The U.S is deporting people at a record pace (close to 400,000 a year!) and the rapidly expanding collaboration between police and immigration is a key tool. Immigrant communities urgently need tools to protect and expand their rights. Immigrant Defense Project, Sex Workers Project, and Sylvia Rivera Law Project are working together to produce DANGER! Police Involvement in Mass Deportation.
DANGER! is a graphic novel in a “choose your own adventure” format and a know-your-rights guide for immigrant communities on how to protect one’s rights and fight deportation. DANGER! features a diversity of characters in a wide range of situations — with the police, in criminal custody, in immigration detention and under supervised release from immigration custody. DANGER! includes a short history of the politics of immigration and a guide to resources.
DANGER! uses text and images to accomplish multiple aims including to: 1) explain how ICE uses the criminal legal system to target deportees and provide Know-Your-Rights information at different stages; 2) illustrate how individuals will have different outcomes in the criminal legal system based on factors such as immigration status, gender nonconformity, class, and ethnicity; 3) provide a road map to the immigration detention and deportation system, and 4) present an accessible analysis to the political history of exclusion and deportation in the U.S.
We are committed to ending the collaboration between police and ICE, and hope DANGER! will serve as a useful tool in the fight to stop deportations.We are working closely with community-based organizations to develop the content in DANGER! Police Involvement in Mass Deportation, to ensure that the novel provides the information that is most urgently needed.
Who Are We?
Immigrant Defense Project, Sex Workers Project, and Sylvia Rivera Law Project work to help navigate the intersections of the criminal and immigration systems and to fight back against deportation. We work a wide range of advocates and immigrants, including people who engage in sex work and low income transgender communities. We came together in 2011 as part of the Anti-Violence Advocates Against Deportation to fight against Secure Communities (S-Comm). DANGER! is being illustrated by Bishakh Som. Bishakh’s work has previously appeared in Hi-horse, Blurred Vision, Pood, the academic journal Specs, and more, and he received a Xeric grant in 2003 for his comics collection Angel. You can see more of his work at www.archicomix.com.
