Campaigns for Change: Learning from the Immigrant Rights Movement with Silky Shah, Author of Unbuild Walls & Professor Andrea Meza, Government Accountability Project
How does change happen? Movement in the public interest often involves vision, alliance-building, and patience. Where do lawyers and the law fit in? Author and Executive Director of Detention Watch Network Silky Shah and Professor Andrea Meza of the Government Accountability Project will discuss lessons learned from the immigrant rights movement. Professor Elissa Steglich will moderate the discussion.
Sponsored by the Immigration Clinic and the William Wayne Justice Center for Public Interest Law
Please RSVP by 12pm, October 17.
About the Speakers
Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. She is also the author of the recently published book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket, 2024). Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11 and has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for over twenty years. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Truthout, Teen Vogue, Inquest, and The Forge and in the edited volumes, The Jail is Everywhere (Verso, 2024), Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence (Haymarket Books, 2024), and Transformative Planning (Black Rose Books, 2020). She has also appeared in numerous national and local media outlets including The Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC.
Professor Andrea Meza teaches Immigration Law at Texas Law and serves as the Director of Advocacy Campaigns and Immigration and Food Integrity Campaigns at the Government Accountability Project. She has managed representation for approximately thirty immigration-sector whistleblowers, addressing issues such as dangerous conditions for noncitizen minors, medical abuses, and mismanagement within ICE and CBP. With over a decade of experience in immigration advocacy, Andrea previously led Family Detention Services at RAICES and oversaw the program’s public policy and litigation efforts. She has also been an Albert M. Sacks Clinical Teaching and Advocacy Fellow with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program and an Equal Justice Works fellow. Read her full bio here.