Sameer Ashar
Clinical Professor of Law, UC Irvine | Workers, Law & Organizing Clinic | law & social movements, legal education, abolitionist futures | losing my edge
- Was thinking of the work of @jenniferleekoh.bsky.social when making these comments
- “On immigration, socialist demands should include full labour and civic rights for migrants, full entitlement to benefits, unionisation across the economy, and an undoing of vulnerabilities that contribute to the super-exploitation of migrants.” Response to all center-left dithering on immigration
- Honored to be in the company of these colleagues @ucirvinelaw.bsky.social
- Not sure why I expected that this university president, when asked about events at Columbia, might comment on the disappearing of graduate students by the state.
- Looking forward to this. Thanks to Catherine Smith and Alexi Freeman.
- Appreciate @marissaesque.bsky.social using racial capitalism to connect the dots; essential work in the midst of the shitstorm
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- I am sure petitioners are pushing on both fronts and courts moving faster than usual, but there’s still a significant time lag with the jurisdictional question up first.
- What I imagine is slowing things down is jurisdictional skirmishing. Govt arguing that the cases should be transferred to LA/Fifth Cir. Khalil was already moved once from NY to NJ district court. ICE moved faster to get Ozturk out of MA but may be unclear where she was when habeas was filed.
- It’s a stacked system to start with, made even more so by the lawlessness of the administration. My question is about the Venezuelan migrants in EL Salvador prison. That is an atrocity on the same level of family separation in Trump I.
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- You need to win the right to a bond hearing and then prove that you’re neither a danger nor a flight risk. In these cases, I’m sure bond hearings are not forthcoming until a federal judge orders it. And then ICE will argue both prongs.
- This point by @70sbachchan.bsky.social on companies making exemption applications and lobbying to prevent exemptions for competitors may have more explanatory power re law firm concessions to Trump than the M&A thesis. thedigradio.com/podcast/glob...
- Excellent commentary. Also a reminder that the attack on the legal profession started with vendettas against individual lawyers. The firm concessions have enabled the broader protoauthoritarian assault and incentivized preemptive obedience.
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- It may be that both young and old have the same understanding of the current political environment but different positionality and differing thoughts about the benefits of accommodation and access to power.
- Those focused on law firm acquiescence to Trump and the undermining of the legal profession as a democratic bulwark would be wise to expand their frame and look more carefully at the public interventions of leading firms against pro-Palestinian protests on campuses. www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/b...
- “Killing Houthis abroad, dismantling infrastructure at home, booting immigrants into foreign gulags, disappearing dissidents, and beyond: death and destruction is what the machine does, and maybe even all it can do.“
- some delightful news: I'm a columnist at @nplusonemag.com! just when I thought I was out, Trump dragged me back in. here's the column debut, about the unspoken yet obvious fact at the center of those Signal chats, and at the core of where we are now
- The interpretive lens we need - looking to the Black Panthers, build from the bottom up
- Re-upping in response to abundance agenda and calls for project 2029. We have the ideational resources we need if we expand our sight to the periphery.
- Had missed this, from the annals of institutional capitulation
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- The antisemitism initiative is being used to send students to detention centers in Louisiana based on their political speech and/or association.
- I’d submit that any reaction other than a lawsuit to these firm EO’s is a concession to proto-authoritarian corruption.
- Hard to believe that PW/Quinn didn’t acquiesce to the WH statement indicating that Pomerantz was thrown under the bus for his government work.
- This is shameful and dangerous, coming from a pillar firm of the legal establishment
- Current and formerly detained workers continue to organize against labor expropriation and unsafe conditions in Geo facilities, supported by @ccijustice.bsky.social and @ucirvinelaw.bsky.social Workers, Law, and Organizing Clinic
- Private prison companies are well-represented at the highest levels of the Trump Administration theintercept.com/2024/11/22/t...
- How many stories of summary detention & removal will it take for people to question their own assumptions/prejudice about labels such as “terrorist” and “gang member”? Multiple generations of socio-cultural production grounds Islamophobic and anti-migrant fascism.
- “Mahmoud is not safe. This is not a matter of how he feels. He is in real danger, and everyone who helped fashion a moral panic around students fighting to stop the outright annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza—and increasingly also in the West Bank—bears moral responsibility for that fact.“
- Permission structure (and lack of past accountability) enables Abu Gharib conditions as empire boomerangs into “the homeland”
- This is what Senate Dems gave an additional $10 bill for in the CR and House and Senate Dems provided for in Laken Riley
- key insight
- Exemplary and inspiring work by @rlopez.bsky.social
- It’s hard to describe what it means to me to see this archive go live at Princeton. It is the culmination of two decades of research starting with my first research grant as an undergrad. library.princeton.edu/about/librar...
- Essential, on the long 9/11 era in immigration law, extended w bipartisan support
- Betar U.S. (ironically, on ADL’s list of extremist organizations) provided a list of targets for deportation to the Trump White House freebeacon.com/campus/trump...
- More thread with link to another by @evanbernick.bsky.social
- thread
- "We are living in a moment in which the system of legal, interpretive legitimacy has fatally broken down. It’s been in its death throes for a decade. Now it’s no longer operating at all. That throne is empty of anything that commands our allegiance or claims to legitimacy."
- “Care only becomes a priority for those in power and with resources when it becomes impossible to ignore because of protests or unrest.“
- Thanks to the Movement Lawyering Group @ucirvinelaw.bsky.social for bringing @tbh1910.bsky.social, founder of Arch City Defenders and lawyer for student protesters at UCI and UCLA, to speak to a packed room of law students looking for direction in a bewildering political context
- Useful perspective from my @ucirvinelaw.bsky.social colleague
- "In the hands of Trump’s lawyers, a constitutional shield against settler-colonial domination becomes an unconstitutional sword. The sword is wielded to dominate people who cannot depend upon the protection of any competing sovereign against United States law."
- Thanks to @suhauna.bsky.social for covering this story. It’s a gift for us to work with CCIJ and courageous leaders Pedro Figueroa and Jose Ruben Hernandez.
- “Class in this sense of the term is not a category of identity—like nationality and ethnicity—but rather is a category of violence and oppression—like racism and sexism.”
- Important meditation on labor history, class, and reformist vs. non-reformist reforms (as it’s described in the contemporary abolitionist lit). I’d consider whether these are all categories (or conduits) of violence and oppression, rather than neutral or natural identity categories.
- “Are California’s immigrants – including the “second responders” now working in relief brigades in hazardous fire-ravaged neighborhoods – a bigger threat to public safety than the Jan. 6 rioters pardoned by Trump?”
- Immigrant defense resources from @ndlon.bsky.social
- “Law can never be a legitimate cover for the failed tactic of incrementalism.“
- My MLK day piece is up. open.substack.com/pub/sherrily...
- “The truth is that criminality is constructed by law enforcement by virtue of the people they choose to arrest and detain – and it somehow is never the boss who doesn’t pay minimum wage.“
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- “Part of the latent power of the values they write so eloquently about – solidarity, grace, the dignity of labour – comes from their irreducibility, their resistance to equivalence and calculation. These values are allergic to commensuration and defy reduction to exchange value.“
- “The struggle to maintain these values in the face of constant onslaught is…an obligation to hold true to the force of incommensurability. There is a politics, a defiance, to resisting the…proliferation of commodification…: datafication, digitalisation, and financialisation.”
