This Week: Meet Immigration Writers Saket Soni and Silky Shah
We have two weeks left to meet our goal of $75,000!
This week, meet two of the Mesa Refuge’s many voices changing conversations about the intersection of immigration, climate change, and mass incarceration: Saket Soni and Silky Shah. Congratulations to Silky, who was featured recently in a Democracy Now interview about her new book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition.
Will you support voices like Saket and Silky?
Saket Soni, Jeanette Pontacq Investigative Journalism Fellow
“Today, my work takes me to disaster zones, where families have lost their homes to hurricanes and fires in the blink of an eye. Each time I visit a family in a torn-up house, I peer into the edge of a climate era that’s just beginning. Each disaster also places us at the outer edge of a profound opening in American life to change our values and reverse our polarization.”
Saket is a labor organizer and human rights strategist working at the intersection of racial justice, migrant rights, and climate change. His recent book, The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America, was published in 2023. He is founder and director of Resilience Force, the voice of the rising workforce rebuilding America after climate disasters. He was profiled as an “architect of the next labor movement” in USA Today, and chosen as a 2022-23 Aspen Institute Fellow. His work was the subject of a major New Yorker feature story in November 2021. Find him at saket-soni.com.
Silky Shah
“In 2020, the uprisings for Black lives opened space to imagine a different society in which all people are thriving and free from overlapping systems of repression. For some it is a distant memory from the current conditions we face. But being at the edge means holding the line despite the backlash and remaining steadfast in our commitment to that vision.”
Silky is author of Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition, and the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition-building power to abolish immigration detention in the United States. She has worked as an organizer on issues of immigration detention, the prison industrial complex and racial and migrant justice for 20 years. Her writing has been featured in The Forge, Inquest, Teen Vogue and Truthout. She has also appeared in numerous national and local media outlets including The Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC.
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Will you help us to support courageous writers-on-the-edge like Saket and Silky today?
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