-----

About the talk:
For over two decades, federal and local policies have consolidated a carceral architecture of migration detention and deportation by using racialized and gendered fears about crime. Donald Trump, swept into power by the fear of “migrant crime,” is using it to great effect. Monisha Das Gupta’s book, All of Us or None: Migrant Organizing in an Era of Deportation and Dispossession, looks at the cross-racial abolitionist politics of a segment of the migrant justice movement that directly defends US-based Black migrants and migrants of color labeled “criminal aliens” and then deported. This segment works closely with the prison abolition movement. The book frames deportation as an expression of settler carcerality. In doing so, Das Gupta stages a conversation between critical migration and critical Indigenous studies. As a migrant justice activist and migration scholar, Das Gupta documents the work of (im)migrant-led organizations and coalitions that span Black, Latinx, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities in New York City, Los Angeles, and Long Beach. She tracks the anti-carceral stories and strategies activists develop to mobilize the ethos of “all of us or none.”

About the speaker:
Monisha Das Gupta holds a joint appointment as professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is the author of All of Us or None: Migrant Organizing in an Era of Deportation and Dispossession (Duke University Press, 2024), and Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States (Duke University Press, 2007). Monisha is deeply involved in local movements for labor and migrant rights.

-----