Why Detained Migrants are Sent to Louisiana w/ Lydia Pelot-Hobbs

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.

[00:00:00] Cayden Mak: What’s up everybody, and welcome to Block and Build a podcast from Convergence Magazine. I’m your host in the publisher of Convergence, Cayden Mak. On this show, we’re building a roadmap for the movement that’s working to block the impacts of rising authoritarianism while building the strength and resilience of the broad front that we need to win.

This week on the show, we are taking another look at some of the stories we’ve been following over the past couple of weeks from some new angles and with some new insights. First, I’ll be joined by Olivia Pello Hobbs, assistant professor of geography at the University of Kentucky as a geographer of prisons and mass incarceration.

Her work specifically looks at the Gulf South and Louisiana in particular. We’ll discuss how and why the state uses its infrastructure of mass incarceration and how abolitionist movements have fought back then. Jen Fry of the Carolina Federation joins me to talk about the organized resistance to the Republican attempts to overturn the results of Last Fall’s State Supreme Court election, which recently entered its third recount and what’s next in that fight.

But first, these headlines. Federal law enforcement has a long history of using some real shady tactics to entrap political dissidents and others from Co Intel Pro to the post nine 11 FBI. Entrapment of Young Muslim men through fake study groups at Mosques, a joint investigative report this week between Wired and 4 0 4 Media exposes a new private company trying to help local law enforcement agencies get in the game.

By outsourcing such entrapment efforts with AI 4 0 4, media used public records requests to obtain some internal marketing documentation from the company, massive Blue, which claims to quote, power positive impact through the ethical use of ai. Barf, their tool called Overwatch, quote deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels.

In other words, it creates fake pre people who attempt to infiltrate online spaces and push individuals to incriminate themselves on the record. This presentation that was obtained by 4 0 4 media included fake characters such as the protest persona. A 36-year-old divorced woman who is lonely, has no children, is interested in baking, activism and body positivity, along with other characters designed to entrap people attempting to organize protests online.

As these tools stand now, the company reports their software has not led to any arrests and some of the samples of their AI character behavior are pretty laughably absurd if you are somebody who’s been paying any attention. But these tool tools will continue to be refined and pushed by these companies that are looking to cash in on the backlash against protesters.

And there are plenty of newly politicized folks. Who are likely to be a lot less careful about their online behavior, and that is just who these kinds of entrapment mechanisms are gonna sweep up. And speaking of this big scary internet. Another piece of news we’re thinking about a little bit is that some far right groups have been doxing activists and they appear to be guiding the cold, creeping hand of ice.

I share this not to spread panic, but to identify this as part of a merch towards fascism, and it’s not just one organization. Either two of them to date have taken credit for some of the active legal cases against pro-Palestine protestors, especially in college campuses. Canary Mission, the pro-Israel Doxing operation includes the names of students as well as some professors who have been targeted due to their political activity.

Betar, USA also proudly announced that they furnished lists of students they think should be deported for what amounts to thought crimes. Bragging on Twitter that this will soon include domestic born US citizens. The outsourcing of this kind of work to what amounts to internet militias is an online update to an old page out of the authoritarian playbook.

These organizations are doing the dirty work for the government and accelerating repression against social movements. This way the government can be in more places than it otherwise could be, and it instills fear in people thinking about standing up against it. Finally we did not talk about the tariffs last week, but I want to plug this great useful thing that I heard from a friend of the show, van Jackson this week on his show on diplomatic.

He pointed out that we need to start calling the tariff regime, what it is, economic sanctions. 

[00:04:22] Sound on Tape: Trump issued his global tariff regime, which people keep calling them reciprocal tariffs. It’s important to note, first of all, these are not reciprocal. These are based on the trade deficit that U the US has with other economies.

There’s nothing like reciprocal about that, and tariffs in response to a trade deficit is like kind of bananas. That doesn’t really make sense. We’re calling them reciprocal, but they’re not reciprocal. That’s a branding thing that Trump did, and then we’re calling them tariffs. But tariffs have certain functions that are not why they’re being used here.

Like these are sanctions. This is global economic sanctions because they’re coercive. This is not about building up a particular sector of the economy, although they use manufacturing as a kind of excuse for this stuff. And so it, it’s really sanctions. We’re talking about a global sanctions regime. 

[00:05:12] Cayden Mak: So to reiterate, the purpose of a tariff is to protect domestic industry.

And this is actually the furthest thing from what a lot of these MAGA policy, this is what the MAGA policy package does. They’re protecting anyone. They’re protecting the ultra rich oligarchs, not industry. And in fact, a lot of those mega rich assholes have actually gotten way richer. Since the first round of tariff announcements to tank the stock market.

On the other hand, the purpose of economic sanctions is to get another state to change their behavior. And this is especially true when it comes to China. There have been, this has a lot more to do with the sort of hawkish brinksmanship with China than it does with any real protection of US business interests.

And I just think we have a responsibility to start calling this policy. What it. Is an effort to isolate and antagonize other countries into a great power conflict where the only winners are the people who have financialized the risk of war. 

Hello, I’m Marcy Ryan and I’m the print editor for Convergence.

If you’re enjoying this show like I am, I hope you consider subscribing to Convergence. We’re a small, independent operation and rely heavily on our readers and listeners like you to support our work. You can become a [email protected] slash donate. You’ll find a direct link in the show notes.

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[00:07:04] Cayden Mak: The abduction of political ice detainees like mun. Khalil has also notably involved moving them from facilities near their homes and communities to far away places, particularly lately, Louisiana. This is not an accident, and in fact, it’s part of a longer trend in ice detention that goes back years. The facility in Gina, Louisiana has no accident either.

The political dimension of this move is pretty clear, isolating people from their communities. Weakens their ability to provide legal defense. It isolates them. And also it is a little bit about court shopping and like venue shopping for their hearings. I think also I wanna introduce this conversation by framing up the fact that these extraditions, that Louisiana as a destination is not an accident.

And to talk about this a little bit with me today is Lydia Pello Hobbes, who has written a book and teaches about the geography of mass incarceration in the Gulf South and Louisiana in particular. Lydia, thank you so much for joining me today. 

[00:08:03] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure. I wish it was under different circumstances.

[00:08:08] Cayden Mak: Yeah, I know. I actually, I feel like I say this a lot to people over the past and I’ve have with a lot of guests over the past couple weeks just been like, ah, I wish we were talking about something better, but man, we are. Yeah. Could you start by giving us a little overview of the sort of landscape of mass incarceration in Louisiana and how the infrastructure that ICE is using in this moment has been set up well before this moment?

[00:08:33] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: Yeah, so it’s worth noting for folks who might not be aware, between the years of 1998 and 2020 for every year, but one, Louisiana had the highest rate of per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. It did not have the most people. But it had the highest rate of folks incarcerated.

And that means that there was decades to get you to that point in 1998, right? It wasn’t like people woke up one day and all of a sudden people were locked up. There were a series of different kind of political choices that were made from the seventies onwards to put that state of affairs into being.

And while there’s obviously a real difference in terms of kind of the federal detention world and the kind of state level prison thing, they, at the local level, there’s often a lot of interplay that’s happening. So it’s worth noting that. Louisiana really starts building up its prison capacity in relationship actually to two different things.

One, a liberal prison kind of conditions of confinement lawsuit that folks who were locked up doing solitary Angola in the seventies put forth trying to transform Angola or the Louisiana State Penitentiary that had unfortunately a bunch of unintended consequences where the states turn.

Was to ameliorate or respond to what they understood as the constitutional crises by expanding out not only Angola, but to start building out a series of new state prisons across the state. And that this really also deepened and solidified prisons in the landscape of Louisiana. Which I think is a really.

Foreign thing. And it was importantly, Louisiana started doing this about a decade earlier than other states than say, California or New York. Or Florida or Texas, because as a state whose political economy is deeply tied to oil, in response to the 1973 opec oil price hikes, Louisiana actually had more cash on hand than almost any others.

So while other states were in like deep recessions Louisiana, literally if you read the state budgets, like I read way too many years of the Louisiana State budgets every year they said we have more money than we know what to do with. So they were actually able to build prisons quicker than say other places, really notably Florida in this instance.

Who had similar court orders. But because they did not have the funds available, they started turning to early release and Louisiana was in a really, specific different place. So 

[00:10:46] Cayden Mak: yeah. Now that’s actually a really interesting, the interplay between the specific like big money industry and then the ability of the state to be like, cool. Yeah. We can incarcerate more people. Yeah. Just 

[00:10:58] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: like taxes really, when do you get the money and where from. Yeah. 

[00:11:01] Cayden Mak: Yeah. I also think one of the interesting things about your work is looking at this interplay between the state and between movements that have been pushing back against the infrastructure.

Do you think that there are important lessons from the history of organizing in Louisiana that can help guide our work today? I think the, like Angola example in the seventies is an interesting example of like how not to pursue certain kinds of reforms, which I think is very important. 

[00:11:24] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: Yeah, I think a lot of it is this question of like, how do people get out, right?

So like, how is it not about, people have talked to me about they’re not trying to find a better place to die, right? They’re trying to get out of the cages that can find them in the first place, right? And so it’s not about some folks I’ve talked to are like, say we’re not interested in running the penitentiary.

We’re interested in getting out of it and making sure other people don’t get out either. And I think. In this political moment where we’re thinking about, political prisoners like Mamu, Khalil, and others, we’ve been very clear here. The goal is to get people out of these various institutions, not to somehow make ICE detention or say the other locations that they’re maybe getting first arrested and Pro brought in.

I assume most of these folks are first getting locked up in a local jail before they’re getting transported. And so what are those different relationships at this moment? Something else that I’ve been thinking about a lot is. Louisiana was the site of in 1987 there was a riot in a place called Oakdale ice Detention Facility.

Actually of Mariel boat prisoners. So for Cubans who had come to the US. And this is, I’m getting a little ahead of myself in our conversation, but who ended up going from Florida to Louisiana and to this new brand new kind of ice facility that was built in Louisiana in the eighties.

And they had a riot when they found out that both Cuba was like, they were in this really. Rock between a hard place where they could both not get released into the United States. And they didn’t, they were, they could not go back to Cuba. So there was actually no answer of anywhere they were going to go than this.

Than ice detention. And they had a riot, which is a really under. Standable response, right? Yeah. If you 

[00:12:57] Cayden Mak: were facing indefinite detention, what are you gonna do?

[00:12:59] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: What you do, right? So they burnt down many buildings. It was a really full scale. It’s often not talked about in the same way that something like Attica is, right?

But in the same way that Attica also the state clamped down and use that lesson to actually intensify coercion, which is not to again, downplay the incredibly liberatory imagination of the Attica brothers. I wanna be very clear here, but the state repression response. At Oakdale was right.

They built the. Ice detention facility back up bigger and stronger and still no one got out. So I think there’s also a, what are the different strategies that we’re thinking about? And preparing for what are likely state responses whether at the local level or the national level or the state level at the same time in this political moment.

So are they going to say, okay, great, we’re gonna have ice detention? Are the Democrats gonna say we could have kinder, gentler ice detention? For instance. And that’s the counter, right? Or we’re gonna get people out of prisons in El Salvador and then they’re gonna come be in pri.

Yeah, exactly. So I think it’s keeping an eye on what the actual goals are and not getting stuck in some kind of middle ground that’s actually not getting anyone free and actually naturalizing in many regards. Immigrants being locked up for all kinds of reasons. 

[00:14:06] Cayden Mak: Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about this too, the I think popular discourse about.

El Salvador and like extradition to El Salvador as I don’t know, we’ve been like, it seems like the mainstream media is splitting a lot of hairs about who is or is not deportable. Whether or not these people are quote unquote innocent. As if it’s okay to like just remove people from their communities arbitrarily and send them to another country.

They’re not even from what it seems very I feel a lot of anxiety when I see that kind of discourse that’s like doing in a much more like a much less material, but no less impactful way. This kind of thing that you’re describing around like how is, like, how is that unintentionally opening a door to a kinder, gentler mass incarceration?

[00:14:56] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: Exactly. Yeah. And I think, I’ve been really thinking about this a lot with Silky Shaw’s work, right? As executive director of detention watch it’s great book and Build Walls, that is the book we need right now. 

[00:15:05] Sound on Tape: Yeah. 

[00:15:06] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: Thinking about immigration justice and abolitionist movements, and I just keep thinking also about we already have a system, like the federal prison system in the United States sends people all over the place and the places most federal prisons are in the US are places really far from where folks are usually from.

So they are in Appalachia, they’re in West Texas. They are also. Very removed remote places that are designed to be in these places to really keep people away from their communities. Yeah. So it’s like, how do we actually use this moment in thinking about El Salvador to say this is a magnification of actually what incarceration looks like, whether it’s at the federal level, whether it’s state, if you’re in California sending people to the Central Valley when theyre from la whether it’s.

Sending people upstate if you’re in New York, right? There’s all of these different versions of this, but that it is the ability to cage, to incarcerate people to disrupt communities and to do family separation. Always. That is what incarceration is. Yes. That leads to a. This as a logical outcome of what we already do.

This El Salvador moment. It’s not an aberration. It’s just an intensification. 

[00:16:07] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. I think that also is such a, I had silky on the pod a couple weeks back and this conversation about the fact that like the things that MAGA is able to do. With the existing system is I think pulls back.

Like it should be a moment where we can pull back the veil a little bit on what we have always done in this country. Yeah, 

[00:16:31] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: exactly. Yeah, exactly right. As long as we say that we can deport people, period. That is what gives us license to deport people in the way that we are deporting people right now.

Yeah. But it’s the underlying thing is deportation not Trump or not so many other things. 

[00:16:45] Cayden Mak: Totally. Let’s turn to the specific facility that we are fairly sure Akm. Khalil is being held in Louisiana. What is significant about that particular facility? And what do you know about that place as a place and the sort of and there’s obviously a combination of let’s talk about this facility. Let’s talk about the venue shopping part. Because there was recently, the local court was like, yes, you can deport this man.

[00:17:10] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: So I think there’s a couple of different things. So I think first of all, this is again to get us out of an exceptionalist idea of what this moment is.

And to go back to like how did you end up with these detention facilities in Louisiana in the first place? And I wanna say this really concretely. This is a story that goes back to the eighties. Again, we had it was not until under Reagan that we, like we had in the early 20th century, done a fair amount of detention and deportation.

And the twenties, the, sorry, the 1920s was a key moment of that. But then there was a like moment where the federal laws around detention, deportation, they weren’t off the books, but they weren’t being activated. And then under Reagan, we see this activation specifically with Cuban prisoners, right?

We’re Cuban folks who are coming and leaving the island and trying to get to the US and first trying to get to Florida, obviously. But then there’s not enough space for them. And there ends up being this real boom of immigration detention in Louisiana in the eighties under two different dynamics.

The first, which is different than the ICE facilities we think about is the intensification of the detention of folks in jails. So this becomes a new kind of system in the eighties where sheriffs, and this is where there’s a really direct tie to mass incarceration, Louisiana local sheriffs who had been getting what are called per diem monies, or they get a lot of they get money for every person held through the state prison system in a local jail per night in a prison.

They started getting that through what was then INS. And to be incarcerating immigrant detainees in their jails for even higher federal per diem rates. So there starts to be in these rural places in Louisiana, an ingratiation of kind of sheriff and the criminal legal system and local economies to say we have a fundamental investment in locking up immigrants.

So that’s part of the story, right? So that I think is important for just shifting ideological terrain and acculturating people to these dynamics. Then we see the kind of intensification and the buildup of ICE detention facility. So the LaSalle facility in Gina is one the Oakdale one I already mentioned, and a key reason why the federal government decides to build ice facilities, or I guess at that moment their INS facilities, but detention facilities in Louisiana.

Is because of the military bases in that region, which allow for airstrips. So it’s really easy to bring people in. So instead of having to like, be at a commercial or an airport like JFK or LAX or something, or Houston, these military airstrips, these military places are really easy to a, bring folks into far away from their families.

Yeah. That’s part of the story. And then it’s really easy to port people out of, right? And it’s these, like these, it actually is a part, this. Air military infrastructure and Jenna Lloyd and Allison Moons wrote this great book called Borders, bases and Boats about the Cold War Buildup of Immigration Detention.

They’ve written a whole chapter about this specific Louisiana dynamic, so I think it’s really important to keep in mind. These immigration detention centers are in Louisiana because of Cold War military power. And if we don’t understand that we’re not actually gonna understand why they’re here in the first place.

So that’s like literally how you get the buildings. How do you get the planes? That’s like the very material infrastructure. On the legal side, as you mentioned, right? There is a goal to get people under jurisdictions that are anti-immigrant that are pro-Trump. And having the judgeships that are going to find in alignment with the administration.

It’s why there was, there’s been such a fight, right? To get Muhammad Kals next hearing to be to the jurisdiction to be New Jersey, right? Instead of having to be Louisiana. That was a really big win for his legal team. Because they know these people, last week’s ruling, they didn’t even a, the Secretary of State, didn’t even really offer a reason other than, I don’t know.

He said, so he was against genocide and then the judge didn’t even say anything. So they, there is a real political choice. Of these jurisdictions. And then also that you’re really far from family and friends. You’re really far from your legal teams. And we know, there’s a whole other question of, immigration detention is technically right, administrative versus criminal law.

So also what people’s rights have are different than say if it was, they were a prisoner versus a detainee, which feel like semantics, but have real legal differences for people’s lives. Sure. But also that it’s, it’s really meaningful when people are far away. The other thing I wanna say about Gina that I think is something to worth keeping in mind is that, I first became accustomed to Gina people in Louisiana, people in Texas have been, doing kind of organizing around these facilities for a long time.

And also there’s been all of this organizing that goes back. Almost 20 years when the Gina six case was on this, I was, 

[00:21:48] Cayden Mak: that was the first thing I thought about when I saw Gina. I was like, oh, is this the same place? Like

[00:21:53] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: it’s the same place. And as someone who spent a lot of time, I worked on the campaign around Gina six whenever that was in 2007, it’s a very small town.

It’s a very small town. It’s pretty multi, it’s a pretty multiracial town, right? There’s a significant black population, but there’s a significant white population that mostly runs a town. And then there’s also this ice facility there, right? So it’s also, for me, I keep thinking about this was also a site of, the largest protest against anti-black racism in the first decade of the 21st century, right?

Yeah. That, that is also there. And those families are there and the folks who organized for many months before it kind be became a national story, right? So I think it’s, and those are folks who were fighting the criminalization of black youth. So I would also say what is interesting or what we shouldn’t forget maybe is a better way of putting it in this moment, is that Gina Louisiana is both this site of state violence that’s happening.

It’s also a site that. Folks who have organized around immigration have known well and been to. And it also has been a site of activism against criminalization. And so my question also in this moment is like, how are we thinking about those pieces all playing together? Because the same kind of judges that are, ruling on Khalil are the same, are, literally the friends of the judges of the people who are ruling against.

Those the six boys with the Genina six case too, so this is also part of the thinking of I think the administration on both the legal and the kind of material infrastructure at this moment. 

[00:23:16] Cayden Mak: Yeah. It’s such a, it’s such a, like pointy it’s almost it’s such a like.

Pointy ca like case in, like No, this is about white supremacy. Yeah it’s like it’s white supremacy all the way down. It’s, you can’t, you couldn’t, I feel like if you wrote this in fiction, people would be like, this is too heavy handed. But it would, yeah, it would feel like you 

[00:23:34] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: were going too far.

Yeah, it would feel like you were going too far in the story, but I think that it’s also, the other thing to note about Gina is it’s really far away to get to, even from Louisiana. So as someone who has physically been to Gina or within Louisiana, like it is far from New Orleans, it is not easy to get to.

So it is a, I don’t know, maybe a four hour drive from New Orleans, and that’s probably the closest city. Maybe Baton Rouge is a little bit closer. Yeah. But it’s not I think it’s also it is both remote in terms of its relationship to a place like New York or Boston or what have you, but it’s also remote also within the state itself.

So it’s not oh, you could easily get on a flight, get there. So it’s like there are these layers of distance that have been created also with this site. 

[00:24:11] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And a lot of that distancing seems to be like. Especially talking the point that you brought up about these military bases, that there’s like work that, that does to make this whole process more invisible to the sort of like general American public that like part of the goal is to essentially disappear people domestically.

Disappear human beings. Within the borders of United States. 

[00:24:34] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: Exactly. And it’s when they first started building things up at Guantanamo, there’s still folks locked up in Guantanamo, right? But when they first started in the first days of the administration and then they took tens down, it’s really unclear what’s happening on Guantanamo.

But the thing I just keep thinking is we can also disappear people within US borders. So they send people to Guantanamo because it’s a unclear site of legal kind of jurisdiction. But. Winning their legal jurisdiction things also by sending them to certain kinds of places in the United States.

Yeah, as well. And I think that’s also part of it. And that even the kind of the things that also make this possible are also the very local kind of ice contracts that like a jail is gonna have with it, right? So I have real questions too about how do we think about these facilities that people are getting sent to longer term, but also where are they even initially able to send people to if they are the day of the arrest, the day that someone is getting taken, are they get, if they’re knocking on a plane right away.

They are going somewhere, and I don’t know all the stories behind this, but the administration is likely using very local kind of democratically control. Like Democrat controlled, not Yeah, 

[00:25:37] Cayden Mak: capital D, Democrat, yeah. 

[00:25:39] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: Yeah. Capital D Democrat controlled, urban infrastructures, right? So it’s also like, how do we.

Think about both the distancing that’s happening, but also the like really intimate connections that are allowing for these things to happen at the same time. 

[00:25:51] Cayden Mak: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s like this infrastructure is way closer to us than we think it is, but it’s also way further away and like it’s some of that like we can’t locate it a little bit.

That’s what makes it scary and dangerous. 

[00:26:02] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: It makes it super scary and dangerous and I think, most people don’t have any. It’s really hard to track it, right? The fact that it even took us days to figure out where people were probably being held, right? Is notable.

[00:26:12] Cayden Mak: Yeah. And the leader of our Lord 2025 when we carry like tracking devices on ourselves like voluntarily. 

[00:26:19] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: Yeah. It’s like really hard. And that theoretically being able to look up where someone is locked up in the United States is public information. People do mugshots, people tell these stories all the time.

And then in this, in a overnight, it’s really much harder to track people down. 

[00:26:31] Sound on Tape: Yeah. 

[00:26:31] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: Than I think we would assume, actually. 

[00:26:34] Cayden Mak: Yeah. It’s pretty wild. My last question for you is we talked a little bit about. Some lessons to be drawn from a history of resistance in Louisiana, but do you think there are other general lessons that organizers need to take from some of this history?

And are there ways that we should be thinking about this moment too, that are missing from a lot of the mainstream coverage of not just Mahmud Khalil’s case, but I think all of the way in ways in which ICE is being weaponized against descent. 

[00:27:00] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: I think there’s a couple things. It’s, I had a friend recently ask me like, what year are we in?

Are we in the turn of the 20th century? Is this an, is this like an Emma Goldman story? Are we in the fifties? Are we, and I’m like, we’re in all of it, right? So I think part of it is not saying it’s a return to something because the literal material and ideological infrastructure of criminalization is just so much wider than it’s ever been before in the history of the United States, right?

So there is a way that like. We did not have the ability to, for instance, fly people around these places and stick them in these f facilities. Like they, the facilities literally did not exist in the same ways. And I think there’s, that is part of the thing to keep in mind, right? That we can draw on historical paths.

But we also have to understand we are in a different present than folks. Struggling in similar ways. Even like thinking about the ways people struggle around political prisoners in the sixties and seventies. The laws have actually gotten harsher, the technologies have gotten more punitive.

So we’re even in a different place than if it was 1975, for 

[00:27:55] Sound on Tape: instance.

[00:27:56] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: At the same time I think we’re getting better, right? About thinking about what this what are the core points, right? So if it’s not about conditions, if we’re saying that there is the criminalization of dissent and it’s criminalization, it’s deportation, these are the root things that we need to be focusing on.

I was at a protest last week in New Orleans, so the Ice Field office for this district is in new Orleans, and it covers many states, not just Louisiana, Texas, other places as well. And the fact that the chants were not just something like restore the rule of law. No one’s gonna chant that.

Like free prisoners, right? And that actually has to be at the forefront, right? Is that it’s not, this is a extreme moment, but if it’s actually about, we don’t believe in attention, we don’t believe in deportation, we don’t believe in criminalization. Like how are we actually gaining at. The root causes and issues that are getting us here in the first place.

So in the same way that I wanna get out of the kind of I think organizers can keep learning in the ways that folks have been doing really well in abolitionist organizing over the last several years to get out of the trap of innocence. Yeah. So it’s not just the question of. Did they do it?

Should they get deported? But the second even, you can deport anyone, it actually opens the de door to deport everyone. And so how do we, and the same thing with criminalization, the same thing with policing. So how are we really making these connections? And also linking up because folks are hap this geography is happening, right?

So people are getting picked up in certain places and they’re getting dropped off in other places. So how are we also. And, but these are not places that, while the public at large might not know a lot about, there are folks on the ground who have been knowing about these places for a long time too, right?

So I think part of it is also figuring out who knows what and where. And they might not be like the big flashy names of organizations that people know about, but they might be like little. 10 person groups that have been helping folks do ice check-ins for years. Who might be like, oh, I know these things.

It might, and that is gonna be also I think, key in this moment as folks are trying to think through this. I also think there is something about just getting to thinking about what are all of these different scales of jurisdiction and state making, right? So I think so much. That can be hard in this moment is being able to pinpoint targets.

And being able to say, there are so many different targets happening, and sometimes their jurisdiction is here. This is last week when the ruling happened. People were like, oh, everything’s over. And I was like, no, they’re still in New Jersey. We’re not actually out of this yet. And being able to get clear, what is the, in my mind there’s like butcher paper and there’s a lot of markers markers are like pointing where everyone is, but being like, these are these folks who have leverage, say it’s a local sheriff, has leverage on one hand, right?

City council has leverage on another hand, right? A board of trustees of some very fancy, very rich university has apparently leverage on another hand at this moment. Or campus police or university presidents or these little small towns. So it’s like, how are we thinking at all of these registers?

And it doesn’t mean that every person needs to be thinking at every register or every organization, but that, it should be clear like, this organization’s focusing here and here, but we’re actually moving in alignment. So that we’re actually able to think about the big picture. So we lose here, but maybe we can win there.

And thinking about this and that. Level and that trying to also always keeping like there are these really heightened stories of this moment, but also knowing we have so many people also being locked up in these facilities with whose names we do not know 

[00:31:17] Sound on Tape: also. 

[00:31:17] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: Yeah. So how do we also, not exceptionalize, but say the reason, and I think, folks whose statements have been coming out have been saying this pretty clearly actually.

My ability to be locked up here right now is because all these other people are locked up who no one knows about, who also should be Right. And that is also, I think, key to just keep front and center. So it’s not we get this one person out, but the structures have stayed, right? But it’s like how do we use this political moment to call into question, to dele de-legitimize these structures for everyone. 

[00:31:43] Cayden Mak: Yeah. I feel like this insight about the like. Different scales and levers of power is a really essential one that I’ve been thinking a lot about because I think that, I’ve found in conversations even with friends about like how like inscrutable and unassailable a federal government feels right now, but that actually like by tracing the ways that like actual, literal human beings move through a system like this, we can see how, demanding that, for instance, like my county sheriff does not collaborate with ice. How that has a like real, immediate and material impact, but also is, can be part of a broader national strategy that is. Ultimately aimed at dismantling this whole system. Yeah. And remaking it into something that is actually about human flourishing.

[00:32:29] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And I think it helps us feel less demobilized. Or like less debil. Like we can do something and it matters and it’s not like a small one off. It actually has material impacts in people’s lives.

[00:32:41] Cayden Mak: Absolutely. Yeah. Now that is fantastic. Lydia, this was great.

It was a delight to talk to you. Thank you so much. Even though we’re talking about some of honestly the darkest shit there is right now. If people wanna learn more about your research and dive deeper into this conversation where can people find you? What should people.

[00:32:58] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: I have a lovely book out called Prison Capital Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana. We also I wouldn say it’s, we have a great book that I co-edited called The Jails Everywhere. That’s out through Verso Press. You can also find me on Blue Sky at Lydia Jean, do whatever the letters are that we do after Blue Sky Learning this.

I still technically have a Twitter account. I don’t think I’ve. Been on it months and months. That 

[00:33:21] Cayden Mak: website really great.

[00:33:22] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: But yeah. But thank you so much for having me here. I really appreciate it. 

[00:33:25] Cayden Mak: Awesome. Thanks so much, Lydia. Take care. 

[00:33:27] Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: Thank you. Bye. 

[00:33:30] Cayden Mak: Next so last week on the show we talked about how the North Carolina Supreme Court race is about to run through yet another recount.

They’re third since the election in November. We published a piece back in February about the organizing efforts around that race and then also the ongoing work to defend the victory from the backlash. I’m joined now by the author of that piece and, co-Director of Carolina Federation, Jen Fry, to get us up to speed on what’s been happening in North Carolina, where their work stands now, and what comes next.

Jen, thank you so much for making the time to join us today. 

[00:34:02] Jenn Frye: Yeah, Caden, thanks for having me. 

[00:34:04] Cayden Mak: First, can we do a quick run through of everything that Carolina Federation and your larger coalition have done to create a more just and representative government in North Carolina recently? I know that this particular story kind of starts with last Fall’s election, but I know that’s also not the only chapter.

Could you give us a big picture outline of y’all’s work and the sorts of things that. You all work on? 

[00:34:26] Jenn Frye: Yeah the Carolina Federation has only existed since about 2018. And we are part of a larger North Carolina ecosystem, though that has been doing civic engagement and electoral work for longer than that.

But I’d say since we. Started joining that effort in 2018 as an organization. We, alongside of Down home, North Carolina, borough, North Carolina, and a bunch of other organizations ranging from the a Philip Randolph Institute that’s been here forever to advanced North Carolina and other groups have been part of collective efforts to help elect and defeat particular candidates in North Carolina.

And in addition to that, we’ve been working to build bases of people in com in communities across the state primarily working class folks who are deeply engaged in their own communities. The Carolina Federation has members in four of the larger counties in our state, and those members collectively have won millions of dollars in their local communities for public schools, for housing, and other local issues.

They have elected a candidate in a primary election defeated a democratic. Candidate who is a Democrat in name only in a really tough district in 2022. And they helped elect one of the most progressive district attorneys in North Carolina, in Durham and won the largest affordable housing bond in Durham’s history in the state’s history by helping elect a progressive slate of candidates in 2015.

Yeah, the list goes on. Oh, I should mention collectively broke the super majority that the Republicans have in the legislature. Not once but twice. 

[00:36:08] Cayden Mak: It’s amazing. This is what we talk about when we talk about governing power is like actually like moving resources to communities and like having the government actually serve the needs of working people.

It’s amazing. 

[00:36:17] Jenn Frye: Yeah. And it’s not an easy fight in North Carolina. 

[00:36:20] Cayden Mak: Yeah. I cannot imagine it is. And speaking of how it is not an easy fight we talked last week on the show about the fact that this is, this contest like this, like result contesting is like out of the MAGA playbook, that this is what Trump did in 2020, right?

That like the idea is to like continually cast doubt on the outcome of a very tight race. Refuse to concede. But can you tell us a little bit about. Who the folks behind this strategy are to get this kind of odious third recount done, which is just I’m like, what is happening? What is the who?

Yes. Like correction. 

[00:36:56] Jenn Frye: It’s not a recount. Three Recounts actually confirmed that Allison Riggs, the Democratic candidate for State Supreme Court won Uhhuh. And what the process that we’re in now is that Jefferson Griffin who lost that race. After the election was over, after those recounts confirmed rigs submitted a challenge of 65,000 voters in North Carolina and asked the courts after the board of election refused to halt the results asked the courts to intervene and prevent the election from being certified, and that is what the state court did after the election.

Riggs. Immediately initiated lawsuits and ever since then we’ve been in a series of court decisions related to this case. So Jefferson Griffin is the primary person behind this. He’s the losing candidate in that race. He’s a sitting judge on the North Carolina Court of Appeals. And he, along with the North Carolina GOP have refused to accept that they lost this election and have continued to really go after voters.

They’re going after individual people who followed all of the rules at the time of the election. They’re claiming they didn’t follow the rules, and they’re saying it’s not the voter’s fault, but the Board of Elections improperly administered the rules. Even though. Many of the rules the board is implementing were written by the Republican legislature.

So right, 

[00:38:24] Cayden Mak: because they have had the power to do that. 

[00:38:26] Jenn Frye: They have had the power to do that since 2010, and they have done many things to make voting harder and elections less competitive. But they want more they want more unfettered power. They know that in North Carolina, we’re a purple state. We have voters in this state who split their tickets.

They know if they don’t close down legitimate paths for voters to unseat candidates that are doing things that are highly unpopular. That they will lose elections. And that’s what this is ultimately about. It’s about them using any strategy they can throw at us to continue to constrain freedom and integrity of elections in North Carolina so that they can hold onto power or take it where they don’t currently have it.

[00:39:13] Cayden Mak: Yeah, that’s, it’s nefarious and it also feels it feels like a, like new battlefront in the like larger story of far right. Court capture. That like one of the things that I’ve been thinking a lot about in reading about this story is like the ways in which this is like the, it’s like the Federal Society end game a little bit.

And that, that is that’s pretty frightening, I think, for all of us outside of North Carolina too. 

[00:39:39] Jenn Frye: Yeah. Yeah the Supreme Court were not important in North Carolina. They would not be going after it. That is for sure. 

[00:39:45] Cayden Mak: Yeah. So what comes next in the fight? There was recently some news like an update on the case.

What is, what are you all keeping an eye on right now? And what are the like next big moves that you’re anticipating? 

[00:39:59] Jenn Frye: Yeah. It feels a little bit like a moving target, but a couple of things to keep in mind here are this is an ongoing legal fight and will continue to be in the courts. Justice Riggs has said that she will fight this all the way to the National Supreme Court if she needs to protect the votes of North Carolinians.

Most recently the Court of Appeals ruled. In favor of Griffin’s challenge, but then the State Supreme Court actually partially ruled against him. So there were 60. There’s different buckets of voters involved here, and I wanna say from the beginning that all of these buckets, in all of these buckets, the voters have been cherry picked.

There is no. It is chaos and confusion because there is no real good reason for why they’re challenging the specific voters. Other than that, they think they probably voted for the Democratic candidate, and so they want their votes tossed out. But there’s a group of voters that was about 60,000 people who Griffin claimed failed to on their voter registration form, put either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their social security number.

It turns out many of those voters actually had provided that information at some point in time. But administrative errors and other factors prevented that information from showing up. There was also confusion about the voter registration form itself, whether those things were required or not. And even if they were marked as required in North Carolina, the law gives voters who don’t.

Have one, don’t put their driver’s license ’cause maybe they don’t have one or don’t include the last four of their social on a registration form can still prove their identity in order for their registration to be valid. On top of that, now in North Carolina we have a photo ID law that requires every voter who shows up in person to show some kind of documentation.

S verifying their identity. Every voter that was impacted by this went through that process. So that was the 68,000 people. Then there are a little over 5,000 others who are voters who are serving in the military or are overseas voters who use a specific portal when they cast their votes from overseas and follow the rules that are set at the state and federal level for doing so.

Griffin is claiming that those voters did not provide photo identification when they voted that they should have, and that therefore their ballots shouldn’t count. However, a repo a law passed by the Republican legislature did not require them to show photo identification to vote. And so that’s being challenged there.

It’s actually pretty absurd that the. Case has gotten as far as it has in the courts because the laws are pretty clear. And this is, it’s pretty devastating and frightening actually how far this has gone. All of the voters that we’re talking about here followed the rules, did what they were supposed to do.

There’s this third CAD. Category of voters that Griffin is challenging. Who are people who may have been born to people who are serving in some capacity overseas? They may not have ever lived in North Carolina. And he’s saying because they never lived here, they shouldn’t have the right to vote here.

And what we’re finding, what the Board of Elections is finding is, it’s digging into all of these lists, is that actually many of these voters either followed the rules, some of the people on that list of people who supposedly haven’t lived here. Are living here now, or have lived here. So it’s just, it’s a mess.

And the people who are suffering are the people whose votes should count, who that haven’t counted yet. The Supreme Court actually said, you know what? Those 60,000 voters were taking them off this list. You cannot challenge their votes. That leaves some subset. Of the military and overseas voters, including my sister who is on that list from, there were five counties that Griffin initially targeted all heavily democratic counties.

The State Board of Elections actually told Griffin, you missed the deadline for challenging voters in most of those counties. You only met the deadline for challenge in one single county Guilford County. So if anything. Only the Guilford County voters should have to cure their ballots. Griffin has challenged that again.

He’s basically throwing a temper tantrum to the court of appeals. The court of appeals sits on to say, it’s not fair. You should let me challenge the voters In all of the counties where I submitted challenges, even if I missed the deadline. 

[00:44:34] Cayden Mak: Yeah, I don’t know how else to understand this than a temper.

It’s just I am going to, it’s, and it’s also very similar to the sort of like flood the zone strategy. It’s just like we are just gonna tie up people’s attention and time and resources. Just like making you feel crazy basically. Yeah. Yeah. And that even it’s, what are, what do you think are the chances of this succeeding?

Is this impressing anybody?

[00:44:59] Jenn Frye: What will I 

[00:44:59] Cayden Mak: say about 

[00:44:59] Jenn Frye: that? I. Here’s what I know for sure, that organizations like ours that work with people year round in their communities to organize and engage people in elections as a way to, to show our power, to express our power. We’re committed to doing what we can to make sure that every vote counts and, if this gets to a point in the coming weeks where there are voters that still need to have their registrations rescued because of what Griffin is doing, we are going to do what we can to help those voters. Luckily we’re abroad coalition of organizations that’s really good at working together and people are fired up in North Carolina.

Nice. One of the early things that we did. With our partners at Down Home and other organizations is we called through the list of all 60,000 voters and said, do you know you’re on this list? Many of them did not. When they found out they were on the list, we said, how do you feel about that? And we collected quotes from people who voted for Trump, people who are Democrats, republicans unaffiliated.

And they were all like, what’s with this guy? Like he lost, like why is he trying to take my vote away? I don’t understand. So people have been showing up at rallies. They’ve been calling their legislators to be like, why aren’t you talking about this? They’ve been calling and sending messages to Griffin himself, a variety of tactics.

And so there are people committed to making sure that their neighbor’s votes count because I think what people realize is today it’s my neighbor. Tomorrow it might be me. And Right. We are all impacted by this challenge. Even if our name is not on the list, we likely know somebody who’s on the list and in the future.

Who’s to say it won’t be me? 

[00:46:46] Cayden Mak: Yeah, absolutely. No, that makes a lot of sense to me. And it’s it’s really, first of all, it’s really impressive that you were able to call through that list and get so many people to be like, wait a minute. Like regardless of partisan affiliation, that like this does cross a line into this kind of like showmanship that I think a lot of people are sick and tired of at this point.

[00:47:06] Jenn Frye: And North Carolinians I’m sure this is true in other places, but North Carolinians. Like fair games, right? Like we have some of the biggest college basketball rivalries in the country and people want. The team who did the best to win. And it doesn’t matter what your party affiliation is or what your zip code is, people agree on that, that my vote should count just as much as yours do if you’re properly registered, if you’re following all the rules.

And in fact the Sitting Chief Justice on the North Carolina Supreme Court, Paul Newbie, he only won his election. By 403 votes, that is fewer votes. Alison Riggs won by 734. So he won by fewer votes. It’s absolutely normal in our state for elections to be that close. So everybody’s this is ridiculous that somebody is claiming to try to change the rules after the fact when they clearly lost.

[00:48:02] Cayden Mak: Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. As we wrap up here, I’m curious how folks listening and not just in North Carolina, but perhaps nationally, can keep track of and also support the work that you all are doing right now, which I think is, again it feels like it’s a little bit of a bellwether for like the big picture of the like conservative court capture project in a lot of ways. 

[00:48:24] Jenn Frye: Yeah. I encourage people to tune in to North Carolina based news outlets who are covering this pretty regularly. There’s WNC local public radio. There’s the assembly, which is a really good local or statewide media source. I think this is also getting picked up more in national and even international media.

And then follow the Carolina Federation on Instagram and Facebook. We post regular updates there about what’s moving and what’s happening. In the next few days, we’re likely gonna be sending out a link to call for volunteers to be at the ready to rescue ballots for people. So that’s the best way is to follow us on social and keep up with the latest as it pivots because.

Everything changes day to day. And there’s this thing simultaneously moving where the Board of Elections the Republicans are trying to change who controls the Board of Elections, there’s actually court cases moving on that right now as well. That, that at some point intersect with this contested election that shouldn’t be contested.

[00:49:27] Cayden Mak: Yeah. That’s that is concerning. I really hope that the outcome here is, in favor of like fair and free elections because I think it, it matters so much what happens in really each state about this.

[00:49:39] Jenn Frye: Yeah. Yeah. This is a test case for a strategy that the magar Republicans want to move nationwide.

So everybody should be looking at this and people who love and care about democracy and freedom should be paying attention. 

[00:49:53] Cayden Mak: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jen, and thank you so much for all of your hard work in North Carolina. It’s a pleasure. Yeah, pleasure is mine. Thanks so much.

All right, take care. As a little outro today, I’ve got another media recommendation for you all because a Jarris Dixon’s Fascism Barometer podcast is back for a second season. If you have not listened to the first season, please go back and check that out. But if you’re looking for more clear-eyed analysis from people who are doing the work, a jarris has got you, they’re a critical part of my media diet, and if you enjoy this show, you’ll also enjoy theirs.

My thanks again to Lydia Pella, Hobbes and Jen Fry for joining me today. You can find links to connect their work in the show notes. This show is published by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. I’m Caden, mock producer is Josh Stro Kimie. David designed our cover art. If you have something to say, please do drop me a.

You can send me an email that will consider running on an upcoming episode at [email protected]. And if you’d like to support the work that we do at Convergence, bringing our movements together to strategize, struggle, and win in this crucial historical moment, you can become a [email protected] slash donate.

Even a few bucks a month goes a long way to helping our independent small team help build a map for our movements. I hope this 

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