All of Us or None: Migrant Organizing in an Era of Deportation and Dispossession

In All of Us or None, Monisha Das Gupta tells the story of contemporary antideportation organizing in the United States by migrants and refugees labeled as criminal aliens. These activists, who live daily with criminalization, work against forms of deportation that Das Gupta calls settler carcerality-the United States’ use of deportation to exert territorial control in the face of Indigenous self-determination. Drawing on fieldwork with antideportation organizing groups in New York, Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Honolulu, Das Gupta documents the inventive methods of struggle against settler carcerality. Das Gupta shows how the organizers’ actions and visions depart from the settler colonial nature of the mainstream demands for a pathway to citizenship and civil rights. Through direct action, storytelling, political education, and youth and queer leadership, these organizations and collectives conceptualize an abolitionist vision of migration justice that rejects the settler state and encompasses all those who are disavowed. By highlighting this work, Das Gupta demonstrates the transformative promise offered by a dissident migrant-led politics working toward dismantling settler structures and logics.

Table of Contents:
Preface  ix Acknowledgments  xxi Introduction. Deportation as Settler Carcerality  1 1. “All of Us or None”  27 2. “It Is Our Moral Responsibility to Disobey Unjust Laws”  54 3. “Don’t Deport Our Daddies”  82 4. “Deportation=Genocide”  109 5. NotDREAMing  136 Conclusion. Jailbreak  167 Notes  171 Bibliography  207 Index  239

About the Author :
Monisha Das Gupta is Professor in the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is the author of Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States, also published by Duke University Press.

Review :
“All of Us or None brilliantly moves us through several impasses that have long prevented useful dialogue between migration and Indigenous studies and activisms. Offering an important record of activist labor and thought that is too often marginalized, this truly outstanding book provides a very timely and urgently needed intervention that will advance scholarship across several key fields.” - Eithne Luibhéid, author of (Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant)