The following interview was conducted in August/September 2025 for Issue 44 of The Abolitionist Newspaper by Critical Resistance, published in December 2025. Check out project here & support the project with a paid subscription to sponsor free subscriptions for people locked up in jails, prisons and detention centers.
Editors’ Note: In this conversation, Michael Nishimura of The Abolitionist Editorial Collective and member of Critical Resistance’s Los Angeles chapter speaks with two currently detained organizers, Oscar and Jonathan, and two outside organizers, RA and Eunice, about the fight to free migrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and for migrant justice. Based on their lived experience of imprisonment and migrant detention, they discuss what state repression currently looks like on the inside, how cross-wall organizing is essential in the struggle to end migrant detention, and why resistance against the policing and detention of migrants is a central (but often siloed) part of the fight to dismantle the prison industrial complex (PIC). Since this conversation happened, Oscar and Jonathan have been transferred to the California City Detention Center.
MN: Can you tell us a little bit about your involvement with organizing for the migrant justice movement and how you became involved in the organizing work that you do?
O: My name is Oscar, I have been detained at Golden State Annex Immigrant Detention Facility in McFarland, California, for eight months. I’m a native of Mexico and I’ve been in the US since I was five years old. I’m trying to be a leader and an advocate for the immigrant community here.
J: My name is Jonathan. I also come from Mexico. I was brought here when I was two years old; the US is the only home I know. I was previously organizing in Golden State Annex, and I have been detained for over two years in Mesa Verde Detention Facility in Bakersfield, California, trying to organize people here with assistance from organizations on the outside.
RA: I’m RA, an inside-outside organizer. I got involved with the movement when I was detained at Mesa Verde ICE Detention Center in early 2022. Through another detained leader, I was able to connect with migrant justice organizations that worked on my freedom campaign. Once I was released in early 2023, I started to do outside organizing and advocacy work, and now I help coordinate campaigns for detainee freedom, deportation defense, and family support.E: Hi, I’m Eunice. I’m an organizer with Pangea Legal Services, a nonprofit that provides immigration legal services/deportation defense. We do policy advocacy and organizing toward realizing our vision of everybody having the right to move freely through the world, the right to papers, dignity, and respect. I was born in Mexico and migrated to the US when I was five with my family. Though I now have the privilege of citizenship, I was undocumented for 29 years. I do this work because growing up, I lived with the fear of deportation and being separated from my family, and I believe that everybody should be able to live here with permanent protection
MN: What role does cross-wall organizing play in our struggles to defend migrant communities, stop migrant detention, and resist deportation? How have you been talking with others in the detention facility about tactics–what can be done based on the conditions and what you all are willing to do to achieve those things?
O: Cross-wall organizing is a crucial part of resisting while being detained. The system tries to take advantage of people who are not informed of their rights or their access to resources. Having lines of communication to organizations like Pangea or California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice (CCIJ) is huge so us inside advocates can connect and pass on critical information to our dorm-mates. We’re seeing people getting transferred within a day’s notice sometimes, so we are trying to prepare people and fight this. We are organizing folks to do what they can, whether it’s filling out an appeal form or translating a declaration, to make our collective demands to better our situation.
J: When I first got here, just like Oscar said, I saw many individuals who didn’t know English being mistreated, and I felt that I needed to speak up. Very quickly I became the person in the dorms who everyone was coming to and asking questions, when I didn’t even know how to help myself. I was coming from state prison, and I had no clue about immigration law. But then I met people from CCIJ, and we would ask them the questions from people inside, help people inside with getting phone access, and discuss the conditions inside. Through connecting with different organizations like CCIJ and Pangea, we’ve been able to accomplish a lot. In 2024, we had Mesa Verde and Golden State Annex on hunger strike, as well as another detention center in Washington, and then later on we had folks in Desert View Annex in Adelanto, who took action because they heard in the media about what we were doing.
RA: For cross-wall organizing, it’s crucial to have directly-impacted organizers who have been in detention and know how the system works. There will always be some differences organizing on the inside, but we need unity to advance forward to combat this system and really focus on the one evil that is targeting all of us. For me right now on the outside, it’s important to teach people how we went about organizing our resistance on the inside. We pass that information down to detained folks, and then we can learn from what folks are doing now as things evolve. There is a need for more exposure and firsthand testimony of impacted people, but right now, it’s a little difficult, even for me, because we are the most vulnerable and could easily be detained again.
MN: I’m thinking about what RA just mentioned about the difficulty of communication in and out of the detention facility, retaliation for speaking out, and other forms of repression. It’s remarkable how folks organized across detention facilities to go on multiple hunger strikes over the years despite knowing the consequences, and it speaks to what folks were willing to put on the line to fight for their freedom. In this current moment, how are you seeing the intensification of censorship and repression?
E: It’s wild how much repression we’re seeing. We see how the administration is closely monitoring immigrants’ social media, and anything that they say that doesn’t align with the administration is going to be taken very seriously when they’re trying to apply for citizenship or adjust their status. Even our organizations, nonprofits, legal services providers are under attack. The administration came out with a memo earlier this year basically claiming that we’re here to help immigrants commit fraud. So, it’s been extra challenging. We want to make sure that folks’ voices are amplified, but we also know they risk retaliation from guards. But even so, people are willing to speak out and fight isolation.
J: We’re not getting free phone calls, which we’ve been fighting to get for a while. It was put into law in California (Senate Bill 1008) that people in jails, prisons, and detention centers should be given free phone calls. But because immigrant detention is federal jurisdiction, they say they don’t have to follow those guidelines. That’s a part of how we’re all getting censored, because we need to talk to not just our family and loved ones but also to organize and speak out against what’s happening. We have seen how they try to censor our voices, put us in solitary confinement, or transfer us when we take action and do labor strikes or hunger strikes. One organizer here was on a hunger strike, and he was sent to a facility in Texas where they tried to force-feed him with tubes in his nose. So sometimes we have to choose our battles, but we have to keep going to get people released.
O: Just to add, repression has had a great impact in another way: I want to see my family, but not everyone has immigration status; with all the ICE raids, it’s almost impossible for them to visit from six hours away because of that fear that if they get close to a place like this, or an area that’s hot with immigration activity, they might get picked up themselves.
RA: When people stand up and speak up, there’s always going to be some retaliation. The guards basically act with impunity. Last year, two folks were transferred to Washington while they were on a hunger strike. One returned because of their advocacy, but we still don’t know what happened to the other person. Another hunger striker was sharing a testimony for a press release through GlobalTel Link (GTL) video, and because it was being monitored, he was taken to the hole for that. These are all folks that are fighting for better conditions and for their freedom, and they’re being punished for it.
MN: Thank you all for sharing what is happening. I want to expand on something that folks touched on, which is how the struggle against migrant detention, ICE raids, and deportation is a part of the struggle to abolish the PIC, yet, some don’t see these as synonymous, leading to some friction and silos within the movement. What are some of the connections and challenges of integrating anti-detention work with other anti-imprisonment and anti-policing work?
J: I see everything linked with each other, like a clock. Everything’s connected. For example, I got picked up from prison and brought straight over here, so I never got to experience any sort of freedom. Conditions here are like prison, so why don’t we have similar regulations for release? I know immigration law is very different from criminal law, but these systems are connected because people come directly here from prison. We have to make these connections to put these things into more conversation, to stop transfers before they even happen.
E: Even though migrant facilities are considered civil detention, they are modeled after the carceral system. Folks have shared that detention conditions are as poor or worse than prisons or jails. We’ve had laws for decades that criminalize people of color, citizens and noncitizens alike, and feed people into both systems in the name of “public safety”. This harmful narrative of “good” versus “bad” immigrants is tied to thinking that people who have convictions are disposable and only certain people are worthy of what we all desire: Freedom, safety, family, and health. As organizers, we can expose the real harm of how they feed off each other. That’s what happened with Mesa Verde and Golden State; they were former prisons that the community organized to shut down, but they were repurposed. It is a misuse of taxpayer money to keep investing billions in policing, imprisonment, detention centers, surveillance, ICE, and the militarization of the border instead of what the community actually needs. We see the impact on all of our communities when their access to healthcare and housing and food will be impacted due to that money being taken away and invested into ICE.
This harmful narrative of “good” versus “bad” immigrants is tied to thinking that people who have convictions are disposable and only certain people are worthy of what we all desire: Freedom, safety, family, and health. As organizers, we can expose the real harm of how they feed off each other.
RA: Immigration detention is always going to be what it’s meant to be–it’s just an oppressive system that cuts corners to save money and give people the lowest quality of life. It’s similar with imprisonment; as Eunice mentioned, Golden State Annex used to be a prison. Now the detention center in California City, another former prison, is being operated by CoreCivic. The facility was not even prepared to receive transfers, and people weren’t even getting their medication. Families haven’t been able to contact their loved ones. So, when we’re thinking about abolition or closing down prisons, we have to make sure they aren’t able to be refitted for immigration detention. There are other facilities that are still in “warm shutdown”, like in Tracy or Dublin, where they want to reopen them for migrant detention. Whether it’s a state prison or a detention facility, the infrastructure and the repression is the same. Migrant detention looks like imprisonment in all the ways that prison looks like prison. You’re in the immigration system, but you’re getting jail clothes, jail shoes, and getting paid a dollar a day to do janitorial work or kitchen work, just like the prison system that many are getting transferred from as a form of double punishment after their sentence. So, organizers are demanding divestment from the prison and immigration detention systems and investment into communities to make them healthier and so they can thrive.
MN: I appreciate you all making these connections, particularly the necessity of an abolitionist praxis for our resistance. We are seeing collaboration between state prison and migrant detention infrastructures and so many prisons in warm shutdown turned into detention facilities. Is there anything that you want to share with comrades currently in migrant detention, in terms of actions, solutions, strategies, and tactics?
RA: For non-US citizens who are in the criminal legal system, there are legal tools like the Convention Against Torture, post-conviction relief, or a habeas corpus petition that could help. There are also avenues like clemency and pardons, but many of those are being denied. The California governor, who claims to be for rehabilitation, did not want to sign the Voiding Inequality and Seeking Inclusion for Our Immigrant Neighbors (VISION) Act or the Harmonizing Our Measures for Equality (HOME) Act, legislation that would have prevented ICE transfers. So, we need to use different strategies to fight collectively from the inside out. I also wanted to mention the impacts on the Southeast Asian community right now. Many who have been released and building themselves up on the outside are being called in for ICE check-ins and then being detained. A lot of these folks are refugees and are being deported to countries that are not even their country of origin. This is the system that’s targeting all migrants of color that we’re fighting to dismantle.
J: To people that are in detention or at risk of ending up in detention, I want to let them know that we’re fighting for you. We’re thinking about everybody: my neighbors who live next to me and the people at the other dorms. To fight us being censored, we need to be in conversation with organizers from different states about the issues that they’re having trying to organize with people on the inside. I want them to know that we are using all possible tactics to fight for their freedom.
O: One thing I want to share with the whole immigration community is to not procrastinate on anything. If people need to submit certain documents or you need to get informed about certain laws that are changing that may affect your case, don’t wait until the last minute. Take action to get organized and to fight for our demands and our release. Everything is possible.
About the Authors:
- Jonathan (he/him)is a detained organizer at the Mesa Verde Detention Facility in Bakersfield, CA.
- Oscar (he/him)is a detained organizer at the Golden State Annex Immigrant Detention Facility in McFarland, CA.
- RA (he/him) is a formerly imprisoned (in CDCr) and formerly detained (in the immigration system) activist and organizer with the Dignity Not Detention coalition, both inside and outside of detention walls.
- Eunice (she/her/ella) is an organizer and co-director of Pangea Legal Services, a nonprofit that does immigration legal services/deportation defense, policy advocacy, and cross-wall organizing.