Shadows of Liberty: Immigrant Detention, Incarceration, and the Demand for Dignity in the United States

The Trump administration is terrorizing our communities with mass deportations, militarized raids, and brutal detainment, tearing families apart and unlawfully withholding immigrants in inhumane conditions. As historian Ana Raquel Minian points out, this is only the latest chapter in a saga in which immigrants to the United States have been held without recourse to their constitutional rights. This imperative panel will trace back to the 1800s with Minian’s In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States, which braids together the vivid stories of four migrants seeking to escape the turmoil of their homeland for the promise of America: a Chinese refugee, a European war bride, a Cuban exile, and a Central American asylum seeker. Personal accounts give this history a human face, as with The Poet and the Silk Girl: A Memoir of Love, Imprisonment, and Protest,Satsuki Ina’s memoir documenting her parents’ forcible removal from their home, their incarceration in wartime American concentration camps, and the generational struggle of Japanese Americans who fought for the restoration of their rights and clung to their full humanity in the face of adversity. As she traces the legacies of trauma, she connects her family’s ordeal to modern-day mass incarceration at the U.S.-Mexico border, which is what Daniel A. Olivas bases his modern retelling of “Waiting for Godot” on. Through a darkly comic absurdist lens, Waiting for Godínez: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts features the forever-waiting character Jesús, who is kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents each night to be deported and thrown into a cage that is left unlocked. Though these “black sites” of rightlessness exist out of view from the average American, their reach extends into our lives, all the way to the gradual unraveling of the right to bail and the presumption of innocence. Veronica Granillo brings a lawyer’s perspective from her experience working on affirmative and defensive asylum cases, U Visas, residency, and naturalization as the Senior Staff Attorney at East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, a community organization that provides services to support low-income immigrants and people fleeing violence and persecution. Moderated by Piper Kerman, justice reform activist and author of Orange is the New Black, the narratives of this panel allow us to see how the changing political climate surrounding immigration has played out in individual lives, imploring us to reconsider this country’s policies in light of the fact that we are all human and deserve respect, dignity, and democracy as we make our way in this confusing and often indifferent world.