Drawing from over twenty years of activism on local and national levels, this striking book offers an organizer’s perspective on the intersections of immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.

“Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I am going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

In the wake of post-9/11 xenophobia, Obama’s record-level deportations, Trump’s immigration policies, and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, the US remains entrenched in a circular discourse regarding migrant justice. As organizer Silky Shah argues in Unbuild Walls, we must move beyond building nicer cages or advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. Our only hope for creating a liberated society for all, she insists, is abolition.

Unbuild Walls dives into US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, from the last forty years up to the present, showing how the prison-industrial complex and immigration enforcement are intertwined systems of repression. Incorporating historical and legal analyses, Shah’s personal experience as an organizer, as well as stories of people, campaigns, organizations, and localities that have resisted detention and deportation, Shah assesses the movement’s strategies, challenges, successes, and shortcomings. Featuring a foreword by Amna A. Akbar, Unbuild Walls is an expansive and radical intervention, bridging the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.

"Unbuild Walls is a vital intervention! The freedom to move around and the freedom to stay put are central to abolitionist vision. Silky Shah shows, with lively detail, how abolitionist political analysis is both preparation for and guidance through complex, difficult struggles."
—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation

"Anyone interested in social change and in the most pressing questions about social movement tactics needs to read this book." —Dean Spade


Silky Shah has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11. In 2009, she joined the staff of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigrant detention in the United States, and now serves as its executive director. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Truthout, Teen Vogue, Inquest, and The Forge and in the edited volumes, The Jail is Everywhere (Verso, 2024), Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (Haymarket Books, 2024), and Transformative Planning (Black Rose Books, 2020). She has also appeared in numerous national and local media outlets including The Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC.

Representing over 120,000 Black and Latino immigrants and working families, Cathryn Paul serves as the Public Policy Director for CASA. Recently announced as the University of Maryland’s 30 under 30, Cathryn has driven successful campaigns in the Maryland legislature resulting in crucial victories in Maryland, including legislation to end state/local partnership with ICE, expand tax credits to immigrant taxpayers, expand healthcare coverage, and more. Cathryn has also led and supported various other statewide policy reforms, including emergency progressive pandemic response, police reform, and tenant rights. She is a leading voice for immigrant rights in Maryland, and now oversees CASA’s advocacy work across four states – and the federal level. Cathryn is an alumna of the University of Maryland.