A Roundtable on Environmental Injustice and Border Abolition

Daniel Watman, Border Encuentro (Tijuana, MX): To me, what the border really means is death. I started out as a Spanish teacher in the early 2000s bringing students to Friendship Park and doing a language exchange through the fence. Although border militarization began in the 1990s under Operation Gatekeeper, there was just one chain-link fence at the park until 2007, when they started extending a secondary wall.⁹ Under the Real ID Act of 2005, Congress waived thirty-something environmental laws—including the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and several native burial acts as well.¹⁰ That’s when I became politically active. The walls obstruct cultural exchange by promoting a narrative of division, but they have also devastated the environment—shifting hydrology, destroying habitats, native flora, bacteria, and rock formations that took hundreds and thousands of years to grow—and created a humanitarian crisis. In the 1980s, hundreds of people would cross the border daily. Once they put the walls in, border crossings didn’t drop, they just shifted to the mountains and desert. Instead of six or ten people dying every year, it went up to three or four hundred. Now, somewhere around ten thousand people have died crossing the border since Gatekeeper.¹¹

Aly Wane, UndocuBlack Network (Syracuse, NY): I’m an undocumented immigrant organizer originally from Senegal. Right before 9/11, the Dream Act was about to be passed.¹² I thought I’d be able to legalize, and then 9/11 happened. I remember feeling in my body—I knew I was going to be part of the collateral damage. Two conversations that used to be relatively separate, national security and immigration, fused. Around 2006, people started being disappeared off the streets of Syracuse, which is a hundred miles from the northern border. We found out that CBP (Customs and Border Protection) and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents were racially profiling and brutalizing people in the Latinx community, with cooperation from local law enforcement. I joined a group called the Detention Task Force where we try to stop deportations. We lost so many people to deportation, that radicalized me. Since then, my analysis has deepened, and I have been thinking about the prison-industrial complex and its relationship to borders and racism.

Guerline Jozef, Haitian Bridge Alliance (Southern California): Race has always been the underlying factor in US immigration history. This isn’t something that just happened at the border, it has been happening since the beginning as we see with our Indigenous brothers and sisters who are still dealing with expulsion throughout the Americas. Look at Chinese Exclusion, Japanese American incarcerations during World War II, and the history of Haitian refugees coming into the country in the 1980s, put in detention, prison, and in Guantánamo Bay, seen as carriers of HIV/AIDS, and we can see how this whole system is based on anti-Black racism. I started detention work in 2015–16, when many Haitians left Brazil for the United States. A majority were survivors of the 2010 earthquake, some of Hurricane Matthew in 2016, and went to Brazil on a humanitarian program.¹³ In 2016 the economy and political system in Brazil collapsed, and they made the decision to walk from Brazil, through South and Central America, to the US border seeking asylum. We received a call that there were Black people at the border, so we went that night and met twelve young men and women, and the rest is history.

Kristina Shull, director of Climate Refugee Stories (UNC Charlotte): In 2016–17, I was working with Freedom for Immigrants supporting people in immigration detention, and I noticed a growing frequency of environmental themes in their migration stories. At the same time, my students at UC Irvine were expressing fear and eco-grief as xenophobia and climate denialism ramped up under the Trump administration. The Climate Refugee Stories project originated as a student-led response to these intersections—a shared desire to document origins and experiences of climate displacement, especially among communities facing immigration restrictions. For example, we collected testimonies of West African asylum seekers detained in the US South during Hurricane Irma in 2017. Experiences of heightened abuse, due process denials, and deportation during and after the storm show how immigrant prisons are sites of environmental racism that magnify climate vulnerability.¹⁴

Christine Wheatley, executive director of New-Age Environmental Development of Africa/NED Africa (Ghana): I am leading a team collecting stories from circular migrants and coastal and island communities along Ghana’s 330 miles of coastline who are fighting erosion, flooding, and displacement as a result of climate stressors—particularly rising sea levels. The privatization of land inland has further entrapped people along the coast, some opting for dangerous stowaway on container ships. We are producing a film for Climate Refugee Stories highlighting the experiences of people like Jonathan, who feel forced to emigrate without documentation (fig. 1).

Tanaya Dutta Gupta, Climate Refugee Stories (Nairobi, Kenya): My research focuses on internal circular migrants in the Bengal Delta region of Bangladesh and India who are confronted by cascading risks of climate and other crises, including the global COVID-19 pandemic. During fieldwork in March 2020, I hurried to Kolkata as India entered a countrywide lockdown. I saw how COVID-19 and the climate crisis intertwined to affect vulnerable migrants—floating back and forth between rural and urban, their movements considered problematic in a world where effects of borders are magnified beyond nation-state margins. As borders migrate inward, their effects manifest through structural and symbolic violence, making the lives of those who move increasingly insecure and dispensable. Following the lockdown in 2020, internal state boundaries in India acted as barriers for migrant workers trying to return to their villages after becoming stranded in urban areas without adequate income, shelter, and food. Migrant workers who returned to rural areas of the Indian Sundarbans were further confronted by the disastrous effects of Cyclone Amphan that made landfall in the middle of the lockdown.¹⁵ Together with COVID-related technologies of control, such as containment zones, checkpoints, and curfews, the intersecting effects of multiple crises can disproportionately impact migrants who, despite moving within national boundaries, are nevertheless conditioned by border-like effects owing to their geographical and social locations at the margins.

Daniel Watman: My impetus in working at Friendship Park, doing cross-border events like yoga classes and poetry readings, was to create ways for people to meet across cultural and physical borders. When we planted the Binational Friendship Garden of Native Plants in 2007, things started to become more militarized at the border, so we focused on the garden as a way to change the narrative. The garden is a sample of what exists in the Tijuana estuary, a binational watershed. It is made up of circles that go through the fence with the idea of creating a space where people can make friends through the wall and collaborate to promote native flora of the region. It is neither a US garden nor a Mexican garden; it is a garden without borders (fig. 2). I have been photographing and documenting the destructive environmental impacts of border wall construction in San Diego–Tijuana for the past few years. In January 2020, CBP uprooted the garden on the US side, then prohibited all access. It is now overgrown, the natives choked out by weeds.

Kristina Shull: In the spring of 2018, I traveled with Activate Labs, a peace-building organization that partners with Climate Refugee Stories, to the US–Mexico border in Tijuana to accompany a Central American refugee caravan displaced by a confluence of political, economic, and ecological turmoil. Activate Labs led refugee children in creating artwork depicting pollinators (birds, bees, and butterflies) symbolizing migration (fig. 3). Daniel Watman and volunteers invited refugee children to display their art and plant vegetables in the Binational Friendship Garden for Realimenta Comunidad, a project that feeds houseless community members and recently deported migrants. In the shadow of the wall, the garden is a site of hope and resilience. But it remains threatened. In summer 2022, CBP confirmed plans to construct thirty-foot “bollard-style” walls at Friendship Park designed during the Trump administration. Through direct action and negotiations, the Friends of Friendship Park coalition led CBP to announce a temporary halt to construction for further discussion with community stakeholders.¹⁶

Christine Wheatley: NED Africa’s headquarters is located on the Ghana-Togo border, with offices in both countries. We engage people on both sides of the border in communal projects, such as coming together every month to clean the river that passes through both communities. NED Africa also supports sustainable livelihoods in Ghana through new green industries such as biogas and practical ways to abolish borders by creating opportunities for climate refugees, other would-be emigrants, and returning migrants to enjoy the freedom to stay. We also challenge borders in the minds of Ghanaian and Togolese youth who often feel inferior to their counterparts in the West. Low self-esteem and the poverty they grew up in drive beliefs that they must emigrate in order to live a good life. Recognizing that many people facing displacement would prefer to stay in Ghana, we work to create opportunities for them to live well at home. For us, this is one manifestation of climate justice: that people most affected by climate change inform and benefit from solutions being developed to mitigate and adapt to it.

Emma Crow-Willard, Climate Refugee Stories (Puerto Rico): My filmmaking focuses on shifting narratives around climate-related displacement toward hope, innovation, and unity. In Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, I’ve found that people have built deep connections with their neighbors after the disaster. For example, Jeremiah, who builds Earthship sustainable housing, told me: “I’ve never seen people at their best like I have after natural disasters. And I’ve been in a bunch of them. That’s what being human is all about. Erasing all those lines, working towards just sustainability and being in harmony with your environment.” Another resident of Vieques, an island subjected to sixty years of US weapons testing and left without a hospital after the storm, remembered: “After Maria, the level of courtesy and community help was something I never experienced. There was a solidarity. There always has been a bit of distrust between the Viequenses and the North Americans. That evaporated. We were neighbors. We were people on a very small rock who just helped one another.”

Guerline Jozef: Over the past five years Haitian Bridge has assisted and collaborated with ten to fifteen thousand Haitian migrants, including migrants from Africa and Central America. We can use Haiti as a case study, and the winning of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti [in May of 2021] as a way to identify different types of protections that are needed for people. I want to be clear: TPS was not given to Haiti, it was won from the community. It has allowed 150,000 people to apply, but since September of 2021, the United States has deported over 18,000 people to Haiti, including pregnant women and children, and has barred them from accessing TPS.¹⁷ It is critical that we push to redesignate another TPS for Haiti in light of the assassination, earthquake, recurring hurricanes, and continued turmoil in the country as a result, mostly, of US policies. It took many forward-facing campaigns to make sure that TPS for Haiti wasn’t just an immigration issue but also a racial justice issue, and a climate justice issue.¹⁸

Jamila Hammami, Open Borders Conference steering committee member and founder and former executive director of the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project (New York, NY): Seeking to escape gender and other overlapping violences, the Rainbow 17 was the first trans/gay migrant caravan from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Mexico, many of whom were PLHIV. In 2017, they crossed multiple borders to seek asylum at the US port of entry in Nogales, Arizona. During their journey, Trump had issued executive orders to curb refugee admissions.¹⁹ Our only option was a massive march and direct action on both sides of the US–Mexico Nogales boundary. Grassroots LGBTQIA+ immigrant rights groups from across the United States mobilized in solidarity to demand the Rainbow 17’s entry. On August 10, US passport holders with free movement walked across the border, where the Rainbow 17 were preparing to survive the detention and deportation machines. We marched on both sides of the border and served our purpose—we made a militant trans and queer ruckus (fig. 4). Watching the Rainbow 17 enter the port of entry was one of the most painful things I ever witnessed. Looking into the eyes of other queer and trans folks from the Global South putting everything on the line—it changes you. We had no control of what would happen inside the ICE cages or GBT pods. While some of the seventeen were ultimately deported, two people I sponsored won their asylum cases.

Steven Sacco, immigration lawyer and Free Migration Project board member (New York, NY): Five or six years ago, I became involved in the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City, and I learned a great deal in that work from which I have developed a vocabulary for articulating border abolition.²⁰ Today, I’m trying to be one cog in a machine of millions trying to move public opinion and policy in the direction of abolition democracy. To paraphrase PIC abolitionist Mariame Kaba, nothing worth doing is done alone. That has led me to work with Jamila and the Free Migration Project, among others, in first organizing and then supporting an annual Open Borders Conference and to write on the subject to encourage more conversations and voices in the room who will normalize border abolition.²¹

Ilana Cohen, Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard (Cambridge, MA): As a rising senior at Harvard, I work with the FFDH campaign, which has exposed the role of Harvard’s endowment in climate destruction and injustice. At FFDH, we use the strategy of divestment to posit a radical vision of climate and endowment justice. In the last decade, the divestment movement has seriously diminished the industry’s power, helping to clear the way for that transition—most recently, with our success getting Harvard to finally pledge divestment. Our tactics include petitions, protests, and organizing pro-divestment faculty votes. Our most successful action was filing a legal complaint against Harvard with the Massachusetts attorney general, arguing that the university’s continued fossil fuel investments violated its duties as a not-for-profit institution under state law.²²

Angela Walker, AP English teacher (Charlotte, NC): This past year, Tina Shull and I coordinated a seminar at Charlotte Teachers Institute where K–12 teachers developed curricula addressing climate migration. My curriculum examines the power of Afrofuturist and African futurist narratives as they challenge assumptions around migration, borders, and otherness.²⁴ We will read Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower and Nnedi Okorafor’s Zahrah the Windseeker. My students often express hopelessness when it comes to climate change. By exploring Cli-Fi [climate fiction], I hope they can make connections between the real world and possibilities of a future that can be achieved with deliberate, consistent action. Analyzing speculative fiction that reenvisions a diverse, nonviolent global ethic of care then becomes a disruptive act that can set human reality on a different course. Teaching is equally disruptive.

Aly Wane: Who gets to tell the story of 9/11 or of “border security”? Borders, prisons, the military, police, these are myths embedded in people’s minds. I want to interrupt the conversation around militarizing borders, especially in the context of climate justice. I actually mean open borders. It was only with repeated negative and traumatic interaction with the deportation and incarceration machinery that I became an abolitionist—especially since I intersected with the Black Lives Matter movement. One of the projects I’m working on now with the UndocuBlack Network is called Moving Toward Justice, which is trying to create an abolitionist platform on immigration in the same way that the Movement for Black Lives had a radical utopian platform.

Steve Sacco: Any approach to border abolition has to center democracy and race. My article “Abolishing Citizenship” argues that citizenship law—and the stratifications that enforce it, borders, immigration law, etc.—is an inherently antidemocratic and racist caste system. It then wrestles with the question of how to build a democratic, anti-racist political membership in policy and law. Environmental justice sits at the intersection between anti-racism and democracy. If liberty and equality are the building blocks of democratic society and the law that should protect it, then democracy requires an equal right to move and an equal right to survive climate change. Practically I think this means abolishing citizenship such that all people can move and remain between nation-states, and paying reparations to survivors of borders and deportation. Together, these may give people both the right and means to escape or survive the unnatural disasters of climate change. That is what it should mean to respond to climate change with anti-racist democracy.

Jamila Hammami: The Rainbow 17 Trans/Gay Migrant Caravan taught me that the only way to ensure human rights and freedom of movement is to abolish the nation-state and all forms of borders. As Nandita Sharma discusses, border “crises” are crises of citizenship created by closed borders. Abraham Paulos poignantly highlights that citizenship is a border in and of itself.²⁵ Critically, borders are violent and meant to keep people out and uphold white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and capital.

Tanaya Dutta Gupta: Echoing Arundhati Roy in hoping the pandemic can act as a portal to a better world, I encourage conversations envisioning just climate futures.²⁶ But can we imagine just futures for climate-affected (im)mobile people without abolishing borders? What would such futures look like? I believe scaling this wall would require looking beyond what is visible, to also incorporate all the not-so-visible effects of borders in our critical transformative tool kit. I hope to contribute to decolonizing knowledge by placing voices of variably (im)mobile people who are being crossed by borders at the center of my work.

Angela Walker: I ask students: “What would it look like to embrace a vision of the future that was just for everyone? What would it look like to decenter and dismantle everything that is the result of imperialism, capitalism, colonialism—all of the isms—and defer to models and visions for the future from communities that have historically been deemed inferior?” I want to hear what students’ visions of the future are; ultimately they have the most at stake. As Walidah Imarisha argues, “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction.”²⁷

Guerline Jozef: Climate change isn’t coming tomorrow. It’s now. Open borders are available right now for people who are in power. The freedom of movement, the freedom of being, being guided by love—that is how we need to look at migration. When you saw images of Haitians at the border [in Del Rio, Texas], I, too, was under the bridge. I was looking in the faces of ten thousand other Guerlines who were separated from me simply by chicken wire. I saw a reflection of my own being. Unless we can see ourselves in the other—and yes, dismantle a system that has been rooted in slavery, anti-Black racism, anti-other, anti-unwanted—we will not be able to move forward. Our community cannot wait.