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In the new book, now justice in the shadows, alina das, Immigration Rights activist, lawyer, and professor at nyu school of law shows that trump antiimmigration stand is the lathe iteration of the idea of the criminal alien. Align welcome, alina and dara. I want to i mean, understanding this is kind of a weird situation, obviously for you not being down here in d. C. , also that we are living through a time when it seems luke there was only one story that matters and working on a book that is but weve been talking over the last few days and i know in fact what you and your colleagues have been working on right now [inaudible] extension of the work you have been doing into the coronavirus era and since so much of your book, and one of the real d things i appreciate is how much grounded can you maybe talk through the cases youre working on right now and how this the immigration system look during a pandemic from the perspective of the people youre trying to reach . Guest sure. And thank you so much for being here and thanks to politics and prose, and to all of you who i wish i could see but cant right now. Really appreciate you taking a moment, especially during this hero risk horrific time to be here and hear is chat but the things this book covers. Sadly enough to say when i started writing the book i never imagined it would come out during a pandemic. I never imagined that our immigration system would quite look and feel the way it is looking and feeling right now, which is to say a lot because i had a very low level of expectations to what we could see, i particularly from the Current Administration when it comes to immigration policy. Could never imagine things to be quite like this and i have to say sadly, the theme is i cover in the book are real where more relevant than ever given what were hearing from the white house, from federal immigration agencies like i. C. E. , which is immigrant and customs enforcement, the folks going to peoples homes and arresting people and really in charge of what is called interior enforcement as well as customs and border protection. People i care very deeply about our being affected under cobra 19 in this pandemic. It is the way in which a better government policy is to essentially devalue human life in the name of Public Safety. And it angers me because my clients and the people have a privilege of working with and for, and for many years, they are members of the public, they live in our communities, they were living their lives just fine before eyes came knocking on the door in the Early Morning hours to take them away, they were the ones dropping their kids off at school when ice would come in and there is a Public Safety rhetoric in the defense of these actions and its prompted me too write the book in the first place. To see the way in which you can keep over for 30000 people locked up in jails knowing that they are at such heightened risk for contracting a deadly disease. In claimants because of Public Safety when this is an immigration system, people are being held, we made a choice for very bad reason to criminalize and we never needed to do that in the first place. I think the behavior of the government right now is shameful on so many Different Levels and immigrants have taken the pay and even including many of my clients. Human talk about yes we can, it is a 26yearold husband and father, i had the privilege of meeting him through his Immigration Lawyer who has been representing him for a number of years, she brought in the immigrant, i teach there and she brought them in to my clinic and she represents to try to get him attention. I have to say, his case exemplifies so much of what is wrong with the system, there is a great profile that really talks about how he ended up facing deportation as part of the pipeline which he shared to the United States when he was just six years old, he ended up growing up in the bronx with his family, he was in the poorest Congressional District in the country and he quickly found himself from an honor student into somebody who is kicked out of school in his neighborhood as a black man, he is an immigrant from began via. And so it did not take long before he ended up getting juvenile offenses and that was his entry point into the system of the pipeline. But he served his time and he changed his life and he was ready to move on. But because of the way our Immigration Law works, instead of being able to get the Second Chance that he earned, he was into a new pipeline the deportation pipeline. Thats where he remains today, i decided to write this book in 2017 and actually that same month is when ice hit. Today is the 995 of his detention. Our government has been locking up the commands of that and what is more outrageous about his case, five days after he was initially locked up by ice, he found out his partner, a u. S. Citizen who lives in the bronx was pregnant with their first child. Even though ive had discussions to release him, they refused and that little girl has grown up, she just had her second bullfight earlier this month, she gripping her entire life with having her dad by her side. That is what immigration policies are. To make matters worse, we did have a moment where we thought the tide would turn earlier this year thanks to incredible advocacy by his family, the community in newark, the bronx defenders and Governor Cuomo granted one of the very rare pardons. February this year at conviction, the adult conviction which was for an unarmed robbery, he maintained his innocent to get out of bikers, young man, that happened a very long time ago and he listened any pardon him. We thought we could go to ice and he said weve been keeping him locked up because of this, we dont have to, were going to let them go. And he did not care. They gave us a one page decision saying they were going to continue to lock him up because of his conviction without mentioning that he had been pardon. That is the democracy we stuck in. And before people say if youre an immigrant, thats what you get, the important thing to remember again is that he somebody who did what was expected of him, he changed his life and its not just him, its entire family, his life and his child who are suffering because of the governments. And the fact that even today with the pandemic, despite our request for his release, he is sitting in the jail was hi the epicenter for the covid19 cases, the first place in this country that had a positive covid19 case among people by ice, he remains there and thus far neither ice will release him, thankfully we will keep fighting and a shout out to my students, amy joseph and cynthia with sophia and myself over the last several months, we will keep fighting until someone listens, it should not have to be this hard and his life is worth far more than what our government is doing to him, its a real tragedy. This thing about for that matter, many of the places that you talk through, once you start hearing and recognizing the same kind of things in the history, places keep coming up like listening to young people, some of the stuff that you have in the book between state and local law getting moved an accident where the same system ends up incurring the consequences for someone, then realizes that it did not necessarily mean to do all of that and tries to fight back. To what extent do you see this as a history of intentional harm versus the history of tragic . I think its a little bit of both, it depends on what actors were looking at. My point of my book is to say weve been looking at immigration policy and the debate in the wrong way. The title of the book is no justice in the shadow and part of the reason they decided to call it that was because we are constantly being told even by folks who are in aggressive movement, people who dont like the consequences and realize its too harsh, we are causally being told that what we need to do is to make sure that that certain immigrant to come out of the shadows and who deserves to come out of the shadow. In reality, the question we should be asking is a question that history teaches us to ask, why though shadows exist in the first place. And its absolutely intentional, if you go back into the history of our immigration system when you started creating federal law around immigration, that whole project is whats tied up with antiblackness, colonialism, really the way that we treat people of color and immigrants, placed into the hierarchy and so you see the First Federal laws of these choices that were making that are intentional come up during the time where the borders of the United States are changing, chinese immigrants were coming in and initially welcome for their labor and during an economic downturn and becomes demonized. Very quickly we have a racialized criminalization, a lot of people are familiar with the chinese exclusionary act to be in one of the first Immigration Laws and going back to the intentional choice, even earlier than that was something i talked about in the book a law in 1875 called the page act which specifically when youre testing the waters instead of going against chinese immigrants, they talked about convicts and the use language that antiimmigrant folks in california had really adopted as ways of trying to drive Chinese People out on the stereotype. This is a constant theme in the book from the history we see it starts when immigrants are being associated with criminality, its a rhetoric. Then you see laws that criminalize behavior, this is true of drug laws, or border, there was a time when some of them are not considered criminal acts and when they got associated with people of color and immigrants, thats when we see laws that treat is these as crime. Much of a group of people who are criminal and aliens, sometimes we have this category that starts to justify huge Deportation Machinery. That cycles right back into the rhetoric. We see that cycle throughout unfiltered day which is very intentional, at the same time we see groups like you mentioned who can step back and look at pieces of the machinery and recognize that theres a wrong, thanks to incredible activist and others, we have a much better understanding for example of the real racist foundation of our legal system. There is a much better conversation, it certainly by no means perfect in a much better conversation that were having today about the unintended and intended consequences of the legal system and how its supposed to deal with as a policy which is really wonderful and gratifying to hear but yet when we push it forward, we say we can recognize that every police encounter, arrest charge conviction, sentence in a criminal legal system is racially charged with their discriminatory element that runs throughout the entirety and how we have that conversation about deportation and people assume, youve been arrested or if you have a conviction or if youre an immigrant, of course somebody has to be supportive, why not you. When the reality is, we should not be questioning who deserves deportation and we should really be asking why are we deporting people, deportation itself is such a harsh consequence and we go back to history with the choice that we made during a time when we were a lot more open and as a country we were being labeled. I think this is one of the episodes in the book that i had no idea about, its the first time of whether it was to support the immigrants would been in the u. S. And the extent to which after the policies of deportation arose to support and consider a question, you could ask the same thing to say that someone cannot come here and to say if you have been living in the u. S. , they can kick you out. [inaudible] making reality more likely and more adjusted i wanted to talk a little bit more about the dynamic of criminalization in the way and the ideas and rhetorics into law but that is one of the main engines driving the narrative in the book. It can be a little bit i think you can have your basic onetoone level understanding with Immigration Law, there used to be an explicit natural system where if you were an immigrant from southern or eastern europe, much less you were going to be able to get in, the 1965 act in order to the nationality act is a hard sell or act, it ended up opening up immigration to a lot of people and did abolish the races system. When we talk about the 365 act, yes that can be a little bit more complicated its a different dynamic coming from a different place in the law and we will determine who can come in based on the countries that we can think. It is clear, this again gets the intentional and intentional dynamic, it is clear that changes that were brought in 1965, that was riding a set of laws, they are eliminating the National Origin quotas, with a huge step forward in terms of recognizing, with our Immigration Law should not be based on where people came from. Other scholars talk about doing an amazing job of how the National Origins and quotas were about waste specifically and defining it in what it means to be an american. The proximity to an immigrant, its not a recognition, its changed over time thats been a defining feature of whether or not you can get those papers and whether you can come here and belong and its something that we feel currently today, getting rid of those quotas was a huge deal. But it is no surprise, thats what i try and articulate in the book that here we are, all these years later and we now have more deportation, n more imprisonmen, more exclusions that we ever had previously in the system, the very specific forces like openly White Supremacists including john hampton who has a number of organizations over the years who have tried to promote this idea and now we have the system, we have to make it fair, more immigration to protect america americans, doing it in ways that are very quoted racially but not as explicit, theres a whole system that is designed to me americans believe that none of our immigration system is based on questions and what its for the country and what is not. As opposed to being a system that is designed to keep out immigrants of color in different ways, now that we do not have national or origins. There is a chapter in my book where i talk about a man who is my first client as a law student, back when i first started, i talk about the fact that its no accident that he and his family came to the United States in the early 1970s in hong kong, he tried to come earlier and he wouldve been facing these barriers and quotas, it is no accident he came then but its no accident that in 1990s he was found locked up in immigration jailed facing deportation even though he was a green card holder and his entire life, he became a grandfather because he was facing deportation in the late 1990s. He use the system in a mass incarceration in the 70s and 80s and 90s as a response including immigration reform, we created a system that has penalized immigrants in different ways and has different narratives to talk about same people that most of us, now the president still does, he is in openly racist rhetoric and most americans dont use that rhetoric now and we justify the Current System because we are able to use this language to talk about immigration policy when in fact we should be targeting the same people now that there are quotas with the wall and were now building different walls, the walls of the supporter in civil walls as well. Maybe if you can talk a little bit more and to commit a little bit of policy upon everybody listening, and to talk through the concept, people who are not immigration nerds are usually supplied and it sounds like 1920s track in Immigration Law. Sure, it is interesting because Immigration Law today now has long sections devoted to what types of criminal offenses from coming to the u. S. , from staying here can lead to someone being deported in one of the things that i try to emphasize people when im talking about the issue is that no one is immune, you can be a green card holder, you can have permanent residency and then if you have a conviction, there is no statute of limitations, it can be a conviction that you had when you were a teenager and if its considered a conviction, there you are, 20 years later, youre traveling back from visiting your grandma and suddenly are taken into an immigration jail, it happens every day and its a constant and expected part of deportation system. One of those categories, if youre wondering what it is, i am too, after all these years of litigating cases, it is impossible for me too do anything but quote the variety of definitions that different agencies have given the term because it has no meaning. I found it very interesting about the term that it came up and it was added to Immigration Law in the late 1800s, shortly after it started writing federal immigration for the first time and they didnt want to define it then either. You can be excluded from the United States. What is interesting, other scholars, this term also found its way into different laws during the same time in one of the places where was first emerging was in a law that came out of the backlash to emancipation that used as a reason to block people from being able to have the right to vote. In the right to participate. Again another example of how