration."
SS: I think what was so evident about how the 2024 election worked out was, and largely part of the reason that the Democrats capitulated, was that, actually, Gov. Greg Abbott, of my home state of Texas, really, really played the game, and positioned immigrants as a problem. A lot of people focused on Trump, but I think Abbott, with the scheme where he was bussing migrants to cities like New York and Chicago, and “bringing the border" to those cities, it exacerbated and revealed all the fractures in the social safety nets that exist in those places, especially in light of the pandemic, and how there was more of a housing crisis. There's obviously an opioid crisis. There's so many other things that communities are negotiating. And because there was that anxiety in those places and that fear around economic insecurity, immigrants became a really easy scapegoat.
And so from my perspective, I think, again, this goes back to this question of the Democrats failing to offer any countervailing vision. It wasn't just on immigration, but it was just generally [not] offering something about, what is the public good and what can we do for people and how can we help people? And how do we get to a place where people aren't feeling nervous about paying rent, and anxious about all the other things, and the price of goods in the grocery store, and all the other things that were happening? And how can we make sure that Democrats are responding?
And so I think, from my perspective, we've had a lot of conversations with people on the ground, especially in light of the fact that people are worried about a detention center closing down and not having those jobs. It's like, “Well, what is the economy you want in those communities? What is a just transition to that? What are more healthy economies than having incarceration or a military base or something like that?” And so moving more away from the scarcity mindset and making conditions for people in the US better, I think is going to be an important part of our strategy to make the case for immigration.
Also, of course, even I think sometimes this continues to get lost, as the root causes of migration aren't always a part of the conversation. And so also, what is the role of the US, and the US across the world, and how have they exacerbated these conditions, and what can we do around that?
JJ: I wanted to just draw out one point of information, which is that just because the US outsources detention to Mexico, for example, doesn't mean it's not on our watch, right? That's just as a point of information.
SS: Yeah. I think actually the last time I talked to you, it was after a really big fire that happened in one of the facilities on the other side of the border in Mexico. And I think that's the reality, is that, in so many ways, Mexico absolutely has the second-highest rate of detention in the world. And it might look a little bit different, I think, in the US context, because it's been such a society that's obsessed with imprisonment. We have detention centers that actually are mostly jails or former prisons that are used, but I think there you might have different types of facilities.
But yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that externalization that we've seen is also on the US. So it's not just that they're doing it here, but they're doing it abroad. I think the concern for us, we've done some research on this, is that when you have a detention center close to a location, so for instance in Southern California, in San Bernardino County where the Adelanto Detention Center is, when it was built and started holding people in 2010, 2011, I believe, San Bernardino County ended up having the second-highest ICE arrests in the country. And so just by having the capacity there, more people are going to get detained. And so that's a lot of the reason why we do the work to shut down detention centers, to stop expansion here. But I do absolutely agree that a lot of our work also needs to be making sure that the US is not just outsourcing a lot of the same policies and tactics to other parts of the world.
JJ: Finally, even as the internet connects us in many ways, there's still this atomism in modern US life, and we're inundated with this notion that, to put it very crudely, success means starting your own thing, inventing something new and selling it. And that whole mindset works against the collective action that we need so much now, and that we know works.
Detention Watch Network, as the name suggests, is a coalition, and that formation shapes the work. And that seems very much like a way forward. It's less media-friendly: “So many voices, so many groups, who do we quote?” But that kind of work, coalitional work, is really where we need to be, don't you think?
SS: For so many years, it's been organizers and lawyers, people who are detained, their family members, policy folks in DC, all of them coming together, and we've actually won a lot of our campaigns in the last many years. Some 20 detention centers are no longer in use, because of local and state and federal-level campaigns to stop their use. And a lot of that is because a lot of different people from different sectors came together, and ordinary people in their communities, who've said, “No, we don't want this.”
And so I think that's absolutely true. There is no single way, and I'm so grateful to all the people who are doing litigation to stop those executive orders right now.
And I also know that ICE already has the tools it needs to target people. And so we have to do work at all the different levels, and make sure we're doing everything we can to protect communities.
We also saw recently that ICE finally started putting out announcements about how they're going to expand detention. They're saying they're going to build four new 10,000-bed facilities, which is just absolutely unheard of, but we're doing the work to research that, figure that out, and do everything we can to block those. And we blocked it before, and I think we can do it again.
And so just holding onto that spirit of resistance, and knowing that this is going to be a tough time, but also there's a lot of people who are ready to do the work, and to make sure we can protect our communities as much as possible.
JJ: We've been speaking with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network. Follow their work online at DetentionWatchNetwork.org. Silky Shah, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
