Sophia Gurulé, an immigration defense attorney and policy advocate, explains “crimmigration”–the intersection of the criminal legal system with the U.S. immigration system. Sophia shares with host, Rafa Kidvai, how even very brief encounters with the criminal punishment system can lead to detention and how state surveillance using these two systems can lead to deportation.
Visit Repro Legal Defense Fund to learn more. Follow Sophia on Twitter @s_phia_.
If you have questions about your legal rights or access to abortion, go to the Repro Legal Helpline or call 844-868-2812. If you are being criminalized for something that happened during a pregnancy, go to reprolegaldefensefund.org.
Rafa Kidvai: This is Nobody Criminalized, how the state controls our bodies, families, and communities. I'm Rafa Kidvai, director of the repro legal defense fund, If/When/How. On our podcast, we talk with experts, activists, and advocates whose daily work intersects with reproductive justice and the state's targeting of marginalized communities. SisterSong, a reproductive justice collective led by women of color, defines reproductive justice as the human rights to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.
You will hear us restate the shared commitment throughout our interviews, because regardless of the issues guests focus on, that is ultimately the world we all intend to create. Our guest today is Sophia Gurulé. Sophia is an immigration defense attorney and policy advocate at a public defender office in the Bronx in New York City. She represents both detained and non detained people facing deportation.
Sophia Gurulé: There is no constitutional right for non-US citizens who are in deportation proceedings. There's no constitutional right to an attorney like there is in criminal proceedings.
Kidvai: Sophia and I talk about crimmigration, the ways the US immigration system criminalizes specific individuals and communities. Since immigration detention facilities have been home to so much reproductive violence, like forced sterilization and forced pregnancy, we felt it was essential to speak with an expert on the role our immigration system plays in our fight for reproductive justice.
I'm so, so excited you're here, Sophia. Thank you for making time.
Gurulé: I'm so excited to be here chatting with you.
Kidvai: The work that you do is often described as crimmigration, which is really sort of the combination of policing via the criminal punishment system and then policing via the immigration system. Can you lay out a little bit for our listeners what the relationship between these two systems is in terms of how they surveil and punish people?
Gurulé: Yeah. For many years there's been a connection between the immigration legal systems and the criminal punishment system where, particularly the nineties, federal legislation passed to make the immigration system much more punitive, to make it a system that basically mirrored the criminal punishment system, both in terms of prosecutions, in terms of incarceration and ICE detention. I mean, that really expanded in the eighties and nineties and thereafter.
And a lot of the people who are in these facilities, in these human cages, are people who don't necessarily have contact with the criminal punishment system, but a lot of them who are there for very long periods of time, and the entire deportation apparatus now hinges on this idea of a bad immigrant or someone who is a criminal, or someone who is committing a number of criminal acts, even though many of these systems themselves are inherently criminal, as most people would understand them. A lot of the ICE detention system and ICE enforcement system tries to act like they're... I mean they are police, but they also try to give themselves the same sort of meaning that police throughout the United States give themselves.
But on a more baseline level, oftentimes people's criminal convictions, or even just their contact with the criminal system, regardless of whether or not it resulted in a conviction, is used as the basis to put someone in deportation proceedings, or to put them in ICE detention.
So as I mentioned, I work in the Bronx and I represent an overwhelming majority of people who have criminal convictions, because the Bronx and New York City in general is a heavily police city, it's obviously that policing is directed toward black communities, communities of color, deliberately targeting immigrant communities. So a number of those folks will have contact with the criminal legal system, and then their criminal convictions will either service the basis for their deportation, because the federal immigration laws became a lot more focused on contact with the criminal punishment system. So they'll use those convictions regardless of whether or not the person was never sentenced to any term of incarceration or regardless of whether the person was fully complying with the millions of different ways that the criminal punishment system tried to keep people beneath their boot. So let's say they're complying with probation or they're paroled out or they got a new sentence or re-sentencing, regardless of any of these things, they'll use those convictions again kind of as a form of double punishment, to not only just target people, but then actually deport them. It will be the basis for the deportation.
Alternatively, for folks who are, let's say they're in deportation proceedings just for entering the United States without inspection, meaning that they're undocumented, or they overstayed their visa because they entered when they were very young in the United States. And if you've had contact with the criminal punishment system, if you've had contact with the police, there's an expansive surveillance apparatus between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement. So let's say you never even had a conviction, but let's say you've had a number of arrests or stops for disorderly conduct or for jumping a turnstile or less serious offenses, you will still be sucked up into that system because of the data sharing that occurs between ICE and federal immigration enforcement and the local law enforcement.
So there's so many different ways that just having any form of contact with the criminal punishment system can be the basis for your deportation, for months of ICE detention and then permanent separation from your family.
Kidvai: Thank you for really laying out, not only who gets criminalized, but also the piece about how both the criminal punishment system and the immigration and deportation systems really pitch themselves as caring about people and their safety and do this under the guise of protecting our communities. When I think about the targets of the crimmigration system, I think about survivors of intimate partner violence and sexual violence as being part of that list of targets, and I guess I'm wanting to hear a little bit more about some of the work that you've been doing to support Assia Serrano's fight against the US government.
Gurulé: Sure. So Assia Serrano was one of the first women to have their sentence re-sentenced under a New York state piece of legislation referred to as the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act. And that bill became law only a few years ago, was the product of a lot of survivors groups and a lot of really critical advocacy. But because she was not a US citizen, everyone agreed that she was a survivor of intimate partner violence and domestic violence, and that her criminal conviction, which was the basis for her even going into a state prison, was actually the product of her abuse and surviving her abuse and her abuser.
And even though they all recognize all of the amazing work that she had been doing while incarcerated, instead of returning to her family after serving 18 years in prison, DOCCS, who runs the New York State Prison system, actually said, wait, we need to keep you here because ICE is going to come pick you up and you're going to be going through deportation proceedings.
They held her for an additional two weeks. She was then sent to a local county jail, and she was held there for about six weeks, and then she was deported. And I first got to know Assia because of a local organizing group because they reached out to me saying, "We've been working with this person. She's about to be released. This is supposed to be a really exciting moment for her, but she has some questions about an immigration case that she's not really familiar with, and can you just speak to her and try to figure it out"? So I did. And that's when she learned via me, for the first time, that she actually had a final deportation order from years ago from when she was incarcerated. She had no idea that she had a final order, she was given bad legal advice, and that's when we really jumped into action to try to stop her deportation. And unfortunately, were not able to.
We're still fighting to get her back. We're still trying to work with many different groups across the country for her to have a chance to come home, because there's a lot of advocacy efforts with the Biden administration right now to try to get people who are wrongfully deported, and we believe that she was wrongfully deported, a chance to come home. So it's still ongoing. It's very interesting how quickly people are willing to throw away Afro-Latina black survivors and immigrants, but we'll continue to fight for her, and that is an ongoing fight to reunite her with her family.
Kidvai: Thank you for that. You call yourself an abolitionist. You are working towards the world without police, prisons, borders, and I want to hear more about why you have the goal to close jails and prisons as your primary goal, versus the sort of reform goal of trying to make these spaces more humane, or maybe you're doing both at the same time. Tell us how and why this is where you land.
Gurulé: The first thing that came to my mind was why are we okay with human caging? I don't want to live in a world where we cage human beings. I don't think that makes us safer. I actually think it perpetuates violence, not only for the folks who are inside, but for their families and for our communities and for the world at large. I think incarcerating people is a form of social control. I think it's particularly directed to control poor people, disabled people, black people, Latinx people. That is the purpose of incarcerating and human caging, and I don't want to live in a world where that's what we're trying to do. I don't believe in a world where any of those communities or anyone really should be facing that type of social control.
Oftentimes, we tend to think of incarceration as just like, oh, it's a private industry and these big corporations... And yes, big corporations do play a big role, not just in terms of running the facilities, but in terms of outsourcing every single thing that happens within a jail or prison or detention center, whether it's in terms of providing medical care, which is oftentimes egregious and neglectful and doesn't actually meet people's medical care needs. But also in terms of being able to communicate with anyone on the outside, whether that's having iPads or whatever, to try to communicate with people, that never work. And then cutting off access in every other way that they can, whether it's the food that people are being served.
I mean, it's all in industry based on human caging, and it's disgusting. I've been working with people who have been incarcerated for years now, and while I will always fight with people, and it's a part of both my role as a litigator and public defender and as someone who does policy work to try to improve people's immediate material realities when they're incarcerated, that can never be the angle of what we're trying to do because I don't know what it takes anymore for people to realize that these are systems that will never function in a way that is humane.
My kind of guiding principle is that all of these facilities and policing and all of these forms of social control have to end. It's not just these private facilities, but it's also running state budgets, it's running county budgets. We are literally building communities and budgets based off people's backs. And I don't know how people can still live with themselves while these places are existing.
Kidvai: I mean, I think it goes back to the point you made earlier about how both the immigration and criminal punishment systems are always talking about doing this in the name of survivors or talking about doing this in the name of protecting communities, when in fact, it's a complete farce. It's a bald-faced lie that they're doing anything to make us safer. In fact, clearly what you're saying is that it's making us more unsafe. It's facilitating a lot of these social dynamics that I think harm us eventually.
Some of your work has involved working to end ICE contracts. Talk to me a little bit about what your organizing has looked like to undermine carceral systems.
Gurulé: Yeah, alternatively, a lot of people will be like, "Well, what is safety? How will you create safety if we don't have these institutions"? Because we have been brainwashed and fear mongered into thinking that these are the only ways that we can be safe. And a lot of my organizing work has been about rejecting that and rejecting that fear and what does it mean to be safe and how do we build that?
So a lot of the work that I do is directed at providing material support to the people that I represent, working with communities, and when I say communities, I mean communities that are doing parole justice, that are trying to end the family regulation system, or who are doing immigrant rights work, or doing all different types of advocacy and recognizing that the way that we build safety is by understanding how all of these issues are interrelated. And then building those bridges between all the work that we do and fighting, not only for individual clients or the people that I'm defending in immigration court, but also simultaneously doing the policy work.
So trying to end these contracts with local county jails in New York state so that New Yorkers are no longer detained in New York State because there is compelling evidence that shows that depending on the amount of bed space, that's going to directly correlate to how many people are going to be arrested by ICE. And I believe that when people are arrested by ICE, that doesn't make our community safer. I don't believe in ICE. I don't believe in immigration law enforcement more broadly. I believe that families need to have their material needs met and to be with one another.
So for me, a lot of my work is trying to not only shrink the deportation machine in my own community, but also working with families and directly impacted people and organizations to build those networks of support so that people can actually thrive within their communities and not just trying to get the boot off everyone's neck.
Kidvai: Sounds a lot like the definition of reproductive justice to me. And so I think about all the work that you're doing as repro justice work, right? Like you're talking about building safer, stronger communities, making sure that our relationships feel healthy and safe, and so everything you do as RJ, but I guess I'm also wondering, in the cases that you've worked on, are there ways in which people trying to access reproductive care in custody has looked or has an RJ analysis sort of been present in your work as an immigration defense attorney?
Gurulé: What we're all really talking about is bodily autonomy and talking about people's inherent right to self-determination and just control over their own body. And the other thing about ICE detention and incarceration more broadly is that it fundamentally strips people of their bodily autonomy. I mean, you don't have control over what you eat or the medical care that you get or where you sleep or anything, and you're regularly abused by jail officials all the time.
And what I'll say in terms of access to medical care, including reproductive care, is that the people that I've worked with who have been detained or incarcerated by ICE, or in state prisons or jails, the consistent theme of their stories, whether it's ICE detention or other facilities as well, is that they are regularly denied adequate medical care, all of the time. I mean, we're talking things like getting your diabetes medication or we're talking about doctors not even acknowledging that you have high blood pressure.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, people were having the opportunity to try to get out because they were at high risk because they were immunocompromised. And even though now that litigation has been shot down by courts that are oftentimes aimed at trying to end people's bodily autonomy and showing a total disregard for people's bodily autonomy, oftentimes when I was filing requests, because of people's medical needs, the medical records would show that they're being consistently denied the adequate medical care that they need, and that would be the basis of getting them out. And I was able to help get a number of people out because of that, because of the fact that people have medical needs that are oftentimes not being met.
So while reproductive care is a very specific question, I think it relates more broadly to the lack of medical care within these facilities and the fact that they're never going to be able to provide adequate medical care to people who are incarcerated because, again, that's not what the point of these facilities and prisons and detention centers is. The point is social control and strip people of their bodily autonomy.
Kidvai: This is a question that we ask everybody on the show, but it feels like a good time to ask you, which is, when you hear the phrase, "Nobody criminalized", what comes up for you?
Gurulé: So I'm going to very poorly paraphrase someone that I've represented who was incarcerated for many years by ICE and incarcerated in other facilities even before ICE, who when he talked about being incarcerated, would oftentimes say, "They got my body here, they got control of my body, but they don't have control of my mind and my spirit. And that's what I'm working to keep strong and that's what I'm working to survive". And so for me, when I hear, "Nobody criminalized", I think of the folks that I've worked with and I think of anyone who's facing state violence via criminalization or surveillance.
Kidvai: Just thinking about all the people that you've represented and the different folks that you've supported as they've been sort of navigating state violence, tell us what makes you go to work in the morning? What sustains you? What brings you joy in the face of such extreme cruelty?
Gurulé: Yeah, I mean, for many years it was anger. It was being angry at the deportation officers or the prosecutors and the disgusting things that they would say about the people I represented, or say about me because I dared to side with someone that they were targeting for deportation. And I learned the very hard way that you can't really be motivated by just anger. And oftentimes the anger is related to your own experiences of having your own bodily autonomy attacked or threatened and realizing that if you just rely on anger, then yeah, you'll burn out and you'll be exhausted and you'll be unhelpful to anyone, including yourself.
So for me, what really motivates me, not to be corny into Che Guava, but I really think this is the quote that best sums it up, is that, "A true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love", and oftentimes anger is related directly to love. That really is kind of my motivating force, a love of humanity, a love of people, a love of this earth, a love of everything that we know to be good.
So for me, I've had to really reframe and recenter myself in that and not just anger. When we talk about abolition and we talk about all this community building and building relationships within communities, that's really what that is, is building networks of support that are guided and motivated by love and are actually materially resourced. And actually loving and believing in someone's inherent dignity and worth.
The people I work with are amazing survivors and people don't even understand what incarcerated people and migrants survive, and I have learned so much about what it means to fight these systems and to fight for our families and to fight for the lives that each person deserves from the people I work with. They have expanded my consciousness and my understanding of what's possible. And I really do believe it's possible, when you're guided by love and this inherent understanding of people's worth and the ability of people to continue to grow and to continue to evolve, to continue to pick themselves back up even after state actors are constantly trying to dehumanize and treat them as subhuman. You can have that anger and you can have that motivation, but it can't be your only basis. You have to actually have a love of humanity and appreciation for other people every day.
So I get a lot of hope from being a community with others and fighting, because if you do it by yourself, I think the hardest moments for me are when I self-isolate and when I really think that it's all on me to do it or that only I can do it, and it's not. It requires all of us. And also when you're around other people and you are in that joy and you are celebrating one another and celebrating life, like it reminds me why I'm doing what I'm doing.
Kidvai: Sophia, thank you so much for being here and for bringing your wisdom and your smarts and your energy and your commitment to liberation. It's been really, really lovely to spend this time with you.
Gurulé: No, thank you for letting me go off and letting me just share what I even think and how I survive in this world. Not every day that people are given space to talk about those things, so thank you.
Kidvai: To recap our conversation with Sophia, here are a few takeaways. Any engagement with the criminal punishment system can create a domino effect in someone's life. As Sophia shows, even brief encounters can lead to deportation and detention because of the surveillance that comes from data sharing between local and federal law enforcement agencies.
The US system of incarceration and human caging is a form of control that perpetuates state and interpersonal violence against people from marginalized communities, and the intersection of the immigration and criminal legal systems can and has created additional trauma for survivors of intimate partner violence with the state often functioning as an extension of the abuse.
Sophia works towards ending the system of incarceration altogether, and building a world that doesn't rely on controlling and exploiting people's bodies and labor.
Sophia Gurulé is an immigration defense attorney and policy advocate at a public defender office in New York. You can find her on Twitter at S_phia_.
I'm Rafa Kidvai, the host of this podcast and director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund If/When/How. The Repro Legal Defense Fund funds Bail and Strong Defenses for anyone criminalized for something that happens during pregnancy. Learn more at reprolegaldefensefund.org.
If you have questions about your legal rights, go to reprolegalhelpline.org or call 844-868-2812. Nobody Criminalized is produced by LWC Studios for The Repro Legal Defense Fund, If/When/How.
Sage Carson and Jen Gerdesh are the media and marketing team at If/When/How. Pamela Kirkland is the show's producer. Paulina Velasco is the managing producer at LWC Studios. Kojin Tashiro is lead producer and makes this episode.
And remember, keep your community safe and don't talk to cops.
CITATION:
Kidvai, Rafa, host. “The Criminalization of Immigration.” No Body Criminalized, Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. April 3, 2023. Reprolegaldefensefund.org.