Recent months have seen a number of protests by LGBTQ immigration activists calling attention to the horrific conditions faced by LGBTQ immigrants in detention centers. Trans women prisoners may be forced into cells with male inmates, for instance, and suffer violence, including rape, from fellow prisoners as well as guards. Like HIV+ prisoners, trans prisoners may be denied access to life-saving medications. 

 

Gender JUST applauds calling attention to such abuse. However, as an organization dedicated to prison abolition and structural transformation, we call for an end to incarceration for everyone, not only LGBTQ immigrants.  We call for a wider conversation about the politics of inclusion embodied by the mainstream queer and undocumented movements. These movements seek a tiny expansion of the category of citizenship without challenging citizenship itself as an institution. 

 

Today, movements focused on immigration are deeply embedded in the logics of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) and Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) to work toward the meaningful advancement of our communities. The veneer of progressive politics disguises the fact that mainstream immigration activists work to contain autonomous struggle and police the boundaries of permissible dissent.  

For example, in 2014, members of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICRR) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) had members of Moratorium Against Deportations (MDC) arrested at the annual May Day parade when MDC expressed views that challenged the ICRR’s and SEIU’s narrow politics. 

 

Such militant policing shuts down dissent within immigrant communities. The policing takes the form of the actual, militarised arrest of bodies and also extends to controlling the “messages” that can or cannot circulate with regard to immigration policies. This collaboration with the prison system erases the fraught histories of genocide, displacement, and incarceration that the PIC has enacted upon the most vulnerable, immigrant or otherwise. 

 

Queer, indigenous, and migrant bodies have always been conflated with disease, degeneracy, and contagion in the national imagination. In the 1980s, African and Haitian migrants were popularly believed to have introduced AIDS to the United States; in 2014, migrant children were the focus of fears of epidemics both major (Ebola) and minor (Scabies). The settler-colonial society has always justified the annihilation, deportation, incarceration, and exploitation of certain communities by painting them as unclean, unable, and inferior. 

 

Gender JUST will not include ourselves in this imperialist project. Instead we call for emancipatory politics that can help everyone move toward a world without borders, police, prisons, or 501C3s. We must move beyond the structures of capitalism that compel people to migrate across borders and then punish them. We must begin to name the social service agencies in our communities when they act as imperialists and police officers by menacing those who they claim to serve. In doing so, we also need to remember the colonial histories of European and American states.

 

In moving forward we draw on the brilliant legacy of queer radical movements before us and take inspiration from the radical immigration organising that continues here in Chicago and around the world. In the coming months, Gender JUST will be collaborating with local activists to work on a politics around immigration that considers not simply asking for people to be let in or for some people to be let out of prisons, but an interrogation of the system that produces such profound economic and psychic displacements that people are compelled to migrate across borders.  

 

LIST OF RESOURCES FORTHCOMING 

If you’d like to join us in our work and the conversation, please contact genderjust@gmail.com.