Drawing from over twenty years of on-the-ground activism, this striking book offers an organizer’s perspective on the fight for immigrant rights, making a bold case for prison abolition.

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 Unbuilding 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.

Unbuilding Walls dives into the last 40 years of US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, showing how the prison industrial complex and detention 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. She highlights the limitations of reformist tactics, explaining how the "good" vs. "bad" immigrant paradigm has undermined the broader movement for racial justice and advanced fear-mongering around the US-Mexico border. Through challenging criminalization and embracing abolition, immigrant justice advocates have been able to reduce detention and deportations of immigrants in the US. Ultimately, Unbuilding Walls is an expansive and radical intervention in that discourse, bridging the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.