Death Panel Care Networks, Abolition, and the Fight Against Border Policing (DP x S26)
Sep 24, 2026
Historian A. Naomi Paik, author of Bans, Walls, Raids, and Sanctuary, and immigrant-rights organizer Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, examine border policing as a machinery of illness, detention, and social fragmentation. They discuss abolitionist sanctuary, resisting deservingness narratives, defending communities against raids, and rebuilding care networks through mutual aid.
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The Border As A Counterinsurgent Health Regime
- Border policing preemptively weakens people’s capacity to resist by making them poorer, sicker, less mobile, and more precarious.
- Its goal is not merely suffering but reducing the time, strength, security, and relationships available for collective struggle.
The Border Exists Far Beyond The Borderline
- The border regime combines prisons, militarization, detention, policing, local government, and international agreements rather than existing only at a geographic boundary.
- Its interior and global extensions include migrant policing inside the United States, third-country agreements, and border enforcement abroad.
How Immigration Detention Became A Prison Industry
- Modern immigration detention grew through anti-Black racism, the war on drugs, neoliberal political economy, and the expansion of prison capacity.
- Private detention companies and struggling counties treated immigrant incarceration as an economic development opportunity.
