Kristina Shull is a lecturer in the Department of History at
UC Irvine and an activist who shared with us how her education shaped the work
she does to bring attention to the problems facing immigration and immigration
detention centers in the United States.
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| Photo credit: Axel Dupex for the Open Society Foundations |
Can you talk about your experience at NYU and how it helped
shape what you do now?
I am so grateful for my time at NYU. The interdisciplinary Master’s Draper Program
in Humanities and Social Thought was foundational in several ways. It allowed me the flexibility to pursue and
hone my intellectual interests, and it introduced me to theories and methods
for understanding issues like immigration detention within the larger frameworks
of global histories and human rights. The
program’s rigor prepared me well for doctoral work, and its opportunities for community
engagement helped me envision a career in academic activism. I think it’s most important contribution in
shaping my career path was providing a model for a “hybrid” approach to making
academia actionable in the world, where history can be marshaled as a catalyst
for change.
How did you decide to pursue a higher education degree in
History?
I had always loved reading and writing, but struggled to
settle on a major/discipline that would be a proper container for all of my
varied interests: from art, music, and literature to politics, human rights,
and racial and environmental justice. I was
studying abroad in Ireland as a UCLA undergraduate when 9/11 happened. It was both eye-opening and fascinating to
be, on one hand, somewhat sheltered from the range of powerful domestic responses
in the US, and on the other, more exposed to the range of international
responses—all of which highlighted the import, and consequences, of US action
in the world. At the same time, I was
enrolled in a history course on the troubles of Northern Ireland and reading
daily headlines of its tenuous peace agreement crumbling in the streets. I began to make connections between these disparate
but parallel histories of political violence and public response, and I began
to see history, especially from a global perspective, as a necessary vehicle
for untangling these issues and drawing inspiration to forge solutions.
When did you start to become interested in working to bring
attention to the problems with immigration in our country, specifically in our
use and dependence on immigration detention centers?
As a US-born citizen, I was exposed to these issues in a
cursory way through my studies. However,
they suddenly became intensely personal and I realized how many aspects of our
broken immigration system were unknown to the general public, myself included. Ten years ago, I was a recent NYU graduate living
and working in the city. I fell in love
with and married a man who was undocumented—he had lost his case for political
asylum and had been ordered deported. When
we tried to adjust his status, we were denied and he was immediately detained
in a for-profit immigration detention center in New Jersey and deported. As I visited him every day for three months,
my eyes were opened to the conditions in detention and the suffering inflicted
upon thousands of families subjected to this arbitrary and vast, yet largely
hidden, system.
As I met more affected people and learned more about the
features of the detention system, I began to see how much the anti-immigrant rhetoric
floating around our society (and recurrent in our nation’s history) is
disconnected from reality, and how much of immigration detention’s growth in
recent years has been driven by a profit motive.
What hardships do immigrants face when they are detained?
Immigration detention is a “civil” procedure; people in
detention are not serving a set sentence for any crime, but are merely awaiting
or appealing outcomes on their immigration or asylum cases. There is no time limit to how long a person
may be detained, and as a result thousands of people are detained for months
and even years. This unknown factor
contributes to additional hardship in detention. Even though it is not
considered a form of punishment, in practice, immigration detention looks and operates
exactly like prison or jail, and many immigrants are held in the same
facilities as citizens (such as county jails).
People in immigration detention can include asylum seekers, victims of
human trafficking, and legal permanent residents with long-standing community
ties.
Advocates, scholars, and human and civil rights groups have
long-documented the many abuses that occur in immigration detention: a lack of
due process and legal aid, inadequate medical care, limited visitation rights,
squalid and cramped conditions, poor nutrition, lack of access to recreation
and library/educational materials, exorbitant commissary costs, frequent
transfers across the country, and physical and sexual abuse.
Only 14% of immigrants in detention have a lawyer (there are
no public defenders provided as there are for citizens), which greatly
increases their chances of winning their cases, but the vast majority end up
being deported. Immigrants may be
eligible for parole, usually on bond, which may range from $1500-60,000+, and
monitored supervision, and then are allowed to pursue their cases from outside
detention. To be released, they must
convince a judge or deportation officer that they have strong community ties
and support, and pose no threat to their community.
How does the work you are doing now bring these issues to
the public’s eye?
As I visited my husband in detention, I developed a strong
belief that if everyone in this country could be a witness, and to know this
was happening (especially how and why), it would not be happening. But I also saw how detention and deportation
practices spread fear and trauma throughout communities, effectively silencing
those affected. Barriers of language and
privilege have also created a dearth of migrant voices, especially first-hand
accounts from detention, in the mainstream media. My fellowship work with CIVIC [Community
Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement] in immigration detention “storytelling” aims
to challenge this pattern of silence by uplifting migrant voices in traditional
media, and by creating new media spaces for these voices (such as our blog, IMM
Print, on Medium.com that features detention stories). The anthology we did, Call me Libertad: Poems Between Borders, and our other stories
projects are led by those directly affected, and have grown out of people’s
mounting desires to have their stories heard—whether for their own sake, to
educate the public, or to enact change.
Many people have sent their stories: writing, poems, and
artwork from detention to CIVIC’s network of visitation programs across the
country, and part of my role at CIVIC is to begin building an archive of this
material. There is a crucial role that humanistic storytelling can play in the
immigration debate. Literary language
and expression has the capacity to express complex realities and generate
public empathy in different ways than data and social-scientific analysis. It is also the work of “doing” history, or collecting
testimony in all forms. This is a form
of activism because it is capturing experiences that may otherwise be lost,
which can then be used to correct the record, and effectively challenge the
narratives that gave rise to and sustain systems of oppression. (Such as, the notion that immigrants, especially
undocumented immigrants, are inherently criminal when studies across the 20th
century have repeatedly shown crime levels to be lower among immigrant
communities than among citizens).
How do you collect these stories?
Many stories are sent to CIVIC’s members (our network of
visitation programs, serving 43 facilities in 19 states, run by 1500+
volunteers) through the mail. We also
run a national hotline and maintain a database to track people in detention and
use it to connect people to their family members, monitor abuses, generate
advocacy campaigns, and gather stories. We
also partner with community and university organizations, including NYU’s
School of Law’s Immigrant Rights Clinic, to develop stories projects. CIVIC and NYU have produced the innovative
website www.prolongeddetentionstories.org
this year, with an annotated amicus brief, to highlight stories that relate to
the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on the case Jennings v. Rodriguez on the right to a bond hearing after six
months in detention. Partnerships such as these work to facilitate
collaboration between academics, practitioners, advocates, and affected
communities.
What are some challenges you have faced in doing this kind
of work?
Frankly, storytelling can be dangerous. There are real instances of retaliation that
can occur when someone speaks out from detention—they may be threatened with
deportation, denied visitation or other privileges, and even subjected to
solitary confinement. People may also
face persecution in their home countries for speaking out. Whether real or perceived, these dangers add
to the culture of silence surrounding detention. It is a real challenge. We make these concerns clear to anyone
wishing to tell their story, and we can also work in many ways to protect
people’s identities or wait until they are in safety before sharing their
story. However, you may be surprised how
many people wish to speak out despite these potential dangers. And storytelling has proven to be very
effective in mounting campaigns for people’s release, protecting people from
retaliation, increasing accountability in the system, and in pushing for policy
change.
Finally, it is a challenge for me in doing this work to
“check my privilege,” of citizenship, education, and race, and to strike the
right balance between using my privilege to create more spaces for migrant
voices, and stepping back to allow those voices to be heard, in their own
right, without mediation.
What steps can we make to help change the way immigration is
viewed, and alleviate the issues that plague detention centers?
Immigration is an issue that may have some of the strongest
misconceptions surrounding it—and many of these go centuries deep in this
nation’s history. We need fact-checking
now more than ever. There are many angles from which the immigration detention
system can be exposed and understood—from politics economics, through the
lenses of racial, economic, and environmental justice, to the personal. People
who are interested in CIVIC’s work can learn more at www.endisolation.org, read or contribute
to IMM Print’s blog at www.medium.com/imm-print,
volunteer to become a visitor of someone in detention, or answer calls on our
national hotline.
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