Darryl Li: It is worth noting, however, that the order handed down by federal judge Ann Donnelly on Saturday night merely suspended removals under the executive order, and did not require anyone to be released (a more recent order from a federal judge in Boston has ordered releases, but the scope of its applicability is unclear). Yet the government did release many of the detainees at various airports, even as it continued to hold others. This is a reminder that popular pressure is absolutely crucial in this fight. I have no doubt that the protests at the airports made all the difference.
During the George W. Bush administration, legal efforts to challenge aspects of the so-called War on Terror often devolved into a kind of liberal gladiatorial spectacle: important lawyers and important judges hashing out important ideas, working their way up to the Supreme Court, in a discourse whose terms combined esoteric technocratic questions of legal interpretation with sweeping assertions of American exceptionalism and beneficence. As someone who was active in litigation against the CIA rendition program and detention at Guantánamo, I want to be very clear about something: we won some battles, but we lost the war. This is not surprising, since those litigation efforts were never firmly grounded in robust popular movements, for many reasons. I fervently hope we can avoid repeating that scenario. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg question as to whether the problem was with the lawyers or the weakness of such movements, but the point to emphasize here is that when in an oppositional stance, the best lawyering in the world can only do as much as popular forces make possible.
[…] There is no doubt that this is a promising moment of mobilization. There will be major challenges ahead for the Left in terms of expanding its ranks and building more robust coalitions without being coopted by a lowest common denominator politics or captured, vampirized, and discarded by the Democratic Party. We must all find ways of addressing both the “more woke than thou” as well as the “Trump is a unique evil, so let’s get rid of him and everything will go back to normal” positions. Anthropologists, insofar as they identify with these protest movements, have a responsibility to push them to think more critically about narratives like “we are all immigrants” or “this is not who we are,” which erase experiences of indigeneity and slavery. More here.