“It Is Our Moral Responsibility to Disobey Unjust Laws”

In the summer of 2010, organizers from progressive movements in Los Angeles formed a collective to pry open a space for direct action without police permits to protest Arizona’s anti-immigrant law SB 1070. These Tod@s Som@s Arizona actions illuminated settler carcerality as the combustion of domestic carceral power, immigration control, and private prison corporations fueled by racial, gender, and sexual violence. Feminist and queer contributions to the collective refracted the question of criminalizing immigrants through the lens of ongoing US settler colonial control, which enforces gender binaries and criminalizes queer sexualities. Feminist and queer Tod@s activists introduced embodied and creative approaches to civil disobedience and an ethics of care within the collective. In the immigrant rights movement, Tod@ offered an early vision of abolition and freedom from gendered and sexual colonial-carceral arrangements.