Inside/Outside: Amplifying Incarcerated Voices and Fighting Prison Exploitation

A Conversation with Megan Ybarra, Producer of the Choices Media Project 

Megan Ybarra is Associate Professor of Designing Justice Futures in the Communication Department at the University of California, San Diego. She has shared her research in English and Spanish on abolition geography, environmental justice, and Latine/x /x migration in articles, books, documentary films, podcasts, and zines. Her book, Green Wars (2017), exposed the role of international conservation NGOs in criminalizing Indigenous land defenders and called for land repatriation from Guatemalan protected areas to Q'eqchi' Maya Indigenous peoples. The book was used as evidence to absolve Indigenous land defenders from criminalization in the Tribunal de Mayor Riesgo in Guatemala, and an updated version was published with open access in Guatemala in 2020 (Guerras Verdes). Her community commitments include serving as Chair of the Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund for activist scholars and as a member of the CHOICES Media team.

Emeer Hassanpour: Thank you so much for joining us today. I’d like to ask about your podcast, the Choices Media Project, which, when I first encountered it, struck me as truly magnificent. It’s beautiful, especially one that bridges inside and outside of the prison. Would you talk a little bit about this project? Who is involved, and what is the history behind it?

Megan Ybarra: From my perspective, this actually began in a very different place. I had been doing inside–outside work largely as a collaborator. In my day job, I’m a college professor, and I learned that folks inside needed access to better materials—books, ideas, resources—for their ethnic studies and Mesoamerican history work.

So, I started sharing materials and learning with people on the inside, particularly with a group called Nuestro Cultural, a cultural group based at Clallam Bay Prison in Washington State.

Long story short, in 2019, there was a mass hunger strike, and many people were thrown into solitary confinement and dispersed throughout the Washington State prison system. During the pandemic, for the first time in Washington State, incarcerated people had the opportunity to participate in the legislative process via Zoom at a much higher level than ever before.

I got to know Ralph Dunuan through that state legislative advocacy work, when we were thinking about opportunities for resentencing. Technically speaking, there is parole in Washington State, but most people see clemency as the more viable way to get out. Resentencing would give people who have been locked up since the ages of 12, 14, 19—often serving life or very long sentences—their only meaningful opportunity for release.

We initially met through a group called Liberation Media Northwest. I was helping to write one-page talking points, connect with lobbyists, and literally help connect people via phone. Ralph was doing a great deal of the organizing on the inside. He had been thinking for years about meaningful prison reforms that not only get people free but also center healing and reduce the harms of solitary confinement—through the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Awareness Group and through Native American circles.

Like many groups during the COVID-19 pandemic—and, I would argue, like a lot of abolitionist and leftist organizing in general—the group eventually fell apart. Only later did I learn that other folks had already tried to convince Ralph to start a podcast. They wanted him and others inside to be able to speak directly, rather than having people on the outside explain what “prisoners think.”

In legislative hearings, you get 60 or 90 seconds. People’s stories are complicated and long, and they need a better forum. At the same time, people inside were beginning to access podcasts. Some of these were rudimentary—on the order of what Voice of America used to be—but there were also a couple of Indigenous-led podcasts Ralph listened to, and he was energized by the idea.

As things fell apart and recomposed in other organizing spaces, Ralph noted that multiple collaborators on the outside had expressed interest in the podcast idea. They told him it could happen. He asked, “Are we going to make it happen?”

That is essentially where the Choices Media Project came from. Both of us emerged from that earlier organizing, and as we asked what would be meaningful going forward, he identified the podcast as something crucial—not just so his own voice could be heard, but so multiple incarcerated people with different perspectives, particularly Native but also Black and Asian Pacific Islander folks, could speak for themselves.

EH: Interesting. Tell us more about Ralph?

MY: Ralph Dunuan is of Filipino descent and is also a lineal descendant of the Coast Miwok tribe, originally from what is now Northern California, places like Santa Rosa County. He has moved up and down the West Coast and has been incarcerated multiple times.

He often frames his story in terms of intergenerational trauma and the legacies of a tribe that did not receive federal recognition and has been working its way back toward recognition, land, and access to education, while families were being broken apart by boarding schools and other state institutions. He understands himself as part of a longer historical trajectory.

This is especially true because he has a son who is currently incarcerated and facing what is likely to be a very long, multiple-life sentence in California. That reality is something he has been deeply grappling with and trying to come to terms with.

Ralph was locked up due to his affiliation and actions as a gang member. He was very young. I personally did not fully grasp how young most of these men were when they first entered the system. They tell you their age, but it struck me more when I heard their gang names: Snoopy, Sleepy, Casper. Those are names an 11- or 12-year-old comes up with. That was his culture. That was his family. That was how he learned what it meant to “be a man.”

Because he had real power and thought institutionally as a gang member, his early years of incarceration involved over a decade in solitary confinement. He was repeatedly thrown back into solitary confinement. In many ways, he came of age in a cell by himself. Guards would harass him; he would push back in whatever limited ways he could, within a deeply unequal power dynamic.

He read constantly and became very good at chess, because he spent so much time inside reading and playing. When I came to know him, we were both middle-aged and fairly close in age. We met at a point where we were both looking back at our younger selves, acknowledging mistakes and losses, recognizing the opportunities we had, and asking: how can we make things better for the next generation?

Ralph strongly identifies as an Indigenous father who wants to make things better for his son, his grandson, and those who come after. For him, raising these issues around prison, solitary confinement, and the paths that lead youth into such situations is central to a process of healing and accountability.

EH: I was listening to the latest episode, where you also spoke with Benjamin Brockie. It was very impressive. What do you think about him, and how does he fit into this project?

MY: Brockie is amazing. I think both he and I regret that we just missed each other earlier. He started as an undergraduate at the University of Washington, literally the first quarter after I left. So, it was wonderful that I could still help connect him quickly to people and networks, but also a little sad for me that I was no longer there in person.

Particularly now, when there are broad opportunities for clemency and other forms of release, the environment is extremely competitive. Charismatic leadership is heavily rewarded—both for people still incarcerated and for those seeking clemency, as well as for those who have come home and are doing advocacy work. There is intense competition for scarce resources and attention.

One of the reasons Ralph’s podcast is so important to both of us is that we have seen how charismatic leadership can encourage competition that undermines solidarity. Whenever a single charismatic leader is elevated—whether they actually make a mistake or are perceived to—any misstep reverberates outward and reflects negatively on the whole movement.

That is exactly what Brockie is grappling with. He does not see himself as exceptional, but he knows that if he “messes up,” it will reflect poorly on the entire clemency system. That is a tremendous weight to carry. He is carrying the weight of his family, the responsibility of doing right as an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe, and the awareness that if he does well on clemency, most people will not notice—but if he fails, everyone will.

His willingness to carry that weight without demanding individualist attention is really important. I see that ethic shared by people like Brockie, by Ralph, and by my friend Marco, whom I interviewed while he was in Brazil for episode three.

This is part of why the podcast matters so much; so that there is no single person who speaks “for” a group or for “the incarcerated experience.” Too often, the narrative is, “I’m going to find this one person who is overcoming obstacles and doing well,” and we want that person to have a clean, linear story. But that is not how people’s lives actually unfold.

EH: One topic that I heard discussed several times in your podcast is free or extremely cheap labor inside prisons—something that is still happening in the 21st century. In the 2024 general election, California voters rejected Proposition VI, which, if passed, would have repealed the line "Involuntary servitude is prohibited except to punish crime" from the California Constitution, replacing it with language saying that involuntary servitude is prohibited absolutely. How serious is this issue right now inside other prisons like the Washington State prison system, and how does it affect Indigenous people and people of color inside prison?

MY: There are differences between the California and Washington State correctional systems, but one crucial similarity is that both have an explicit exception in their state constitutions allowing unfree labor in cases of incarceration.

In practice, this means people can be forced to work. That really matters, and Ralph and I have talked about it a lot, especially as he imagines returning to California. We were not surprised that Proposition VI failed, but it was deeply disappointing.

There are smaller victories emerging in California, particularly for incarcerated firefighters. There are efforts to increase their wages and create pathways for them to become professional firefighters upon release, rather than maintaining the current system, where they are generally blocked from jobs they already perform while incarcerated.

In Washington State, the central issue is that you cannot say no to labor. It is not only that people are underpaid; there is also a single monopolistic contractor, CCI. The contractor decides which jobs exist and what they pay, and people cannot refuse those assignments without consequences.

Unlike other forms of programming, which are technically voluntary, labor is effectively mandatory. You can be written up or have your refusal held against you in ways that affect your ability to get out.

The wages are very low. They vary, but they are always under a dollar an hour. In Tacoma, at the federal immigration detention center where people from Washington prisons often end up, the rate was one dollar per shift, and usually it was one shift per day. About 10% of people incarcerated in Washington State prisons have what is called an ICE hold, meaning Immigration and Customs Enforcement believes they can be deported upon release.

Most of the jobs and “job training” programs are extremely boring and offer few meaningful learning opportunities. People have carved out a few exceptions. Working in auto mechanic shops is seen as genuinely useful. At Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, where Ralph was incarcerated, there is an experimental Native healing garden in collaboration with the Native American circle, local tribes, and Evergreen State College. There, people actually learn to plant, grow, and work with plants in meaningful ways.

But the vast majority of labor consists of building stock furniture for state institutions, including the University of Washington and community colleges. For a long time, I taught students seated in prison-made desks and chairs.

Two issues are especially important. First, people want the ability to say no when the work is bad. Everyone wants to work in the Native garden; not everyone wants to assemble furniture. Some jobs are in high demand; others are not. The inability to refuse is part of how CCI and the State of Washington continue to profit from incarcerated people.

Second, there are not enough meaningful work opportunities where people gain skills that will allow them to get decent jobs when they get out. Everyone is also carrying Legal Financial Obligations (LFOs)—court costs, restitution, and interest that accumulate while they are locked up. The courts are already charging people for their legal processes and incarceration, and on top of that, they are forcing inmates into low-paid jobs.

This means they have little opportunity to say no to jobs that are not worth it to them, and they cannot pursue other meaningful opportunities, such as art or education. Most people will leave prison with substantial debt and a record that makes it difficult to access housing and employment.

At one point, University of Washington students were discussing a demand for “no prison labor at all.” Many incarcerated people responded that they wanted work—they just did not want it to be terrible. They wanted meaningful work, skills, time out of their cells—but for more than $0.30 an hour doing mind-numbing tasks.

EH: How important is this free or cheap labor to the government, especially the current government? Economically, how much does the state care about maintaining this system of free labor?

MY: I have two answers to that.

First, I draw on the work of people like David Harvey and Ruth Wilson Gilmore on abolition geography. Gilmore argues that the construction of prisons in rural or toxic locations, and the relocation of people rendered “disposable”—because they are Black, Indigenous, or read as people of color, predominantly Latino on the West Coast—is about placing surplus labor on surplus land to produce profit. In that sense, the system is less about specific tasks and more about the broader political economy of incarceration.

Second, it is important to understand that most of this work is not being administered directly by the state, but by monopolistic private actors. CCI profits from prison labor. GEO Group, a real estate investment trust, profits from detaining people for deportation in Tacoma.

So, we end up with a massive system of state violence that subsidizes corporations; taxpayers and incarcerated people together subsidize private companies.

At the same time, I do not want us to focus only on economics and miss the punitive logic. People in the United States are deeply invested in punishment. This is not about “criminal justice” in any meaningful sense. I am talking about people who have already been sentenced and fined, who are already carrying LFOs, and yet, on top of that, they do not have the right to refuse labor.

This is deeply embedded in racial capitalism and Anglo-American legal culture. Solitary confinement is a punishment on top of the sentence. Forced labor is a punishment on top of the sentence. Some of this is about profit, but a great deal of it is about telling incarcerated people that their lives have no value—that they deserve ongoing punishment for a single act or series of acts.

EH: Right now, we are in a terrible situation economically and politically, and we are witnessing human rights violations on many levels, more than before. How can we actually challenge this free or cheap labor inside U.S. prisons?

MY: This is an ongoing debate that Ralph and I have all the time.

For him, one strategy is pragmatic. He says that at some point, people are going to get out of prison. Therefore, you should remember that if you treat us as less than human, if you treat us as non-human, we will eventually become your neighbors, living with trauma and with limited tools for being functional in the community.

For me, it is crucial that we recuperate dignity and respect for people even while they are locked up. I like to believe that, in many cases, what is driving this is not only hatred but also fear.

People tell themselves: I will never be detained or deported, because I am doing things the ‘right way.’ No one in my family will be locked up, because we will do things the right way. It is the classic neoliberal logic: if you make a lot of money, you “earned” it; if you lose your job, it reflects your personal failure. In the realm of criminal punishment and immigration enforcement, that logic is even more intense.

What I want to emphasize is that the current crisis is exposing the lie. People are being picked up off the street even when they are U.S. citizens. In federal courts, there have been cases like a man in Los Angeles who was picked up five times despite being a U.S. citizen.

On college campuses, academics and students who thought of their work as apolitical—people getting PhDs in electrical engineering who assumed their visas were stable—have had their visas pulled without explanation.

We are now seeing that if they can come for one of us, they can come for any of us. I hope this moment gives us an opportunity to rethink every person who is locked up and recognize that we could be in that position, not because we have done something wrong and not because the state has omniscient knowledge, but because we are living under an increasingly authoritarian system that is, at once, targeted and random.

EH: Would you explain what an STG is, and who is being framed as an STG inside the prison system?

MY: This speaks directly to the forms of state violence and authoritarianism we have been discussing. Those of us who have studied or lived under such systems could see some of this coming, because American exceptionalism—the idea that the U.S. is fundamentally different—is a myth. What we see here is a similar playbook to what we see in El Salvador and many other places.

STG stands for Security Threat Group. It is a broad term, initially meant to refer to gangs, but it has expanded far beyond that.

I remember after September 11, 2001, when the discourse around “terrorism” broadened. Colombia was one of the first cases. Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs) were labeled terrorists, and the argument was that we should be able to do whatever we want to them. The majority of DTOs labeled that way do not primarily make money from drugs; they make money from human trafficking. To acknowledge that would require calling the entire migration regime into question.

Similarly, Security Threat Groups were supposed to apply to gangs, but in practice the term is applied much more widely. In the prison system, if you are labeled as STG, your security “points” change. That affects your access to English-language classes, university courses, better jobs, and which prison you are placed in. Lower-security prisons have more opportunities and are simply less brutal to live in.

Being labeled STG does not mean you are actually in a gang. It can mean your brother is in a gang. It can mean you are from a neighborhood like Hilltop, Tacoma. It can mean you were seen with people labeled as gang members.

At one point, the group I worked with—Nuestro Grupo Cultural, an officially approved Department of Corrections cultural group—was nearly labeled an STG. I had a red badge and security clearance to visit and talk with them about upholding their heritage and doing things well. And then some authorities tried to classify the group as a Security Threat Group. I was not even allowed to bring in a poster with their logo for Hispanic Heritage Month. That tells you something about how flexible and political this category is.

The stakes are not confined to prisons. Consider the first DACA recipient who was detained in the Northwest Detention Center without being accused of any crime. He was brought in as “collateral”—ICE agents came for his father, and he showed them his DACA paperwork to demonstrate that the government had recognized him as present and a low priority for deportation. They interpreted that as proof that he was not a citizen and detained him.

When they locked him up in 2017, they justified it by saying they could tell he was a gang member and part of a Security Threat Group because he had a tattoo. To put it bluntly, if this were a woman with a lower-back tattoo, no one would make that claim. This is about racialized and gendered assumptions with massive consequences.

We saw similar patterns under the first Trump administration, and they went largely unnoticed. Under the second Trump administration, we see people like Manuel Abrego and many others labeled STG via old police databases, including juvenile records. Youth are labeled and tracked in these systems, which are then used sloppily by ICE.

Suddenly, your neighborhood, whether you are read as brown, whether you are wearing a Chicago Bulls hat—these become markers of being in a Security Threat Group. That fungibility—this ability to label almost anyone—allows individual state agents to make determinations without factual claims of harm, and it places all of us at risk.

EH: How political is this system? Are STG labels also being used to target people politically—for example, people connected to Black Lives Matter or, historically, Black Panthers—even inside prison? How racialized and how political is this?

MY: It is deeply racialized and political.

Brockie mentions this in episode six. As an Indigenous person, he saw how people participating in spiritual and healing groups called Native American circles were treated as potential STGs. The same was true for Muslims inside—not primarily those read as Middle Eastern or North African, but Black Muslims from urban communities who embraced Islam while incarcerated.

These are often people who explicitly left gangs. The Department of Corrections (DOC) does not trust them, so their religious practice—which is a practice of cleansing, healing, and reorientation—is reframed as a Security Threat Group.

For people read as “Hispanic,” the labeling is widespread. In Washington State, most people agree that those perceived as Mexican are especially likely to be labeled STG. If you are Indigenous or Black, your odds increase. Essentially, if you are doing work focused on collective healing, mutual support, and self-organized self-help that does not rely on DOC staff, you are more likely to be flagged as a security threat.

This is racial capitalism in practice: the inability—or refusal—to name discrimination as such; the willingness to naturalize a system where white people are presumed to have “earned” their positions and Black and Indigenous people are presumed not to have. The fact that the system avoids saying “this is racist” does not make it any less racist.

EH: I’d like to shift again. What about the food and health quality inside prison—who is in charge of the food and health systems, and have there been any reforms? Because of the food quality, people develop diabetes, heart disease, and all kinds of illnesses. How do you see this affecting people inside, and who is responsible?

MY: The vast majority of people who are incarcerated in the U.S. are held not by the federal government but by their state governments. In California, poor food quality is the result of the state contracting out food services; the same is true in Washington State. Washington taxpayers foot the bill, but a private company delivers the food.

The private vendors are incentivized to provide food as cheaply as possible, which means low-quality meals. The food is low in nutritional value, sometimes rotten, and generally tastes terrible. This structure benefits a broader public–private collaboration, because the food is so bad, people buy commissary items to supplement their diet.

So, taxpayers pay for poor-quality food, and families pay for additional food that is often still low in nutrients but at least tastes better. Many people inside work out and try to stay healthy, but there is very little access to fresh food. Commissary is not a grocery store; you cannot simply decide to buy apples or follow a specific diet.

On the health-care side, access is similarly constrained and bureaucratized. The people responsible for determining whether there is a problem with food or health care are usually correctional officers and their supervisors, not independent health professionals.

I have heard repeatedly that many correctional officers are uncomfortable with the idea of incarcerated people being in good physical condition. For example, many Indigenous people in Washington prisons are also Pacific Islander, Samoan, etc., and they spend a lot of time in the gym. Guards sometimes perceive their health and strength as a physical threat.

These relationships are saturated with fear. Much like police officers trained to treat people on the street as inherent threats, correctional officers are told their work is extremely dangerous. Yet statistically, in the United States, jobs like sanitation, reforestation, and construction are more dangerous than policing, and correctional officer work is less dangerous still in terms of bodily harm or loss of life.

Despite the lack of empirical basis, correctional officers live in fear of the people they incarcerate. In my view, this is partly because people drawn to these professions are often interested in relationships of unequal power, and partly because, over time, as they recognize the injustice of what they are doing, they fear being held accountable—legally or otherwise.

EH: I read one of Ralph’s articles where he talks about the exploitation inside the University of Washington, particularly against Indigenous people and Native Americans. How serious is this, especially now that we are experiencing a kind of militarized university system, where ICE can come and go, targeting people based on appearance—Mexican, Latin American, Black? How serious is this exploitation of Native people and people of color in the university context?

MY: Settler colonialism in the U.S. has always racialized Indigenous people. In the carceral system, you can only check one box. Someone like Ralph is often forced to choose whether he is “Asian” because he is of Filipino descent or “Indigenous,” but not both. People are literally choosing between their parents.

In Washington State, the group with the highest incarceration rate is Indigenous people, not Black people. I was unaware of that for a long time. The same pattern holds in other states like Montana and Wyoming. Those numbers are likely underestimates, because many Pacific Islanders—who are Indigenous in their own right—are counted as “Asian” in university and state data systems. People with multiple identities are miscounted or erased statistically.

The result is that the carceral system’s impact on Indigenous people is under-acknowledged, even as they are disproportionately affected by incarceration and immigration enforcement. In California, many Indigenous people are perceived as “Mexican” and are picked up regularly, even though they are Native to this land long before it became the United States.

Universities are now playing a troubling role. We are speaking from UC San Diego. Just recently, I was in conversation with Veena Dubal, a law professor at UC Irvine and general counsel of the American Association of University Professors. They have been on the frontlines of several key cases.

On September 30, 2025, for the first time, a federal judge explicitly affirmed that engaging in pro-Palestine speech under the First Amendment is not a deportable offense for non-citizens. You do not lose First Amendment rights because you are not a citizen. The fact that such a ruling even had to be made is telling.

At the same time, the UC system is under serious political attack. Under the guise of enforcing Title VI and combating antisemitism, the federal government has made sweeping demands that go far beyond the law; no investigations, no credible claims, and yet numerous conditions imposed. They are attempting to restrict gender-affirming care, dictate which scientific research is permissible, and require all campus police to collaborate with ICE and share extensive data.

Universities and their associated health systems—places like UCLA and UC San Diego—are being reframed as sites of deportation and detention. The goal is to turn universities against immigrants and to make immigrants afraid of universities.

Historically, campuses have been spaces where mixed-status immigrant communities come together around research, learning, and big questions—not always explicitly about immigration. That very fact—that people gather to ask critical questions—appears to be perceived as an existential threat to authoritarianism.

So, we are both under attack and clearly threatening the authoritarian project; otherwise, we would not be targeted this aggressively.

We saw a particularly stark example when the University of California, Berkeley disclosed that it had handed over names of faculty and students to the federal government. My strong presumption is that UCLA and UC San Diego did the same without informing those affected. These lists are not based on rigorous investigation. If anyone files a complaint and your name appears in proximity, your name goes into the system, even if internal processes find no harm and no violation.

From October 2023 onward, campuses and mainstream media outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post revealed something important; many liberals claim to care about facts, free speech, and due process, but they folded under pressure. They “folded like wet sheets,” abandoning core principles.

The Palestine issue was a stress test for democracy, for the First Amendment, and for universities. Once institutions compromised there, they began compromising on gender, ethnic studies, and even fields like chemistry and archaeology that people assume are “noncontroversial.”

Columbia University is a clear example. University leadership caved. It was craven and sad, and it did not stop harassment by the Trump administration. Instead, it signaled that the administration could push further. You do not win anything by compromising with actors who have no intention of keeping their word.

EH: Before we end our conversation let me ask one final question. Where do you see the Choices Media Project going, and how can we, as a society, get involved? Because I believe this is a magnificent project. What can we do to help and to make it bigger?

MY: I appreciate that. For Choices Media and season two of the podcast, we have many ideas.

Ralph was released in September on what is called Graduated Reentry. It is the first time he has been out of prison in 26 years. We are doing our absolute best to make sure there is no minor infraction that sends him back. He still has 18 months left on his sentence, and at any point he can be ordered back to complete it.

He is wearing non-DOC clothes, he is attending university, and he is working a job where he earns minimum wage for the first time in 26 years. It is wonderful, and it is also deeply frustrating and terrible, because it involves a new set of bureaucracies. For instance, he received permission to have a laptop, but the person responsible for checking it out simply refused to do so for two weeks, without explanation.

He is already doing important work, talking with state legislators and key Department of Corrections staff about spiritual healing practices. You cannot fit a sweat lodge ceremony into a one-hour “religious service” block modeled on Protestant church services. A sweat is an all-day process. If people are going to meaningfully reintegrate into their communities, they need access to those practices. Ralph is advocating for that while still in Graduated Reentry.

He was told he is not allowed to have a podcast, though we cannot find any regulation or official document that says this. It is an ongoing negotiation. What I value in Ralph is that he is prioritizing making sure his Indigenous relatives have access to healing and community in meaningful ways—even something as simple as being able to attend overnight ceremonies—rather than prioritizing his own podcast. As a result, the podcast has been on a bit of a hiatus.

The larger lesson from our collaboration is that people who have been locked up for long periods have a great deal to teach us about state violence, authoritarianism, and self-knowledge. They live in a world where social media and email exist, but on different timelines and under different constraints. Their engagement with one another is often more deliberate and thoughtful because they cannot simply leave.

I do not especially want to learn chess from Ralph, but I absolutely want to learn from how he moves in the community and what he values.

Similarly, from immigrants facing detention and deportation, I have learned that in the moment of crisis—when you are abducted off the street, or your parent is taken, or you are suddenly detained—it is very hard to think broadly and strategically about resistance. Much of what I have learned has come either after people have been deported or before they are locked up.

In California, about 10% of people currently incarcerated have ICE holds. That means they have been thinking about ICE, detention, and deportation for years. There is a vast store of untapped knowledge and strategy there.

Some of the people who best understand state violence are those who experience it every day. I hope Choices Media can be one of the spaces that brings that knowledge into conversation with university communities, organizers, and broader publics.

I really hope this becomes an opportunity to build more collaboration, in the spirit of what Mariame Kaba calls “a million experiments, rather than just investing in one person per project.”