I'm very pleased to welcome to Open Your

Reckin's leading voice in immigration abolition and someone who has helped me understand my own views on the subject

for the last few years. Silky Shaw, an executive director of the Detention Watch Network. Welcome.

Thank you for coming on. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Just before we get into it too much,

your career is pretty much exactly the same age as ICE. It's about you started, is that right?

Yeah. Within a month or two? Yeah, I graduated from college in 2003.

Did you and ICE go to rival schools and then ice is like, I'm, I was, I'm, I was, I'm,

the ice is the Slytherin and you're the, I don't know. So that's pretty unique. How did that get going that, that you just immediately came out of the gate fighting an agency that was just born?

Yeah.

I mean, I, you know, I grew up in Texas and I, in Houston, and I was in school in college at the University of Texas at Austin when 9-11 happened. It was a very like,

I don't know, I've been thinking about this. It was a time when people were very active on

college campuses. And, you know, I was in Texas where there was a lot of work around against

the death penalty. Um, there was these like anti-corporate campaigns and a lot of other things

happening. And then 9-11 happened and so much attention like shifted towards the war in Afghanistan

and eventually the war in Iraq. But I was doing all this work around prisons and detention on campus, like doing education,

and I got this job from, like, my first job doing organizing.

And initially it was based in New York, but they were like, maybe we should move this to Texas

because that's where we were essentially seeing this prison boom at the border.

So, like, so much of it was

what was happening there because of, you know, both ice being created and also this sort of, you know,

often when we talk about the war on terror, it's really about that injection of, like,

resources into, you know, U.S. militarism, but the war on terror,

...