Help Zé Fight Their Deportation!

I hope my words can be of some worth in decolonizing the immigrant justice movement, in hopes of creating a more livable world, free from artificial categories and dehumanizing constructs. My next and final court date has been set for January 13, 2017. Thank you so much for sharing my page, donating, and supporting me. I am super humbled. 

Read my speech, Desirable Undesirables, on the intersectionality of the war on drugs and immigration policy. I would like to introduce myself as someone who has been criminalized by the war on drugs and also rendered expendable under current immigration policy: http://whoseimmigrationreform.com/2014/02/22/ze-garcia/

I was recently arrested when SEIU and ICIRR coopted Mayday and then used marshals and police repression against autonomous groups. For more information see http://moratoriumondeportations.org, read Kevin Gosztola's article for the Dissenter: http://bit.ly/1mvL7nc, and watch this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHfu7YYHE_Y

Those of you close to me know my situation, and I know many if not all of you are really broke, so this eSpanging campaign is for those with some money to spare. This text is for everyone who can take something from it. My name is Zé and I am in deportation proceedings.

My social activism and convictions regarding "immigrant justice" come from the personal persecution and exclusion I have faced as an immigrant with few "marketable" qualities. 

Namely, I am a criminal. This identity is in tension with not only the State but also with the many "immigrant ally" organizations that have excluded me and so many others because of the inconvenient reality we represent. Our identities as social criminals will not be defended by politicians. They also won't be defended by the faux grassroots whose scope of justice is limited to well behaved, soon to be good, legitimized & bonafide Americans and/or those individuals whose STEM knowledge strengthens the Capital State.

This text is not meant to attack any immigrant community that has been colonized, displaced, criminalized, enslaved by the state, misled, co-opted, used, or snitched on and turned over by the professional managers of the "immigrant left." This text does take aim at those organizations, the NGOs and not-for-profits complicit in the state terror facing our community, because of their convenient silence (sell outs). These groups have fostered a paradigm and conversation among political elites -- One of merits and exclusion: Who in the immigrant community deserves the gauntlet, the full weight of state terrorism, and who doesn't?

This willingness by the "professional immigration left" to collaborate with the state perpetuates the genocide of millions of our people at the border. The control and terrorization of our community in the interior has never been more succinct and immediate as since the "immigration reform" #Not1More #2million2many bullshit began over the summer. As we have stated as part of Moratorium on Deportations Campaign in every communique and every workshop we hosted, facilitated, or have been a part of: Turn Up, Tear Down and the Ni Vencidos, Ni Vendidos Conference (:D!)

Immigration reform is about the contracts between the state and for profit detention centers. Immigration reform is about the contracts between the state and the war corporations that profit from the militarization of the border. Immigration reform is about the local and state governments that will profit from caging immigrants after arresting them and turning them over to ICE -- because immigration reform increases the logistic and budgetary capacity of collaboration between local law enforcement and immigration.

Immigration reform also increases the quota of immigrants to be deported every fiscal year (something E-Verify will likely have a hand in once it is universally implemented, forcing those undocumented people who wouldn't qualify for relief even further into the informal economy or GTFO). Immigration reform is about turning the immigrant community against itself. It is about creating a hierarchy of deserving and undeserving people. It is about forcing those that qualify for "relief" to accept the state brutality that will fall upon their "undeserving" peers. Immigration reform is about the containment of what should be a revolutionary moment in the lives of immigrant communities. Immigration reform is about citizenship not liberation:

I was placed on deportation proceedings in June 2011 for criminal offenses I committed in 2009 and 2010, namely the possession of a bowl, some weed, and for stealing a bottle of Jack Daniels. A shady attorney, who thereafter refused to take my case because it would "prove difficult," swindled me out of $2,000 for deferred inspection visits. I was arrested (again!) with the Immigrant Youth Justice League (IYJL) in Chicago after covering one of their "undocumented unafraid" publicity stunts for Radio Arte, a Pilsen community radio station.

When I speak about the evils and shady shit of the grass roots, this is what I mean: IYJL invited a friend and I to the offices of their parent corporation, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), to help coordinate a possible defense for our respective charges. IYJL said they had money in their coffers to help me pay for an attorney (of which I never saw a dime).

That same day I spoke to people within ICIRR about my immigration case, I told them I really needed help fighting not only this new criminal charge, but also my deportation case, that I was poor. They gave me the run around and said my case was not really their specialty. I left their offices confused, (barely) documented, and afraid. Weeks later I was invited to Centro Autonomo where IYJL was doing a speaking tour, and I was asked to share the story about my own deportation. I spoke the truth. I told the room I felt very scared and confused as to why people in my own community were refusing to really reach out to help me sort out the confusion of my own deportation case. I told the room that not everyone could be IYJL, with an easy to digest public persona. I was the last to speak.

Tania Unzueta (then queen bee of IYJL) immediately rushed to me after I spoke: "Blah blah blah, Im sorry we didn't ask you to join, its just we felt you weren't quite media ready." Enough. Fucking. Said. Everything I had suspected was laid out in front of me. The "grassroots" couldn't help me, wouldn't help me, because it would mean challenging the image they had postured, packaged, and sold to politicians. This isn't to say there aren't good people in IYJL (although the majority of them have left to work on more challenging projects for the reasons you might suspect) or that it was the intent of IYJL to fabricate a public persona of the cap-and-gown wearing, brought-here-by-my-parents, limited-criminal-background American (even though IYJL was started to help fight the deportation of someone with a criminal background).

But there does exist within IYJL and organizations like it a brand of immigrant-activist eager to be swallowed by the state. They market themselves as young, pure, with little-to-no criminal background, they profess every intent to make "our country" stronger, by pursuing higher education or joining the military -- Let us not forget that the DREAM Act was largely written by the Pentagon with the intent to recruit brown children to fight their colonial wars. The implicit message of IYJL and ICIRR is simple: there are those immigrants among us whose bodies you can still profit from, economically and politically, by detention or deportation. I am one of those bodies:

But who are these mostly white colonizers on stolen land to judge over the bodies of me and my people? And why are these mostly brown people legitimizing and allowing state terror campaigns to continue without much critical analysis? Everyone is just trying to get paid, and allying themselves. Subverting their bodies and desires to the state and its prerogatives is the "easier" way to get paid in money and prestige, by selling out the bodies and desires of those at the bottom of the pyramid. I cannot be one of those sellouts. I do not have the identity of a DREAMer. I am asking you to see the nightmare that millions like me are living.

I am just a person / an activist seeking liberation, asking you for some spare change. Help me fight my deportation so I can continue my fight against a brutal and illegitimate regime, my fight against the sellouts, my fight against EVERY deportation. Help me dedicate less of my body in the service of capital, and more to activism!

In love and in rage,

Zé.