ABOLITION
EVERYDAY SH!T: THE PILOT ISSUE
Content Notice: settler colonialism, state violence, incarceration, sexual violence, militarism, forced migration
Until We Are All Free Art Commission, Jess x. Snow
Abolition Journal’s Sterling K. Johnson spent time with abolitionist attorney Viktoria Zerda for a conversation exploring current strategies for migrant justice and the horizon of border abolition in this moment.
Sterling: Can you please tell us about yourself.
Viktoria: Yeah, so I have a long winding road to now. I'm a Rutgers Clinical Law Faculty, technically a Clinical Faculty Fellow. I work with the Expungement Law Project. So, we take on expungement cases and clemency cases in New Jersey and we offer free legal services to Camden County residents, but to surrounding counties as well.
But before that, I spent a couple years with ACLU of Pennsylvania where I got experience in civil rights litigation on behalf of non-citizens specifically. Then before my legal journey, I spent a number of years, more so, in a social work capacity working with, the technical term is "unaccompanied minors," but basically immigrant youth, who are coming here alone.
And…What predates that is just being from South Texas. Growing up around the border seeing how arbitrary and meaningless it is. Both sides of my family have indigenous roots to northern Mexico, so up until the late 1800s we were in the region moving around as we pleased. Technically, my family didn't immigrate. So we don't have an immigration story per se. We have a border story. And so that informs my take on a lot of this stuff. So, it gives me a unique perspective on the border itself and thus immigration.
Sterling: Okay, that's so interesting. Could you say more about the border story?
Viktoria: Yes. So yeah, like I said, both sides of my family come from northern Mexican states. So Tamaulipas and Coahuila, which are like neighboring states that no one really knows about because they're "country." And for many decades, my family moved between North Mexico and the larger cities in South Texas, ultimately settling in San Antonio in the early 1900s.
But I mean… The interesting piece of it is, the current iteration of the border was established in 1848 and at least for folks who are from that region, it's very easily traceable where your family was and what generation came to what is now the "so-called United States.”
So that's the story about me, my personal background and why I think about the border a lot...
[...]
So although they had citizenship status, if you were Mexican in South Texas at these times, you were probably doing farmwork labor or warehouse labor or something of the sort. My family fell into the farm worker bucket.
So fruits, strawberries, cotton. And they often migrated up north all the way up to Michigan and back down, but stayed mostly in Texas and then became really active in labor organizing. So, my tia founded the Texas chapter of the UFW, the United Farm Workers. She was the first director.
That's how I was raised knowing that history. So I had a non-conventional upbringing when it comes to seeing revolutionary action in my young life and seeing it be done by mostly women, mostly Mexican women.
“That's how I was raised knowing that history. So I had a non-conventional upbringing when it comes to seeing revolutionary action in my young life and seeing it be done by mostly women, mostly Mexican women.”—Viktoria Zerda
Sterling: Like you were saying you didn't cross the border, the border crossed your family. How do we articulate the border to people? It doesn't seem like rights is a good framing, especially places where people were forced out due to economic pressures or places where we invaded or bombed, like Vietnam and Cambodia. Vietnamese or Cambodian people that are in South Philly, they can say, “I'm here due to US invasion." What are other ways to articulate it, especially to people that are just in the store that I go to or friends that you're playing basketball with? What are your thoughts?
Viktoria: Yeah, I agree that it doesn't make any sense because we don't really have the language for it. Honestly, even as movement people, we don't have the language yet for border abolition in the way that we have language for police and prison abolition. Because immigration is a broad term and it encompasses a lot of people, including white people who are upper middle class.
And I know you noted in one of your questions, "Is this about freedom of movement?" And I've always pushed back against that because in the time I've been working with impacted communities, it is more about the freedom to stay and live and prosper where they are from. And again, the populations I've worked with are from the Global South and who are indigenous descendants, Brown and Black people, who are otherwise, lower middle class or middle class people.
The way I choose to understand it is not like the United States is some immigration haven where people come to live "happily ever after." This is kind of where I wanted to get into your first question, which is the way I understand immigration in the US. It is about understanding settler colonialism, first and foremost, and then, global imperialism.
Sterling: Ok, ok, I was wondering if this was the direction that we were going to go...
Viktoria: No, it has to be. And again, that's how I've had to understand it after so many years of being confused. I don't want to fight for someone's right to be here if their experience is nothing but subjugation and trauma and harm, which a lot of folks I've worked with in a legal capacity. But again US immigration is about settler colonialism and global imperialism.
And when you think of immigration with that lens. You have to think about the border. You have to think about the fact that the first iteration of police in the U.S. was Border Patrol. It was police and white vigilantes who were protecting the "frontier" from Chinese immigrants, Indigenous people, and Black people. So that's kind of a good lens for thinking through these issues.
I think about immigration more broadly because it helps take us away from "all immigration is good immigration" and "all immigrants are treated equally in this country." That's a narrative we have to leave in the past. But also, I think there's like a broader question out there about how it's not just about getting people citizenship. I wish people could live where they wanted to live without problems.
But my ultimate goal in being in this movement for immigrants rights broadly is not to make more United States citizens. It's really to push on this point of the citizenship system is a hierarchy that's been set up in this context of settler colonialism and global imperialism, period.
“The citizenship system is a hierarchy that's been set up in this context of settler colonialism and global imperialism, period.”
Sterling: I am going to talk about my experience with the City of Philadelphia. They have partnered with CoreCivic to have a space for people experiencing homelessness.
But generally, CoreCivic doesn't have borders. It seems any prison that is built anywhere could be for any of us. So, what are your thoughts on how we articulate that type of abolitionist position to people in the United States especially to Black or Brown people?
Viktoria: Yeah. I find the term colonized people or colonized regions of the world expresses what's happening here. Because again, these are folks who are really impacted by this kind of harm currently in their home countries and then also, once they arrive to the United States, but also during the journey. People just don't fit into racial categories that we understand in the US.
But if you need a clear example, The GEO group and the private prison corporations' origins start from this one guy named "Whackenhut." It was started by this rogue FBI dropout way back in the day, who started opening private prisons during South African apartheid. That's where the Geo group starts. That can't illustrate the connections enough.
He was present in Central America during the genocide in Guatemala and El Salvador. Then, in the 1980s, the private prisons moved to the US where they proliferated along with tough-on-crime policies. We don't usually include immigration detention in the "mass incarceration" narrative or borders, but borders are a very carceral place.
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The borders extend. What is this massive ICE detention center in Western Pennsylvania, Moshannon Valley Processing Center, if not a border? If not a really violent border space? That's the only explanation for its existence.
Yeah, I think there is a whole conversation about how private immigration detention specifically comes to be and it completely originates in counterinsurgent moments in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
Sterling: Since we are here in Philadelphia and re-starting Abolition Journal, can we talk about how abolition that's coming here and thinking about how it intersects with migration. Could you talk about this ecosystem that’s been happening over the last few years and about how there's been an evolution in the work?
Viktoria: It's absolutely become a space where abolition is on the table constantly. And that's not true of many spaces. I think criminal justice reform comes to mind where there's a lot of people doing a lot of good work and it's a huge ecosystem, but there is a small corner of that ecosystem that believes that abolition is the way forward.
You have to call for the abolition of ICE detention if you know how this system functions. There is no way other way forward. National mainstream organizations have gotten behind this message to abolish ICE, defund them, or shut down ICE detention at a state level.
So to your question, I think it's become a lot less of a liberal space way back when I really started thinking about this and trying to organize around immigrants' rights. In 2012, it was a very liberal space where people said things like, "Well, your parents came the wrong way, but you're entitled to DACA because you had no idea that your parents did this illegally." Those were still the narratives of the "the hardworking good immigrant." We have absolutely moved way past those arguments.
People should be able to live where they want and they don't need to have a reason. But especially if you're from the Global South and been pushed out in such violent ways, centering that history is also something that's evolved in the last couple of years. More and more people are talking about push factors. Mainstream organizations are acknowledging what has happened in Central America during the Reagan and Clinton administrations. That's pretty unique to the immigration space.
Because you just have to reckon with that history if you want to be taken seriously by impacted communities. That history has to be on the table.
“Learning how to move forward in a strategic and meaningful way is our responsibility. If you're a citizen, if you have the privilege of citizenship, I think that a part of solidarity is education. Then it's showing up for people.”
Sterling: What do you think our readers could do to be in solidarity with people in their community? How do we act on solidarity from a national level to the individual, the everyday type of shit level.
Viktoria: Learn how ICE functions and what their enforcement trends are. And again, this is going to come from getting to know the impacted community in your area. This is going to include talking to people, showing up at meetings that your local grassroots organization is hosting, and getting on-the-ground information.
But the point is that immigration enforcement has been a constant in US history. From the time of colonization to the 1800s to the 1900s.
But learning how to move forward in a strategic and meaningful way is our responsibility. If you're a citizen, if you have the privilege of citizenship, I think that a part of solidarity is education. Then it's showing up for people.
It's also getting to know your neighbors. And I mean that in a very literal sense because you're not always going to be able to ask someone's citizenship status, but we should all be assuming in the same way as disability justice or gender justice. This is just a lens that we should do this work with. I assume that everyone and anyone could be impacted by ICE enforcement and detention. I don't need to know your citizenship status to know that I am a phone number you can have if you need. And I think if everyone kind of functions in that way, it becomes a lot easier to think about.
Sterling: What are your thoughts on Know-Your-Rights trainings?
Viktoria: You know, Know Your Rights trainings are always valuable because there are large swaths of non-citizen populations who really don't think they have rights, who really don't understand that they have people they can call when things happen. So to the extent that it's useful information for people to avoid harm, I think they're useful.
Though I would be lying if I said that Know Your Rights trainings were a foolproof way of protecting each other. We have to accept that we need to move beyond Know Your Rights and I know in conversation with some organizers, there's been conversation about the fact that "We need to stop talking about Know Your Rights and we need to start talking about how to support people in detention.” I just really love that as an example of being strategic and about the next steps and the way forward.
So Juntos houses a lot of the letter writing to Moshannon Valley Processing Center. While I was at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, we led this investigation against Moshannon and there's a ton of resources as a result of that investigation published on the ACLU Pennsylvania website documenting the civil rights and in my opinion, human rights abuses that were occurring there.
Get to know ICE detention centers in your state. That is such a super easy way to plug in to being in solidarity with folks that are inside. But also with people outside, families who are writing to their loved ones or who don't have their household breadwinner anymore. That is a very direct way to start showing up for a community that you otherwise wouldn't have been plugged into.
There's so much happening. There's a lot of good anti-ICE work happening, a lot of anti-detention work happening, which is mostly housed in PIC in Pennsylvania, the "Pennsylvania Immigrant Coalition."
The same number of people are being impacted by ICE enforcement. It's kind of business as usual year after year. So I think having that understanding is also an important piece of solidarity, it’s showing up and being productive and being strategic.
I do say I don't want to downplay too much Trump 2.0 because he is planning on massive expansion of ICE detention. And yet we haven't seen anything out of the ordinary yet, aside from again the high profile kind of arrests and deportations that make the news, [Deportation of purported Venezuelan gang members and Mahmoud Khalil mentioned in other parts of conversation].
It could be the case that ICE enforcement does actually ramp up whenever they secure more beds. And so I just want to make sure I'm clear about that.
Sterling: Yeah. Yeah, and maybe this will wrap it up. I know that people in general are just people who are concerned about public safety and you don't want to play that down.
I mean, of course, migrant detention doesn't create safety, of course. What would your vision of safety be in our communities through the lens of migrant justice?
Viktoria: I would say so, at least in the migrant detention context.
People are in ICE detention after they've already served their criminal sentence, if that's what they're in ICE detention for. 48% of people in ICE detention at the end of Biden's term had no criminal history.
They're there because the government has deemed that they are a flight risk and that they won't show up to immigration court. I don't think enough people know that there's this extrajudicial punishment for folks who are non-citizens.
We are safer when we have complete families and communities together. It's been proven time and time again that Immigrants deserve to be home and they deserve to be with their families.
And even if they need to fight for their immigration status, they should do so at home with their family with the support of their community. And ICE detention literally just doesn't have to exist. It doesn't, as one could argue that prisons serve this public safety purpose. I will hear it, and especially from community members. However, in terms of immigration detention, there's even less of an argument for its existence.
Inside of ICE detention centers there is nothing but harm. There is nothing but correctional officers selling fatal doses of drugs to people who are detained there. Sexual assault is rampant. Physical assault is rampant because they're housing people together who are in rival gangs, so it in itself is a violent space that does nothing for public safety or for the safety of the people there. It does quite the opposite.
“We are safer when we have complete families and communities together. It's been proven time and time again that Immigrants deserve to be home and they deserve to be with their families.”
Sterling: It's a hard thing. But being the "good person" means that there's a "bad person," so it's like if you're “saveable,” others are disposable. And nobody is disposable. I keep coming back to the need to stay together and to reject any sort of demarcation.
Viktoria: 100%. And I think sticking by that principle and you could probably relate, but that's what being a lawyer has instilled in me, a super deep commitment to “I don't care what my clients have done.” They are not disposable and they are not if everyone took that stance.
In defense of their neighbor, in defense of the neighbor's husband who's just been picked up by ICE. What would happen if everyone took that stance? I think it would be a very different terrain.
Viktoria Zerda (she/her) is an abolitionist attorney and clinical faculty fellow at Rutgers Law School. She is currently based in West Philadelphia, but is a proud Tejana, originally from San Antonio, Texas. Her experiences as a Mexican-American with deep roots in the South Texas border region informs her work and writing about anti-border struggles along the U.S.-Mexico border, and what it would mean to live in a world without settler-colonial borders. Formerly, at the American Civil LIberties Union of Pennsylvania, Viktoria represented people who suffered civil rights abuses at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).