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Thinking (and Moving) Beyond Walls and Cages: Bridging Immigrant Justice and Anti-Prison Organizing in the United States

Walls and cages–the shorthand the authors use for U.S. migration policy and penal policy–facilitate contemporary processes of racialized dispossession and capitalist restructuring. The goals of this article are twofold: the authors trace some of the geographic scales of mobility and immobility at which walls and cages work; and they link the violent deformations marshaled (and entrenched) through these sites to a transformative, abolitionist alternative. Against the violently deformed meanings of justice, community, and safety that walls and cages produce, the authors promote abolitionist strategies for moving from prisons’ “bedspaces” to the homes and cities where people can freely rest and dream.

mass incarceration, immigrant detention, migration policy, social death, border militarization, right to the city, abolition

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 36:2 (2009): 85-103