the long view.pdf

7/29/2019 The Long View.pdf

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AALR

Sp

ecialIssue:CommemoratingtheTenthAnniversa

ryofSept.11

Volum

e2,Issue1.5:Fall2011

FALL 2011 | $12 U.S.


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The Asian American Literary Review

Volume 2, Issue 1.5: Fall 2011

Special Issue:

Commemorating the Tenth Anniversaryof Sept. 11

Guest Editors:

Rajini Srikanth and Parag Khandhar


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Section 2: New Formations, New Alignments | 209

e Long View: An InterviewSubhash Kateel by Parag Khandhar

e following is excerpted from a longer conversation I had with Subhash

Kateel when he was in Washington, D.C to give a training in June 2011.

Subhash and I have known one another for a number of years, as we both

worked in New York City before and aer September 11th

. Subhash was aco-founder and co-Director of Families for Freedom, a multi-ethnic network

of immigrants facing deportation; prior to that he worked as a caseworker

for formerly detained asylum seekers and initiated and coordinated the

Detention Project for Desis Rising Up and Moving, a group working with

working class and poor South Asian communities. He currently lives in

Miami, Florida, where he was a Soros Justice Fellow at the Florida Immigrant

Coalition, coordinating the We Are Florida! campaign that successfully

defeated attempts to pass sweeping anti-immigrant legislation in the state.I originally requested a written exchange between Subhash and a

longtime collaborator that explored their experiences and reections

regarding detentions and deportations in New York and what they had

presciently described as the immigrant apartheid state aer September

11th. I thought this exchange would provide important observations and

lessons for readers, stories of our communitys history and struggle that might

otherwise remain partially or wholly untold.

As was the case with many of the activists and organizers working onthese issues for the past 10 years, it was dicult for them to write something

reective in response to the inquiry. Time, of course, is always a real factor

for community workers, but the complex, raw emotions unsettled by the

emotional journey through those 10 years was another factor that held back

many submissions, this proposed exchange included.


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210 | The Asian American Literary Review

What follows is a portion of the conversation that took place instead,

a rough but honest telling of complicated experiences, real challenges, and

personal reections 10 years later.

*

Parag Khandhar: A number of folks have been revisiting September 11th

and the Desis Organizing conference in New York City, which occurred just

months before the tragedy. You were part of a group of folks who actively

challenged the formation and format of the convening, bringing upand

I am summarizing the general perception out therethat working class

members of the South Asian community were not part of this community

event, and that made the whole project problematic and suspect. I felt that it

was a good moment, and there were a lot of conversations aerwards but then

September 11th happened and

Subhash Kateel: But 9/11 happened before those issues were ever resolved.

And I feel like we still have this inability to have really hard conversations

in the South Asian community that would lead to really good organizing

without attacking people or organizations or making people feel like shit.

I think some of the stuthat happened at the conference was a genuine

response to the elitism in the South Asian community and its inability to

really respect the leadership of poor and working people in the community.

But 10 years later, I have been to enough conferences where I have seen

legitimate issues get reduced to conference uprisings. So those issues were

articulated but not enough for them to have any meaning to people not

attending that conference.

e grievances that were articulated about the state of leadership in

the South Asian community, sure they were pretty valid.e way they were

articulated by people, including mewell, I would be lying if I said I am not

a little embarrassed of myself from back then. You can address the way that

people do their work, but you have to be very careful to do that in a way that

doesnt attack peoples sense of purpose. A lot of it was stuthat could be


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resolved in conversations, whether thats collective or group conversations,

workshops or mediation, but we didnt have the tools back then.

SK: So then 9/11 happens.

PK: Yeah. In terms of the work its very easy to say, at was the moment,

and its before and aer, right?

SK: Yeah. And for a long time weve tried toght people to say that wasnt

the moment, but honestly I dont know who the hell we were kidding: that

was the moment.

Well, there are two dierent things.eres this idea among non-

South Asian folks that racism against South Asians began on 9/11. And its

really important toght against that notion. For example I got politicized

because of the racism I went through way before 9/11. My parents very much

understood racism way before 9/11. South Asians have faced racism way back

in the early 1900s. But its kind of ridiculous to say that 9/11 wasnt a major

turning point. And historically, probably one of the most signicant turning

points in our history since 1965.

PK: Well, thats another reason for us to have this conversation, right.

Because I dont know of it being seen as that moment from outside of that

thin margin of people whove been doing this work.

SK: We can say there was tons of racism before, but the whole weight of

systemic, cultural violence that happened to communitiesthe whole way

that that things changed dramatically aer that momentthe whole ability

to respond, and the mechanism that gives people the ability to respond,

changed dramatically.ere werent the types of organizations way back 20,

30 years ago that there were aer 9/11. And there wasnt the type of validation

that racism exists, from our parents generation. At least when I was growing

up, it was like, Oh theres racism. Go join this cultural organization and

learn how to do a Bharatnatyam


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Now there are multiple vehicles, no matter how small and modest they

are, where we can acknowledge that racisms wrong and it sucks and racism

against us specically is wrong and sucks.ats dramatically changed. Hasnt

changed fast enough, hasnt changed good enough, but its changed.

PK: Yeah. And I think thats where looking at that space aer September 11th

is important at this time from folks who were working in that space before,

because there are so many folks who just came into the work aer, you know.

And thats kinda all they knew or thats what they were building. But it was a

dierent world before.

SK: Regardless, anyone that did 9/11 work directly will still start twitching

when they think about it. Start crying when they think about it. Because the

shit felt like genocide. And no disrespect to anyone thats been through real

genocide, or real war, butthe sense of complete siege that you felt and the

sense of complete despair, anger, and even urgency was really hard to quantify.

Ive done a lot of work since then, and its still some of the craziest shit Ive ever

seen in my life, and when I talk to other people who went through it, Id say

from September 12th maybe through Special Registrationwere some of the

most intense and insane times in our community for anyone who was doing

that work. Some of the most rewarding, but we were all permanently aected

by those years, myself included.

PK: I think thats very true and feel the same way.

SK: I never saw the world the same aer that.

PK: What were you doing. What was the work that you were doing just

before September 11th. What were you focusing on?

SK: Before 9/11 I helped to build DRUMs (Desis Rising Up and Moving)

detention work, helped to build visitation to dierent detention centers,

started to help build Know Your Rights presentations in the South Asian


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community. We were visiting almost all the South Asian detainees that were

in the Elizabeth detention center. Holding community workshops and even

holding a couple of family meetings for dierent family members prior to

9/11.

PK: So you had pieces in place in terms of the anti-detention work already.

SK: Yeah.ere was an actual, established visitation program even though it

was small and modest. It was sort of a spin-oof something this group First

Friends was doing.ey were visiting a bunch of detainees from a bunch

of nationalities. We were focusing for the most part on the South Asian

detainees, but we were also visiting a couple of African detainees. A couple of

Latino detainees, too. We never wanted it to be just a South Asian thing. We

started to do community education workshops, and were actually part of a

coalition, the Coalition on Detention Incarceration.

PK: So then aerhow did those rst days go. In terms of what to do, how

to respond?

SK: My day job was also doing post-release work with detainees. So even in

my day jobI was working with immigrant detainees in New Jersey. So we

were pretty well situated, as well as anyone can be in that situation. I knew a

lot of the lawyers in New Jersey. I had already been in meetings with the INS

as part of my day job. I already knew who were the assholes and who werent.

And I even already knew a lot of the brothers in the detention centers before,

cause I was the one who went to pick them up when they got released. So

when 9/11 happened, I think we were all just spinning around in our heads,

What do we do, what do we do?

Werst set up this hotline to take reports of hate crimes. A lot of people

were afraid. We had set up this hotline just so people would call. Put up posters all

around the city, inueens and in Brooklyn. We had no idea what we were doing.

PK: Nobody knew at that point.


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SK: Yeah, but we specically had no idea what we were doing. We just knew

we had to do something where these hate crimes were coming from.is is

like Sept 12, 13, 14, this is like right aer, and I hadnt gotten back to work

yet. Because shit was crazy.en as I started getting back to New Jersey, we must have only had like

ten real hate crime-related calls. We started getting a lot more, like, e FBI

came to our house and took my family member-type of calls. I make this joke

all the time: prior to 9/11, detention centers in general were sort of like the

UN, with a little bit less of Europe, you know, although Elizabeth Detention

Center has always been like 20 to 25 percent South Asian, signicantly Sri

Lankan Tamil at the time.

But it was crazy: at Passaic County Jail, which housed a lot of immigrant

detainees, the overwhelming majority of detainees at some point post 9/11

was South Asian or Arab. So you go from having this really diverse group to

then having the overwhelming majority become Yemeni, Egyptian, Pakistani,

and Indian. And even Indian Sikhs. We started to hear these stories about

how people are getting beat up in detention, getting called bin Laden, people

are having their prayer rugs pissed on, people arent allowed to call their

lawyers, some people cant get lawyers, some family members arent being told

where their family members are, and then people started calling this hotline.

PK: With nowhere else to turn, really.

SK: Yeah. Grown uncles were crying on our voicemail. So aer that we were

visiting Passaic County Jail, mostly, and then Hudson County Jail a little bit,

and then aer a little bit we went back to visiting Elizabeth Detention Center.

All of those places are in New Jersey. Passaic was one of the closer ones, so it

was easier to visit. I had a fulltime job. When I was in DRUM, I was never on

payroll. And until February/March 2002, I think, I was working a full-time

job and doing this 9/11 work, as soon as I got out of work, sometimes, during

work, on my lunch break.

PK: Yeah. I didnt realize that.


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SK: So every single day we could we were visiting. We were super dedicated.

So we did a call out for volunteer visitors.e meeting with volunteers

happened at the Community Service Society. I remember walking up the

hall; I was late because I was running late from work. I walk upstairs and Ithink Im in the wrong meeting because there must have been forty or y

people there to become volunteer visitors. Some folks that had been at Desis

Organizing. Other folks just brand new othe street, and we were able to

incorporate into a couple of visitations, but we werent able to catch the energy

of everyone in that room because we were still this really small organization.

We were all really dedicated at that time. Everyone. We would go to the

detention center every single day we could.e entire weekend wed spend in

Jersey coming back late at night. Wed go sometimes with ten visitors. Some

of the folks that visited with us are folks that are lead organizers of projects

for other organizations right now. Wed build relationships with people in

detention. Get to know their families. Sometimes go home and meet with

their families. One person, Shubh Mathur, needs to be in some history book,

because that woman herself would visit twenty detainees a day. And helped

make sure people had suitcases if they were getting deported, you know, make

sure that if someone was having health problems, shed call me all the time,

make sure I sent a letter to Immigration. She was a volunteer, a PhD student.

We were building all these relationships to the point where it felt like we

knew virtually every detainee in Passaic County Jail. Im pretty sure we did at

some point in time. I still have these lists Ive saved.ese hand-written lists

of names.

e stuIm really proud ofthe trainings I led, as part of our

community training, were the veryrst ones that told folks that as a family

member you have to know the Alien Number of someone whos been

detained. Now its considered common knowledge.

So I feel like another huge watershed moment, probably one of the

craziest organizing moments of my history, was the MLK Day rally 2002.

Up until that point there hadnt been many signicant rallies against the

detention of our community folks post 9/11.e world didnt really get

what was happening.ere were a couple of organizations that wanted to do


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something on MLK day: there was this group called HELP that was a group

of folks mostly working out of the mosques in New Jersey. ere was Hudson

County Peaceor Hudson County Greens.ey wanted to organize a protest

in front of Hudson County jail where there were a bunch of detainees. Wewanted to organize a protest in front of Passaic County Jail. So we formed this

campaign with the Coalition for Human Rights of Immigrants and the Prison

Moratorium Project and others called the Stop the Disappearances Campaign.

We even had this long list of demands like Repeal the 1996 Laws.

Even back then, the thinking was that we couldnt just pretend this

thing started on 9/11. We started using strong language to describe what

was happening to our community like kidnapped, disappeared, and

apartheid. Back then was when I started formulating the idea that this was

apartheid. I used to catch heat for that terminology back then, and now no

one disagrees with it. Now its just understood. We cant look at this as just

a South Asian thing; this is really about the beginning of an apartheid state

against immigrants.

SK: We had worked to get the permits for the rally in Passaic County Jail

on MLK day. We had also talked to the police and everything. Our demand

coming out of the MLK Day of Action was we wanted an open meeting

with the District Director of ICE in New Jersey. We had some really dened

demands. We wanted an open meeting, not a closed meeting. We wanted

people who were being held only on administrative charges to be released. So

about a week before the rally, on Wednesday, we got a call from people whom

we thought were alliesIll just call them community leaders.

ey were like, Look, great news, we got a meeting with the sheri.

I was like, We dont need a meeting with the sheri, we already have our

permits.

[ey said,] I think they said theyd hold onto the permits until we meet

with them.

So our legal person walks into a meeting with them. In one room there

are these community leaders who are supposed to be our allies, the chief

of police, the sheri, and I think the FBI standing on one side of the table,


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and our legal person standing on the other side of the table.ey tell us not

to have the protest, and that if we have the protest, there will be more hate

crimes in Paterson, and theyll blame it on us.ey tell us were outsiders.

Were not welcome in the city, and more importantly, if we go ahead withthe protest, theyre going to put the facility on lockdown and theyre going to

blame us for it. So [our legal person] walked out of there, and were like, holy

shit, we had spent months developing relationships with these detainees in

Passaic and we dont want to hurt people. So we start huddling, like we dont

know what the hell to do. [We say,] Ok, heres what were going to do. were

gonna go spend three days talking to everyone who we have contact with in

the detention center, and if one person tells us not to have our rally outside,

we wont have it.

So we go and talk to everybody.e community leaders start telling

everyone in Paterson that the protest is cancelled. Meanwhile, inside the

detention center we had to ask everyone to let us know if we should cancel or

not. No, dont cancel it, we kept hearing from the brothers inside. And then

we found out that the community leaders sold us out because they managed

to get promises from the INS and the jail for halal food, jummah prayer, and

like, dates to break the Ramadan fast with [in November]. You know what

happened to those dates when they made it to the detention centers. Guys

inside told us that guards ate them in front of the people.

And the folks inside were like, Who cares about dates and halal food.

We are getting beaten up. Were getting called bin Laden. Our lawyers are

having trouble accessing us.

And so aer we had talked to everybody, not one person inside told us,

Dont do this protest. And so we did it.

What was crazy about it is werst had the rally in Union Square. A

couple hundred people were there. It was raining out. We had this one family

member Usma Naheed and her kids there. First of all, theres tons of press

there, tons of press, I had never seen so much press in my life. Because it was

a breakout moment, right.is is the rst case of a family member of a 9/11

detainee speaking out and saying, Im undocumented, yes, if you want to

come aer me, come aer me, but at least give my husband his rights. My


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husbands in jail and he hasnt done anything wrong. I cant feed my kids;

were about to lose our house. If you want to come aer me, come aer me,

but give my husband justice rst.

Folks were just like, Oh my God. And then we all jumped on buses, andwe went to the detention center. It must have been a couple hundred people

in front of the detention center.ere were police ocerslming the whole

incident.ere were cops on the side in riot gear. You see some of the pictures,

its funny.eres an elderly blind woman in the march, there are lawyers in the

march, and then theres us and then theres snipers and cop cameras on rooops.

To think that we were threatening or scary, if you saw it, it was hilarious.

But that day was so powerful because it was the veryrst protest in front

of a detention center post 9/11. And all the brothers inside saw it. And it gave

them all such a mental boost and energy boost cause they had spent months

inside. Grown men would call you just crying, Get me out of here, get me out

of here, I want to go home, I dont care, deport me, just do something, just get

me out of here.

Youd see these young guys that you could tell were, like, young, that

looked like they were emotionally and mentally breaking down. And so it

gave them a boost when they saw that there were people outside protesting

for them, and then on top of that, the next day, that the protest had made

virtually every single news outlet in the world. It was on BBC. It was on

Japanese television. It was in the Daily News. It was crazy.

And overnight, things started changing. Overnight. And, you know, we

got triple the amount of phone callsten times, twenty times. We had no

budget; we had none of this stu, right. We were an organization of mostly

un-funded people and we were doing the work out of our homes. We didnt

have an oce at that point in time. You go from this rinky-dink organization,

and all of a sudden funders are coming to you wanting to give you money. All

of a sudden youre in every single newspaper. All of a sudden youre taking

your families all across the city, and all of a sudden everyone wants to have a

piece of you, and I still have a real fulltime job and doing this work on top of

that and all of us are trying to do the best we can, and were getting buried in

work. We were still doing it, though.


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Amnesty Internationaland Human Rights Watch, specicallykept

trying to access detainees but couldnt just go to the detention centers and say,

Were Human Rights Watch, and wed really like to talk to the detainees.

We gave them therst access that they could have so that they coulddo their reports. We had a catalog of names. Visit this person. Visit this

person. Visit this person. We met the Human Rights Watch folks there

a week aer the protest, maybe two weeks. Right at this small cuchifrito

restaurant right by the jail. And we gave them names. And we said dont go in

as Human Rights Watch, you go in as if you were visiting a family member,

and thats how they were getting the rst set of information. I eventually got

laid ofrom work but still stayed at DRUM as a full-time volunteer. In the

meantime, a lot of inghting happened in the organization because we started

this organization in our living rooms and it had grown so fast. A bunch of the

original folks ended up leaving.

And the next thing you know, it was like Japanese television wants to

follow us around, HBO wants to do shit on us.eres also this thing where

some of us out there talking to the press as members are volunteers. Some of

these volunteers are doing this insane amount of work but not getting any

recognition.ey are not getting paid for any of this, but they are doing this

as if its a part-time job. As if its a full time job. And so, obviously, theres

some tension that erupts. And the one thing I realized is that when people are

doing free work, when theyre doing a lot, you have to give people love. I dont

care where theyre from.

Anyway, we raised the bail fund for the detainees. But part of the

problem with the bail fund was that therst two guys who got out I had to

front the cost out of my savings, and I never got that money back. You know,

two guys got out, one of them doesnt have a place to stay, and I eventually put

them up in my place for a year.

Aer we helped get Human Rights Watch access to detainees, they

wrote a report that led to the Oce of Inspector General investigation.

en we started to do these community workshops again. Honestly, before

then, folks didnt understand what this post-9/11 detention work was about.

Aer that everyone understood. I mean it wasnt just us that created this


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understanding. But we were part of a small number of people who had

some deep relationships with a lot of folks inside the detention centers post

9/11, like Shubh and Adem Carroll from Islamic Circle of North America

(ICNA). And then we started working more closely with lawyers from theNational Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights, American

Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and American Friends Service Committee

(AFSC) to try to arrange as much representation as possible as we could for

some of these guys.

For a period, it felt like we knew hundreds of people who got deported.

Some of the leaders whom we worked with, because their husbands had gotten

deported, they had relocated back. So with all of this leadership development,

we would build with new leaders, only to see them leave the country and then

new development had to be done with new leaders all the time.

PK: So you were doing more of the family-based work even thenit wasnt

just the visitations.

SK: It wasnt just visitation. Basically, myself, Aarti [Shahani], and other

folks had started these family meetings before 9/11. I had met Aarti at a

protest on Fathers Day, I believe in 1999 or 2000, something like that, right

aer her father had been released from detention, in front of Varick Street

Detention Center. We said, lets start doing these multi-family gatherings

where all of our groups come together, and we do recruiting outside of

Varick Street Detention Center in the visitation line. And so we had a couple

family meetings like that which brought together Latino, South Asian, and

African family members of people facing deportation.ose meetings were

really incredible, and some of the families that came out of those meetings

eventually became the original members of Families For Freedom. But Aarti

had to go back to school, and so I kept this nascent group going. It was a

coalition eort. We wanted to make sure that it wasnt any one organization

so that the families themselves would have ownership over the group instead

of organizations. So I just kept in touch with some of the families, and kept

doing as much of the work as possible, but by now were getting phone calls


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from people needing help (because of a deportation problem) and the phone

calls became overwhelming.

PK: Were you guys getting calls from other parts of the country as well?

SK: Yeah, we were getting calls from everywhere. Once I started at DRUM

as a fulltime volunteer, all the calls were coming my way. And, honestly, it was

overwhelming. I mean once the phone calls started coming into the oce,

I couldnt visit as much. I had to rely on volunteer visitors.uality control

started to decline because morale was fallingwe were visiting hundreds of

people. We were developing close relationships with people and their families

who invite us into their homes, and then you see people fucking gone, just

deported and their families ripped apart. Hundreds of people. You hear

people break down crying over the phone daily. Or seeing people getting

angry at you because they dont think were doing things well, but how are

you supposed to say, Im a damn volunteer. I mean we were supposed to be

organizing folks, ghting for rights and all that, but it was a daily struggle just

to answer the phones.

PK: And theyre going through all these dierent emotions

SK: Yeah. Volunteers are getting burnt out and you know, theres no shrink

you could visit. I stopped eating. Im eating a freaking chicken roll a day or

some weird shit like that. Im taking money out of my own pocket to pay for

organizational stu. Other folks are taking money out of their own pockets

to pay for stu. It was intense. A couple of events that were signicant at that

timethere was a public hearing that was supposed to be with the head of

INS. She was a no-show even though she promised to come.en, aer that

day, we had one meeting with some family members to prep for that meeting,

and aer that I had a really bad falling out with one of the volunteers.

en a couple days later I had a nervous breakdown in the oce. I thought

I had to go to the hospital. I had just nished writing a complaint letter to the

INS (thats what it was called still back then) about the way some detainees in


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Passaic were being treated. I just got really angry and I wrote out this letter and

I copied a bunch of organizations and I threatened to go to the press. By the

end of the weekday, they responded and did everything we asked them to do.

And I was like, Holy shit, this works. But then right aer that I literally hada nervous breakdown. I lost it. I had a seven-and-a-half-year-long relationship

that ended in September, like two weeks aer 9/11, and I didnt even think

about it. My mom was sick in the hospital sometime when other things were

happeningI didnt even go see her in the hospital, becausewhatever.

None of that even fazed me until me and the volunteer had the falling

out. And then when that happened, I just lost it. Everything started to hit

my head, and thenpsshhh. So aer I had a nervous breakdown, I came back

to the oce two days later and started to try to do work again like nothing

happened. People on the outside would see amazing work. I always hated

that phrase. On the outside people see amazing work, but on the inside we

were getting more resources to do stu, but we stil l werent able to manage

those resources, because we had lost half of our organizing team to burnout

and falling outs.

at summer I leDRUM. Aarti came back from school. Both of us

got fellowships to start organizing with families facing deportation in a

more sustainable, sane way. Families For Freedom was born. One of things

we decided we wanted to make sure we did is, with Families For Freedom,

we wanted to make sure that it was multi-ethnic and it was evenly divided

between Latino folks, South Asian folks, West Indian folks, it was more

completely multi-racial, and it was completely multi-status, so it included

people whose loved ones were facing deportation because of the post-9/11

stu, because they were long-term residents who had served time aer an

oense, and because folks were undocumented. We would use the family

meetings to build family as a primary basis, a base for organizing.ats what

Families for Freedom came out of.at happened almost instantaneously, in

August 2002 or something like that.

Yeah. Families for Freedom.e name Families for Freedom came about

in November 2002. But we had the meetings prior to 9/11. But then the

grouping of folks regrouped in August or September.


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PK: So you moved from one organization to a new one, but then the work

with Families for Freedom was also intensethe existing structure plus all

the 9/11 stuon top of it. How did you sustain the energy to keep going?

SK: Well, number oneI have rarely had a better work partner my entire

life than Aarti. Number two, therst group of members who helped birth

Families for Freedom were just beautiful, dedicated human beings. We had to

do real work. We had to make sure that folks understood that we were serious

from the get-go because otherwise, if we werent working, we were nothing.

ats one thing we always learned, that you cant argue with good work aer

a while.

PK:ats right. Work speaks.

SK: So we busted our ass. We put out a press release like every two days. We

started accompanying families to the deportation oce when their loved

ones were getting deported. But with Families for Freedom, we made a very

specic rule, that to be a volunteer, to be anything with Families for Freedom,

you had to be directly aected. Which is both a good thing and a really bad

thing.e problem was, eventually, by the fourth or h year, we would

have people who werent directly aected who just cared about this issue, and

thered be no avenue to get them involved and no alternative structures to get

them involved. We could have built up a signicant base of allies.

We created a sort of family of families facing deportation. It was beautiful.

ere are still people who are like little brothers, sisters, uncles to me.

e thing is, building personal relationships has the power to overcome

a lot of barriers. Post-9/11 it was pretty common for South Asian families to

say, Oh, dont deport me, Im not Mexicanuntil you are in a room with a

Mexican mother losing her son, going through the exact things you as a South

Asian father are going through.at was the power of what Families For

Freedom (FFF) did and continues to do.


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PK: But on the organizing side, you werent focused on the substantive issues

for what put them in detention, right. Because you couldnt do all those

dierent issues.

SK: Honestly, between the organizers of FFF and the members of FFF, I

dont think there was any part of work against detention and deportations

that we didnt do at least once. Our members went through so much that we

ended up doing so much.

PK: It feels like there are some signicant lessons that you realize now, aer

being in the middle of that intense work, right. I was trying to stay informed,

and I didnt have any idea of half of the work that these groups were doing or

that other people were doing. But it doesnt seem like there were necessarily

ways that people could support either, right?

SK: No, there were ways, but not enough ways to accommodate the sheer

volume of people that wanted to get involved.is was for two reasons. First,

a lot of our organizations were small. But also, a lot of us were ideological

and rigid and mistrustful of creating an organization open to a lot of people.

In retrospect, that was just stupid. We cant be afraid of more people getting

involved just because we as organizations are having growing pains. As people

le groups, a lot of them started their own projects and they were forever

changed by the stuthat had happened. It was good, you know. Not all of

it was good. But they were the ones to take the lens of 9/11 and really think

about the way they wanted to do their organizing.

PK:ats true. I guesssometimes its easy to look back and say, those

tensions, those splits that always seem to happen in organizations, could we

have done anything to avoid them.

SK:erere parts you couldnt do anything about. So things you couldnt do

anything about are, rst of all, we all grow too big, and small organizations

that had virtually no budget suddenly had a $100,000 budget within a year.


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From having no oce space and no full-time stato having multiple sta

members within a year. You had a lot of organizations that were getting a lot

of money doing nothing. And organizations getting no money and doing too

much.at was a cause for tension.ere is a need for general accountabilityif shit happens and ways for people to process the conicts between them. But

honestly, the work was just crazy. Another part of it is we were taking on a

really big fucking beast. And we were doing work that was at the forefront of

what everyone was talking about doing. With amazingly few resources. And

then too many resources that we had to deal with all at the same time.

And to grow progressive spaces, you have to really be willing to engage

people that dont know shit that want to know, and people that dont agree

where you could possibly agree.

PK: I agree with that.

Its harder to nd that middle ground; its easier to draw a line and say,

You t and You dont t, Youre in and Youre out. But I agree with

you, we need to have that regular reevaluation of our methods.

SK: And its real important to slow down aer you do a lot of shit. Take stock.

PK: Yeah.ats a good lesson. Hard enough for individuals, and for

organizations, even harder.

SK: Another thing, at least campaign-wise, being an organization that is

small and doesnt have a lot of resources: it is ok to bluwhen confronting

power. But you never make the rhetoric outmatch your realities. It is the

easiest way to lose relevancy and eectiveness. For example, the 2006

immigration protests, they were a massive uprising, no doubt. Community

organizations did play a role in the attention and consciousness-raising

against H.R. 4437 (the Border Protection, Anti-terrorism and Illegal

Immigration Control Act of 2005), but no matter how much they fronted,

they were not responsible for bringing those hundreds of thousands of people

out. So when they started to take credit for it, and then in 2007, they couldnt


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bring those same numbers out, people called their blu. And by people I

mean people in power. And we lost a lot of momentum that we have never

been able to bring back.

PK: But how do you avoid that?

SK:ats why you gotta be really careful to make sure that your rhetoric

doesnt outmatch your reality. I think a big problem for the average, small

nonprot social justice organization is that some point in time, it starts

believing its own hype. Once it start believing its own hype, then problems

start to happen.

PK: So how do you think this applies to other groups, what we see now in

these movements?

SK: In some ways, you see this in dierent groups working on dierent

issues together. But at the same time, theres a lot of missed opportunities; it

still feels like theres a huge disconnect despite the work that weve all done

post 9/11 and post 2006 (the immigrant rights protests).ere is still a huge

disconnect between communities facing deportation, detention, and general

disenfranchisement. ere still seems to be this disconnect in terms of how

we build a mass-base progressive movement based on the real leadership of

people in real communities and not based on the cult of personality. I keep

saying that the immigrant rights movement is still the single biggest social

movement in the country. Its stil l one of the very few movements that is

capable of bringing out people in the hundreds of thousands with relative

ease. But at this point that power is only being utilized to prevent bad things

from happening.

Even the people I disagree with the most in the movement, its really hard

for me to say they dont do X right.ey dont do Y right. I still know that

they are still working more than forty-hour work weeks, still working at least

a minimum of sixty hours a week for little pay. Some arent getting paid to do


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it. What I can say we are failing at is communicating what we do to the largest

number of people. And communicating it on our own terms.

One thing is, though, we still need organizations in our communities

that are building and working with people who are South Asian. We stillneed viable, diverse groups based in the day-to-day experiences of poor

and working South Asian folks through which they can connect to other

communities.

PK: So do you feel optimistic about the future, given the experiences over the

past 10 years plus?

SK: No, I get pessimistic sometimes. When H.R. 4437 was draed in 2005, I

was like, Were dead.

ere I was, some esteemed organizer whos supposedly a role model for

others, and I thought we were dead.en regular folks come out in the millions

and they fought with us, saying, You are not going to dehumanize us.

e largest protests since the Civil Rights Movement. So Im sort of not

allowed to be pessimistic. Each of our people who wakes up and feels the

power to change things reminds me of that.


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