Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence
February 6, 2025 at 3pm AZ/5pm ET/2pm PT. RSVP here.
Join us over Zoom this February 6th at 3pm AZ (5pm ET/2pm PT) for a conversation with Mizue Aizeki, co-Editor of the anthology Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence, with time for audience questions & reflection.
“Smart border” technologies rarely capture widespread public attention or outrage, but they are quietly remaking our world, scaling up colonial efforts of times past to divide desirables from undesirables, rich from poor, expat from migrant, and citizen from undocumented. Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence sheds light on how the high-tech system of borders developed and inspires stories of resistance.
Mizue Aizeki is the founder and Executive Director of the Surveillance Resistance Lab. For nearly twenty years, Mizue has been organizing to end the injustices at the intersections of the criminal and migration control systems—including criminalization, imprisonment, and exile. Prior to starting the Lab, Mizue was Senior Advisor at the Immigrant Defense Project where she led multiple campaigns to end the entanglement of local law enforcement and ICE policing—including the fights to end Secure Communities in New York State, and the New York City detainer campaigns—and also led the statewide ICE Out of Courts Campaign. Mizue has also built community defense programs to combat ICE raids. Mizue is a co-author of Homeland Security: Myths and Monsters (Common Notions, October 2024) and a co-editor of Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (Haymarket Books, February 2024). Mizue’s photographic work appears in Dying to Live, A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid (City Lights Books, 2008) and Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso, 2016).
Co-hosted with Scholarships AZ. En inglés con interpretacíon en español.
December 12th at 3pm AZ (2pm PT/5pm ET). RSVP here.
Join us over zoom this December 12th at 3pm AZ (2pm PT/5pm ET) for a conversation with Professor Nadia Y. Kim about their book Refusing Death: Immigrant Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in LA, with time for audience questions & reflection.
The book explores how Latin@, Asian, and Pacific Islander immigrant women in Los Angeles mobilize bodies, emotions, and caregiving to challenge environmental pollution and state racism that is killing them and their communities.
Profe Nadia Y. Kim is the George Sumey Jr Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University in Sociology. She centers empire, transnationality, neoliberalism, and the relationality of race, gender, class, and citizenship. Profe Kim is the author of two award winning books: Refusing Death, which examines Asian and Latina immigrant women's movements for clean air, and Imperial Citizens: Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA, which explores how immigrants navigate U.S. imperial racism. Her co-edited book, Disciplinary Futures, considers how the social sciences benefit from engaging with critical ethnic studies.
Co-hosted with Scholarships AZ. En inglés con interpretacíon en español.
Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border
October 17th at 3pm AZ (6pm ET). RSVP here.
At BorderLinks we highlight people's power to affect change and shape our collective future, one with freedom of movement and dignity for all. Join us over zoom this October 17th at 3pm PT (6pm ET) for a conversation with Professor Ieva Jusionyte about their book Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border, with time for audience questions & reflection.
Exit Wounds offers a deep dive into how and why guns from the U.S. that continually flow into Mexico are fueling cycles of violence, migration, and border repression.
Profe Ieva Jusionyte is a legal anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University. She is the author of several books including Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border (2018) and Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border (2024). Jusionyte is a member of the Advisory Committee of Global Action on Gun Violence and an EMT-paramedic who volunteered as emergency responder in Massachusetts, Florida, and Arizona.
Co-hosted with Scholarships AZ. En inglés con interpretacíon en español.
Unbuild Walls & The Case for Open Borders
June 13th, doors open at 6 pm, book talk starts at 6:30 pm, reception and signing at 8 pm. RSVP.
We're thrilled to host a conversation between Silky Shah & John Washington about their new books, as well as have community organizers connect themes to their local efforts in the borderlands, and time for audience questions & reflection. English/Spanish Interpretation available.
Silky Shah, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Read more and order here
John Washington, The Case for Open Borders. Read more and order here
Community Panel: Sebastian Quinac, Alianza Indigena Sin Fronteras; Dora Rodriguez, Salvavision; Yvette Borja, No New Jail Coalition and Radio Cachimbona; and Cecilio Ortiz, Paisanos Unidos and Southside Workers Center.
Unbuild Walls- In the wake of post-9/11 xenophobia, Obama’s record-level deportations, Trump’s immigration policies, and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, the US remains entrenched in a circular discourse regarding migrant justice. As organizer Silky Shah argues in Unbuild Walls, we must move beyond building nicer cages or advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. Our only hope for creating a liberated society for all, she insists, is abolition.
Unbuild Walls dives into US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, from the last forty years up to the present, showing how the prison-industrial complex and immigration enforcement are intertwined systems of repression. Incorporating historical and legal analyses, Shah’s personal experience as an organizer, as well as stories of people, campaigns, organizations, and localities that have resisted detention and deportation, Shah assesses the movement’s strategies, challenges, successes, and shortcomings. Featuring a foreword by Amna A. Akbar, Unbuild Walls is an expansive and radical intervention, bridging the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.
The Case for Open Borders- A beautifully-written, broadly accessible, and forthright argument for a solution to the migration crisis: open the gates.
Because of restrictive borders, human beings suffer and die. Closed borders force migrants seeking safety and dignity to journey across seas, trudge through deserts, and clamber over barbed wire. In the last five years alone, at least 60,000 people have died or gone missing while attempting to cross a border. As we deny, cast out, and crack down, we have stripped borders of their creative potential — as lines of contact, catalyst, and blend — turning our thresholds into barricades.
Brilliant and provocative, The Case for Open Borders deflates the mythology of national security through border lockdowns by revisiting their historical origins; it counters the conspiracies of immigration’s economic consequences; it urgently considers the challenges of climate change beyond the boundaries of narrow national identities.
Read more here.
John Washington is a staff writer at Arizona Luminaria, a community-focused media outlet where he writes about the border, climate change, democracy, and more. He has written for The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Harper's, The Intercept, and other outlets. His first book, The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the US-Mexico Border and Beyond, was published in 2020 by Verso Books. Washington is also a translator of books by Anabel Hernandez, Sandra Rodriquez Nieto, and others. His most recent translations include The Hollywood Kid by Óscar Martínez and Juan Martínez, and Blood Barrios by Alberto Arce, which won a PEN Translates Award. Both were co-translated along with Daniela Ugaz. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, and tweets @jbwashing.
Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the United States. She is also the author of the forthcoming book Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket, 2024). Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11 and has worked as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over twenty years.Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Truthout, Teen Vogue, Inquest, and The Forge and in the edited volumes, The Jail is Everywhere (Verso, 2024), Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (Haymarket Books, 2024), and Transformative Planning (Black Rose Books, 2020). She has also appeared in numerous national and local media outlets including The Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC.
Rising Into liberatory Futures
Thank you to all who attended! For everyone else, it’s not too late to celebrate this BorderLinks anniversary with us: 35 years of learning, teaching, reflecting, and organizing from the borderlands for freedom of movement!
You are an important part of what makes us who we are. We are highlighting our space as a community resource for movement work in the borderlands. Join us to honor where we’ve been, share stories, and build comunidad for where we’re going next. BorderLinks has a new mission and vision and we need our community to make it a reality! Donate to our 35th anniversary campaign
Past Virtual Events - Register to Receive a Recording
BorderLinks Pláticas Series
We are celebrating our 35th anniversary! BorderLinks is a response to the profound dehumanization, and legal and extralegal violence migrants face. Central to the BorderLinks mission is the use of popular education to transform the world through critical awareness, reflection, and informed collective action. We invite you to deepen your understanding with us through our BorderLinks Pláticas Series. Join us in discussion with our guest speakers as we explore the themes of community resistance through art and activism. Check out our event schedule, learn more, and register using the links below.
OCTOBER 11, 2023
A virtual discussion with Profe Silvia Rodriguez Vega, author of Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance among Immigrant Children.
Drawing Deportation illustrates how the children of immigrants use art to grapple with issues of citizenship, state violence, and belonging.Young immigrant children often do not have the words to express how their lives are shaped by issues of immigration, legal status, and state-sanctioned violence. Yet they are able to communicate its effects on them using art.
October 11th, 2023, 3:00pm PT/6pm ET
NOVEMBER 8TH, 2023
A virtual discussion with Fronteristxs: Art and Change.
We are a collective of artists in New Mexico working to end migrant detention and abolish the prison industrial complex. We imagine and fight for a world of liberation for all. The speakers include Dr. Bernadine Hernández, Martín Wannam, hazel batrezchavez, and Szu-Han Ho
November 8th, 2023 @ 3pm AZ + NM (2pm PT/5 pm ET)
DECEMBER 13TH, 2023
A virtual discussion with Dr. Michelle Tellez, co-editor of The Chicana M(other)work Anthology.
The Chicana M(other)work Anthology weaves together emerging scholarship and testimonios by and about self-identified Chicana and Women of Color mother-scholars, activists, and allies who center mothering as transformative labor through an intersectional lens. Contributors provide narratives that make feminized labor visible and that prioritize collective action and holistic healing for mother-scholars of color, their children, and their communities within and outside academia.
December 13th, 2023 @ 3pm AZ + NM (2pm PT/5 pm ET)
About BorderLinks
Humanity is living through a moment of extreme climate change, global displacement, and militarization. BorderLinks offers transformative, migrant justice education. We highlight people’s power to affect change. At BorderLinks, we see, we think, we act. Our participants collectively learn, teach, reflect, share resources, and organize for liberation. Located 60 miles from the AZ-Sonora border, we believe in the power of this unique, and historically, culturally and demographically diverse region. We contribute to advocacy efforts and social movements. At the heart of BorderLinks, we center those most directly impacted by immigration policies and others working for systemic change. BorderLinks hosts virtual and in-person workshops and week-long delegations with high school, university, faith, and civic groups from Tucson, the US, and worldwide. This year, we’re celebrating our 35th anniversary!
