What does this look like on the ground, and what are people doing about it now?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
Deportation is not an abstraction, and the people facing it are not waiting to be rescued. This lens is about what is actually being done: know-your-rights work that assumes an ICE agent at the door, deportation defense that makes the law legible to people without lawyers, day laborers organizing as workers, sanctuary congregations breaking federal law in public, and Black immigrant organizing that neither the immigration movement nor the racial-justice movement has reliably carried. It also includes an episode this theme refuses to soften: the farmworkers’ union ran its own border patrol.
Anchor questions
- If ICE knocked on your neighbor’s door tonight, what would your block actually do?
- What does a community that defends itself look like, as opposed to one that is advocated for?
- The UFW ran a wet line against migrants at the border. What do you do with a hero who did that?
- Black immigrants are deported on criminal grounds at nearly twice the overall rate. Which movement is supposed to be carrying that, and why is neither?
- Sanctuary meant breaking the law and saying so. What would your group actually risk?
Materials
All free unless marked otherwise.
Know your rights, and defend each other
- United We Dream, Know Your Rights. Free multilingual materials from the largest immigrant-youth-led network, written for the encounter rather than the seminar. Free: unitedwedream.org
- Mijente and Just Futures Law, Deportation Defense Toolkit: ¡El Pueblo Se Defiende! Makes deportation law legible to people who are not lawyers, so that a community can defend its own. Free: Part 1 and Part 2
- NDLON. Day laborers organizing as workers, including their own radio station. Free: ndlon.org
- UndocuBlack Network. Black immigrant organizing, and the constituency both movements keep dropping between them. Free: undocublack.org
Sanctuary
- Southside Presbyterian Church, “The Sanctuary Movement.” The congregation that started it in 1982, telling its own story: more than 13,000 Central Americans sheltered, fleeing death squads their own government was funding, in open and announced defiance of federal law. The federal government prosecuted church workers for it. Free: southsidepresbyterian.org
The farmworkers, honestly
- Duke Human Rights Center, “Chavez, the UFW and the ‘Wetback’ Problem.” In 1973 the UFW ran a “wet line” along the border, its own members stopping migrants from crossing, with beatings reported on the Mexican side, and in the mid-1970s the union reported undocumented workers to the INS. This is not a smear from the union’s enemies; it is documented. Free: humanrights.fhi.duke.edu
- United Farm Workers, “Cesar Chavez and UFW: longtime champions of immigration reform.” The union’s answer: Chavez opposed strikebreakers, not immigrants, and the UFW took undocumented members. Read it beside the account above and decide for yourself. Free: ufw.org
- Ernesto Galarza (1905 to 1984), Merchants of Labor (1964). The Bracero exposé by the organizer who helped end the program, written from inside the fight. This is why a labor argument against guest work is not automatically nativism, and it makes the UFW question harder rather than easier. Free to borrow: archive.org
Where the two themes meet
- UndocuBlack Network, M4BL, and BAJI, Criminalizing Blackness (2022). Black immigrants are 7.2 percent of the noncitizen population and 76 percent of them are deported on criminal grounds, against 45 percent of immigrants overall. The 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 immigration acts are not two systems meeting; they are one machine, and this report shows it working. Free: undocublack.org
A note on method
Much of this lens is organizing material from committed organizations, and it is written to recruit as well as to inform. That is not a defect, but name it in the room. The UFW section is here deliberately: a movement that cannot look at what its own heroes did is not doing political education, it is doing hagiography. Read the accusation and the defense together, in that order, and let the room sit in the discomfort rather than resolving it.
Further reading
For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.
- Mijente, No Tech for ICE: resources. A free comic and workshop guide on the surveillance-technology contracts behind deportation, plus organizing materials. Committed campaign standpoint. Free: notechforice.com
- Zinn Education Project, Teaching about immigration. Free lessons and role plays, including ‘Deportations on Trial’ and material on the Depression-era expulsion of up to two million Mexicans and Mexican Americans, many of them citizens. Free with registration. Free: zinnedproject.org
- Bill Bigelow, Jeff Edmundson, The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration. The standard critical-pedagogy classroom text for this theme, from Rethinking Schools. Role plays and interactive lessons that adapt directly to a study circle. Free: zinnedproject.org
- Smithsonian National Museum of American History, The Bracero Program: A Historical Investigation. A free primary-source investigation packet on the guest-worker program, built to be run with a group rather than lectured at one. Free: americanhistory.si.edu
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially detention testimony in detainees’ own unmediated voices, which is the hardest thing here to source honestly, and organizing material from outside the United States.