Immigration Article of the Day: Undocumented Activism and Minor Politics: Inside the Cramped Political Spaces of Deportation Defense Campaigns” by Austin Kocher and Angela Stuesse
Undocumented Activism and Minor Politics: Inside the Cramped Political Spaces of Deportation Defense Campaigns by Austin Kocher and Angela Stuesse, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography
Undocumented activism is on the rise. In response to the expansion of immigrant policing, detention, and deportation, a form of anti-deportation activism called ‘deportation defense campaigns’ have become a staple of immigrant rights movements in North America and Europe. DDCs seek to prevent individual deportations through multi-pronged grassroots organizing strategies and provide a path to temporary or permanent legalization. Yet in the process, campaigns must address questions about when and how to challenge dominant discourses and institutions while also achieving short-term goals. By drawing on the notion of the “minor” in critical geographic scholarship, we view DDCs through lens of “minor politics.” We argue that the disruptive and conformist potential of undocumented activism should be understood not as a static evaluative framework, but as strategies that condition, and are conditioned by, the contexts in which undocumented activism unfolds. Using ethnographic methods, we examine two DDCs to show how the campaigns strategically navigated the cramped political spaces of undocumented organizing in the months following the new Trump administration’s surge of anti-immigrant policies. We conclude that DDCs unfold under historically and geographically specific conditions that not only shape what counts as disruptive and conformist, but may call into question any easy division between the two altogether.
KJ