“A Beginner’s Guide to Abolishing ICE,”

Read the article here.

ICE is yet another new development in law enforcement, and it’s that many are calling for the defunding of. Published late in 2019, Natascha Elena Uhlmann’s Abolish ICE examines how poorly regulated and critically damaging Immigration and Customs Enforcement truly is.

See the full list here.

A new decade, a new Selena Gomez: Back with a new album, the pop star goes deep on immigration activism, Latin identity, and her favourite karaoke song, with questions from the likes of Timothee Chalamet, Jim Jarmusch, and Yara Shahidi—plus, her biggest fans in the world

Natascha Elena Uhlmann: Thank you for your vulnerability in sharing your own family’s experiences with immigration. My family has felt the pain of borders and it terrifies me how hostile the world has become since then. How do you balance the importance of sharing our experiences with the system—giving it a human face—with fear of putting our loved ones at risk?

Selena Gomez: It’s definitely frightening, but I think sometimes you have to do the things that scare you in order to shake people up. My goal was to simply humanise my people, because they were being called aliens, criminals, and I can’t even imagine what these kids being separated from their families are going through. It’s something that is going to traumatise them for the rest of their lives. And it just seems animalistic; it is scary but I think it needs to be talked about, so that’s where my heart was coming from when I signed on to do a project (Living Undocumented) that addressed such a big issue.

Read the full interview here.

This week, a federal jury in Arizona acquitted human rights activist Scott Warren on charges of harboring undocumented migrants. Warren faced up to 20 years in prison for providing food, water, and shelter to two men from Central America who were traveling through the Sonoran desert. It’s a victory for activists across the country in a case that has come to define the stakes of humanitarian aid.

Warren was arrested by Border Patrol agents last year at an outpost maintained by No More Deaths, a faith-based humanitarian nonprofit organization providing basic necessities to migrants passing through the blazing desert that stretches across the Southwestern United States. That morning the organization released a report accusing U.S. Border Patrol of interfering with their aid efforts. Over a 46 month period, No More Deaths members tracked their humanitarian aid drop sites, and found that Border Patrol agents vandalized water left for migrants 415 times, or twice a week on average. They released footage of Border Patrol agents appearing to kick over water jugs and laughing, which quickly went viral, garnering millions of views within days. Border Patrol officials denied charges of retaliation: “We’re protecting immigration laws in the area, and there was a situation in which we needed to do the arrest because there were some illegal individuals in that area,” Carlos Diaz, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told The Washington Post. The No More Deaths report painted a damning picture of the agency, indicating a pattern of cruelty against undocumented migrants. As one migrant said in the report, “I needed water, some of the other people in the group needed water, but we found them destroyed. [I felt] helplessness, rage. They [the U.S. Border Patrol] must hate us. It’s their work to capture us, but we are humans. And they don’t treat us like humans. It’s hate is what it is. They break the bottles out of hate.”

Read the full article here.

October 2019 Reads for the Rest of Us

Written by Mexican American activist Natascha Elena Uhlmann, this book is exactly what the title implies: an impassioned call to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). We’ve all heard about the horrific conditions of border camps and detention centers but, Uhlmann argues, improving these conditions is not enough and ICE must be abolished to make long-lasting change for immigrants to the U.S.

Read the full list here.

An innovative approach to ‘abolish ICE’

For weeks, organizers with Never Again Action, a Jewish-led advocacy group, have gathered outside of ICE offices across the country. Singing protest songs, they implore ICE officers put a stop to the agency’s abusive detention and deportation practices. “Quit your job!” is a common plea.

Some may just take them up on it.

This week, Never Again Atlanta, one of the group’s many local chapters, launched a job placement program for immigration officers seeking to distance themselves from the agency. The program seeks to make leaving the agency a real possibility by matching conscientious objectors with career advisers and job opportunities. “As we looked into these agents’ eyes, we could tell they weren’t comfortable with what was going on. We’ve asked them to quit their jobs, so how can we make it easy on them?” Emily Baselt, an organizer with Never Again Atlanta, told The Week.

Read the full article here.

What is there to salvage in an agency that exists solely to hunt, catalogue and detain the most vulnerable among us? Ice’s violence is as systematic as it is cruel

This summer, a coalition of award-winning authors came together with a plea to Congress: they called for an end to the inhumane conditions in detention centers, where women are forced to drink out of toilets and children go without food, water or medical care.

The writers, immigrants and refugees themselves, know just what is at stake: “Many of us came to the US as children and shudder to think how this country would treat us now,” they write. They urge Congress to mitigate the worst abuses of our immigration system, from unsafe conditions – in detention or third countries – to endless backlogs and convoluted legal processes.

Read the full excerpt here.