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No Justice in the Shadows
How America Criminalizes Immigrants
A provocative account of the long, racist history of our immigration system, revealing how it has become the brutal machine that today upends the lives of millions of immigrants
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Each year in the United States, 300,000 people are arrested, imprisoned, and deported, trapped in what leading immigrant rights activist and lawyer Alina Das calls the “deportation machine.” The bulk of the arrests target people who have a criminal record–so-called “criminal aliens”–the majority of whose offenses are immigration-, drug-, or traffic-related. These individuals are uprooted from their homes, their families, and their communities, and banished.
Through the stories of those caught in the system, Das traces the ugly history of immigration policy to explain how the US constructed the idea of the “criminal alien,” effectively dividing immigrants into the categories “good” and “bad,” “deserving” and “undeserving.” As Das argues, we need to confront the cruelty of the machine so that we can build an inclusive immigration policy premised on human dignity and break the cycle once and for all.
Praise
"Alina Das has written a riveting account of the cruelty and inhumanity of our immigration system. You can no longer say you did not know or sit on the sidelines. This book is powerful, informative, moving, and most importantly, a call to action to protect our immigrant neighbors and commit to building a country that respects the dignity of all people."—Linda Sarsour, activist and author of We Are Not Here to Be Bystanders: A Memoir of Love & Resistance
"Alina Das' book is a necessary and compelling read to understand how the immigration system in the United States targets Black and Brown immigrants. Das writes with compassion about her clients whose lives are altered by cruel and arbitrary immigration policies that aim to exclude, ban, separate, detain and deport millions of people. Das' book urgently reminds us that ending white supremacy requires the dismantlement of the structures and policies that undergird today's immigration system."—Deepa Iyer, author of We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future
