Bringing together faculty, students, community advocates, and directly impacted leaders from across the country to Hunter College in New York City to explore the intertwined systems of immigration detention and mass incarceration—and the movements working to dismantle them.
Although immigrant detention centers and prisons are often understood and resisted separately, they operate through shared logics, infrastructures, and institutions. Participants from Arizona, California, Florida, New Jersey, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and New York will share lived experiences, local histories, and organizing strategies that reveal these connections. Together, they will confront the narratives that have divided immigrant justice and anti-incarceration movements and imagine new stories, pedagogies, and public memory practices that can link them.
The convening is a step in a year-long process to reimagine States of Incarceration, a national participatory public memory project, and to develop new collective narratives and media that strengthen connections between immigration and criminal legal system advocates nationwide.