Migrant Justice in the Age of Removal: Rights, Law, and Resistance against Territory’s Exclusions

Migrant Justice in the Age of Removal details the story of Migrant Justice, a migrant rights organization led by undocumented workers in a complicated and perhaps unexpected location: Vermont, United States. This compelling story, which includes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s use of a covert informant to infiltrate the group and deport key members of its community, provides a detailed analysis of the state of immigration enforcement in the country today, alongside an intimate portrait of successful modes of resistance against it. Migrant Justice has gone on to improve rights for migrants in Vermont and across the country in these incredibly precarious times for migrant activists. This book places Migrant Justice’s activism within what is defined as the Age of Removal, or the last three decades in which immigration enforcement in the United States has increasingly used enhanced enforcement mechanisms like the “order of removal,” which aids in the confinement, control, and exploitation of migrants. Migrant Justice’s work also fits within a growing landscape of migrant rights movements that have arisen during this time, and Jacob P. Chamberlain provides a crucial snapshot of its work to better understand its successful forms of organizing in these contexts. In this confluence of opposing forces, we see egregious abuses against migrant actors, but we also see new and progressively powerful forms of resistance that are posing a specific challenge to bordered and territorially based limitations on rights and democracy. Migrant Justice’s work expands rights access to people, regardless of citizenship, which essentially works toward a deterritorialization of rights access—or the opening of sociopolitical belonging to new actors.