About

The Immigrant Defense Project presents Life Beyond Borders: Oral Histories.

The stories and experiences of those with criminal convictions are seldom heard, and when they are, it is often through the register of advocacy, journalism, or courtroom testimony. The telling is strategic, and the audience is specific. The Immigrant Defense Project’s “Life Beyond Borders: Oral Histories” project works to provide, first and foremost, a mechanism through which those who have had experience with the criminal legal system and the immigration/deportation system document, by and for themselves, their stories.

This project was inspired by the extraordinary stories of everyday people who members of IDP worked with in fighting for their freedom from the entangled systems of detention, deportation, and incarceration. We began to reflect on the capacity of these under-told stories to teach about not just oppression, but humanity, resilience, joy, love, home, and freedom. In developing this project, we reflected on themes, contradictions, and questions that had emerged in the work: what was important to individuals’ lives but often left out of “official” narratives crafted with strategic outcomes in mind? Based on these reflections, we developed a series of questions to guide conversations, but not direct them. It was also important for us to consider length, since we wanted to make participation accessible to people with less time available. While we shared training in methods, different individuals led interviews, and each of us held relationships with narrators that shaped how stories were told, and what was told. Narrators reviewed transcriptions of their stories and made changes that they wanted. In the end, our conversations lie somewhere between oral histories and semi-structured interviews. We call the project an oral history project, because of its vision, intention, and method.

This project was developed by Mizue Aizeki, Karelle Fonteneau, and Jane Shim in partnership with Ujju Aggarwal at the New School.

Enormous thanks to Elvis Martin, who created the artwork featured on the home page and the above banner; photographer Aviva Klein for her portraits; audio engineer Robert Raymond; Will Coley; students from Professor Aggarwal’s Fall 2020 Beyond Policing seminar and Oral Historian Lynn Lewis; students and faculty from the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton University; the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School for its support; and all those who shared their stories.