AALR

Special Issue: Commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of Sept. 11

Volume 2, Issue 1.5: Fall 2011

FALL 2011 | $12 U.S.

The Asian American Literary Review

Volume 2, Issue 1.5: Fall 2011

Special Issue: Commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of Sept. 11

Guest Editors: Rajini Srikanth and Parag Khandhar

e Long View: An Interview

Subhash Kateel by Parag Khandhar

e following is excerpted from a longer conversation I had with Subhash Kateel when he was in Washington, D.C to give a training in June 2011. Subhash and I have known one another for a number of years, as we both worked in New York City before and a er September 11th. Subhash was a co-founder and co-Director of Families for Freedom, a multi-ethnic network of immigrants facing deportation; prior to that he worked as a caseworker for formerly detained asylum seekers and initiated and coordinated the Detention Project for Desis Rising Up and Moving, a group working with working class and poor South Asian communities. He currently lives in Miami, Florida, where he was a Soros Justice Fellow at the Florida Immigrant Coalition, coordinating the We Are Florida! campaign that successfully defeated attempts to pass sweeping anti-immigrant legislation in the state. I originally requested a written exchange between Subhash and a longtime collaborator that explored their experiences and re ections regarding detentions and deportations in New York and what they had presciently described as the immigrant apartheid state a er September 11th. I thought this exchange would provide important observations and lessons for readers, stories of our communitys history and struggle that might otherwise remain partially or wholly untold. As was the case with many of the activists and organizers working on these issues for the past 10 years, it was di cult for them to write something re ective in response to the inquiry. Time, of course, is always a real factor for community workers, but the complex, raw emotions unsettled by the emotional journey through those 10 years was another factor that held back many submissions, this proposed exchange included.

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What follows is a portion of the conversation that took place instead, a rough but honest telling of complicated experiences, real challenges, and personal re ections 10 years later. * Parag Khandhar: A number of folks have been revisiting September 11th and the Desis Organizing conference in New York City, which occurred just months before the tragedy. You were part of a group of folks who actively challenged the formation and format of the convening, bringing upand I am summarizing the general perception out therethat working class members of the South Asian community were not part of this community event, and that made the whole project problematic and suspect. I felt that it was a good moment, and there were a lot of conversations a erwards but then September 11th happened and Subhash Kateel: But 9/11 happened before those issues were ever resolved. And I feel like we still have this inability to have really hard conversations in the South Asian community that would lead to really good organizing without attacking people or organizations or making people feel like shit. I think some of the stu that happened at the conference was a genuine response to the elitism in the South Asian community and its inability to really respect the leadership of poor and working people in the community. But 10 years later, I have been to enough conferences where I have seen legitimate issues get reduced to conference uprisings. So those issues were articulated but not enough for them to have any meaning to people not attending that conference. e grievances that were articulated about the state of leadership in the South Asian community, sure they were pretty valid. e way they were articulated by people, including mewell, I would be lying if I said I am not a little embarrassed of myself from back then. You can address the way that people do their work, but you have to be very careful to do that in a way that doesnt attack peoples sense of purpose. A lot of it was stu that could be

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resolved in conversations, whether thats collective or group conversations, workshops or mediation, but we didnt have the tools back then. SK: So then 9/11 happens. PK: Yeah. In terms of the work its very easy to say, and its before and a er, right? at was the moment,

SK: Yeah. And for a long time weve tried to ght people to say that wasnt the moment, but honestly I dont know who the hell we were kidding: that was the moment. Well, there are two di erent things. eres this idea among nonSouth Asian folks that racism against South Asians began on 9/11. And its really important to ght against that notion. For example I got politicized because of the racism I went through way before 9/11. My parents very much understood racism way before 9/11. South Asians have faced racism way back in the early 1900s. But its kind of ridiculous to say that 9/11 wasnt a major turning point. And historically, probably one of the most signi cant turning points in our history since 1965. PK: Well, thats another reason for us to have this conversation, right. Because I dont know of it being seen as that moment from outside of that thin margin of people whove been doing this work. SK: We can say there was tons of racism before, but the whole weight of systemic, cultural violence that happened to communitiesthe whole way that that things changed dramatically a er that momentthe whole ability to respond, and the mechanism that gives people the ability to respond, changed dramatically. ere werent the types of organizations way back 20, 30 years ago that there were a er 9/11. And there wasnt the type of validation that racism exists, from our parents generation. At least when I was growing up, it was like, Oh theres racism. Go join this cultural organization and learn how to do a Bharatnatyam

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Now there are multiple vehicles, no matter how small and modest they are, where we can acknowledge that racisms wrong and it sucks and racism against us speci cally is wrong and sucks. ats dramatically changed. Hasnt changed fast enough, hasnt changed good enough, but its changed. PK: Yeah. And I think thats where looking at that space a er September 11th is important at this time from folks who were working in that space before, because there are so many folks who just came into the work a er, you know. And thats kinda all they knew or thats what they were building. But it was a di erent world before. SK: Regardless, anyone that did 9/11 work directly will still start twitching when they think about it. Start crying when they think about it. Because the shit felt like genocide. And no disrespect to anyone thats been through real genocide, or real war, butthe sense of complete siege that you felt and the sense of complete despair, anger, and even urgency was really hard to quantify. Ive done a lot of work since then, and its still some of the craziest shit Ive ever seen in my life, and when I talk to other people who went through it, Id say from September 12th maybe through Special Registrationwere some of the most intense and insane times in our community for anyone who was doing that work. Some of the most rewarding, but we were all permanently a ected by those years, myself included. PK: I think thats very true and feel the same way. SK: I never saw the world the same a er that. PK: What were you doing. What was the work that you were doing just before September 11th. What were you focusing on? SK: Before 9/11 I helped to build DRUMs (Desis Rising Up and Moving) detention work, helped to build visitation to di erent detention centers, started to help build Know Your Rights presentations in the South Asian

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community. We were visiting almost all the South Asian detainees that were in the Elizabeth detention center. Holding community workshops and even holding a couple of family meetings for di erent family members prior to 9/11. PK: So you had pieces in place in terms of the anti-detention work already. SK: Yeah. ere was an actual, established visitation program even though it was small and modest. It was sort of a spin-o of something this group First Friends was doing. ey were visiting a bunch of detainees from a bunch of nationalities. We were focusing for the most part on the South Asian detainees, but we were also visiting a couple of African detainees. A couple of Latino detainees, too. We never wanted it to be just a South Asian thing. We started to do community education workshops, and were actually part of a coalition, the Coalition on Detention Incarceration. PK: So then a erhow did those rst days go. In terms of what to do, how to respond? SK: My day job was also doing post-release work with detainees. So even in my day jobI was working with immigrant detainees in New Jersey. So we were pretty well situated, as well as anyone can be in that situation. I knew a lot of the lawyers in New Jersey. I had already been in meetings with the INS as part of my day job. I already knew who were the assholes and who werent. And I even already knew a lot of the brothers in the detention centers before, cause I was the one who went to pick them up when they got released. So when 9/11 happened, I think we were all just spinning around in our heads, What do we do, what do we do? We rst set up this hotline to take reports of hate crimes. A lot of people were afraid. We had set up this hotline just so people would call. Put up posters all around the city, in ueens and in Brooklyn. We had no idea what we were doing. PK: Nobody knew at that point.

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SK: Yeah, but we speci cally had no idea what we were doing. We just knew we had to do something where these hate crimes were coming from. is is like Sept 12, 13, 14, this is like right a er, and I hadnt gotten back to work yet. Because shit was crazy. en as I started getting back to New Jersey, we must have only had like ten real hate crime-related calls. We started getting a lot more, like, e FBI came to our house and took my family member-type of calls. I make this joke all the time: prior to 9/11, detention centers in general were sort of like the UN, with a little bit less of Europe, you know, although Elizabeth Detention Center has always been like 20 to 25 percent South Asian, signi cantly Sri Lankan Tamil at the time. But it was crazy: at Passaic County Jail, which housed a lot of immigrant detainees, the overwhelming majority of detainees at some point post 9/11 was South Asian or Arab. So you go from having this really diverse group to then having the overwhelming majority become Yemeni, Egyptian, Pakistani, and Indian. And even Indian Sikhs. We started to hear these stories about how people are getting beat up in detention, getting called bin Laden, people are having their prayer rugs pissed on, people arent allowed to call their lawyers, some people cant get lawyers, some family members arent being told where their family members are, and then people started calling this hotline. PK: With nowhere else to turn, really. SK: Yeah. Grown uncles were crying on our voicemail. So a er that we were visiting Passaic County Jail, mostly, and then Hudson County Jail a little bit, and then a er a little bit we went back to visiting Elizabeth Detention Center. All of those places are in New Jersey. Passaic was one of the closer ones, so it was easier to visit. I had a fulltime job. When I was in DRUM, I was never on payroll. And until February/March 2002, I think, I was working a full-time job and doing this 9/11 work, as soon as I got out of work, sometimes, during work, on my lunch break. PK: Yeah. I didnt realize that.

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SK: So every single day we could we were visiting. We were super dedicated. So we did a call out for volunteer visitors. e meeting with volunteers happened at the Community Service Society. I remember walking up the hall; I was late because I was running late from work. I walk upstairs and I think Im in the wrong meeting because there must have been forty or y people there to become volunteer visitors. Some folks that had been at Desis Organizing. Other folks just brand new o the street, and we were able to incorporate into a couple of visitations, but we werent able to catch the energy of everyone in that room because we were still this really small organization. We were all really dedicated at that time. Everyone. We would go to the detention center every single day we could. e entire weekend wed spend in Jersey coming back late at night. Wed go sometimes with ten visitors. Some of the folks that visited with us are folks that are lead organizers of projects for other organizations right now. Wed build relationships with people in detention. Get to know their families. Sometimes go home and meet with their families. One person, Shubh Mathur, needs to be in some history book, because that woman herself would visit twenty detainees a day. And helped make sure people had suitcases if they were getting deported, you know, make sure that if someone was having health problems, shed call me all the time, make sure I sent a letter to Immigration. She was a volunteer, a PhD student. We were building all these relationships to the point where it felt like we knew virtually every detainee in Passaic County Jail. Im pretty sure we did at some point in time. I still have these lists Ive saved. ese hand-written lists of names. e stu Im really proud ofthe trainings I led, as part of our community training, were the very rst ones that told folks that as a family member you have to know the Alien Number of someone whos been detained. Now its considered common knowledge. So I feel like another huge watershed moment, probably one of the craziest organizing moments of my history, was the MLK Day rally 2002. Up until that point there hadnt been many signi cant rallies against the detention of our community folks post 9/11. e world didnt really get what was happening. ere were a couple of organizations that wanted to do

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something on MLK day: there was this group called HELP that was a group of folks mostly working out of the mosques in New Jersey. ere was Hudson County Peaceor Hudson County Greens. ey wanted to organize a protest in front of Hudson County jail where there were a bunch of detainees. We wanted to organize a protest in front of Passaic County Jail. So we formed this campaign with the Coalition for Human Rights of Immigrants and the Prison Moratorium Project and others called the Stop the Disappearances Campaign. We even had this long list of demands like Repeal the 1996 Laws. Even back then, the thinking was that we couldnt just pretend this thing started on 9/11. We started using strong language to describe what was happening to our community like kidnapped, disappeared, and apartheid. Back then was when I started formulating the idea that this was apartheid. I used to catch heat for that terminology back then, and now no one disagrees with it. Now its just understood. We cant look at this as just a South Asian thing; this is really about the beginning of an apartheid state against immigrants. SK: We had worked to get the permits for the rally in Passaic County Jail on MLK day. We had also talked to the police and everything. Our demand coming out of the MLK Day of Action was we wanted an open meeting with the District Director of ICE in New Jersey. We had some really de ned demands. We wanted an open meeting, not a closed meeting. We wanted people who were being held only on administrative charges to be released. So about a week before the rally, on Wednesday, we got a call from people whom we thought were alliesIll just call them community leaders. ey were like, Look, great news, we got a meeting with the sheri . I was like, We dont need a meeting with the sheri , we already have our permits. [ ey said,] I think they said theyd hold onto the permits until we meet with them. So our legal person walks into a meeting with them. In one room there are these community leaders who are supposed to be our allies, the chief of police, the sheri , and I think the FBI standing on one side of the table,

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and our legal person standing on the other side of the table. ey tell us not to have the protest, and that if we have the protest, there will be more hate crimes in Paterson, and theyll blame it on us. ey tell us were outsiders. Were not welcome in the city, and more importantly, if we go ahead with the protest, theyre going to put the facility on lockdown and theyre going to blame us for it. So [our legal person] walked out of there, and were like, holy shit, we had spent months developing relationships with these detainees in Passaic and we dont want to hurt people. So we start huddling, like we dont know what the hell to do. [We say,] Ok, heres what were going to do. were gonna go spend three days talking to everyone who we have contact with in the detention center, and if one person tells us not to have our rally outside, we wont have it. So we go and talk to everybody. e community leaders start telling everyone in Paterson that the protest is cancelled. Meanwhile, inside the detention center we had to ask everyone to let us know if we should cancel or not. No, dont cancel it, we kept hearing from the brothers inside. And then we found out that the community leaders sold us out because they managed to get promises from the INS and the jail for halal food, jummah prayer, and like, dates to break the Ramadan fast with [in November]. You know what happened to those dates when they made it to the detention centers. Guys inside told us that guards ate them in front of the people. And the folks inside were like, Who cares about dates and halal food. We are getting beaten up. Were getting called bin Laden. Our lawyers are having trouble accessing us. And so a er we had talked to everybody, not one person inside told us, Dont do this protest. And so we did it. What was crazy about it is we rst had the rally in Union Square. A couple hundred people were there. It was raining out. We had this one family member Usma Naheed and her kids there. First of all, theres tons of press there, tons of press, I had never seen so much press in my life. Because it was a breakout moment, right. is is the rst case of a family member of a 9/11 detainee speaking out and saying, Im undocumented, yes, if you want to come a er me, come a er me, but at least give my husband his rights. My

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husbands in jail and he hasnt done anything wrong. I cant feed my kids; were about to lose our house. If you want to come a er me, come a er me, but give my husband justice rst. Folks were just like, Oh my God. And then we all jumped on buses, and we went to the detention center. It must have been a couple hundred people in front of the detention center. ere were police o cers lming the whole incident. ere were cops on the side in riot gear. You see some of the pictures, its funny. eres an elderly blind woman in the march, there are lawyers in the march, and then theres us and then theres snipers and cop cameras on roo ops. To think that we were threatening or scary, if you saw it, it was hilarious. But that day was so powerful because it was the very rst protest in front of a detention center post 9/11. And all the brothers inside saw it. And it gave them all such a mental boost and energy boost cause they had spent months inside. Grown men would call you just crying, Get me out of here, get me out of here, I want to go home, I dont care, deport me, just do something, just get me out of here. Youd see these young guys that you could tell were, like, young, that looked like they were emotionally and mentally breaking down. And so it gave them a boost when they saw that there were people outside protesting for them, and then on top of that, the next day, that the protest had made virtually every single news outlet in the world. It was on BBC. It was on Japanese television. It was in the Daily News. It was crazy. And overnight, things started changing. Overnight. And, you know, we got triple the amount of phone callsten times, twenty times. We had no budget; we had none of this stu , right. We were an organization of mostly un-funded people and we were doing the work out of our homes. We didnt have an o ce at that point in time. You go from this rinky-dink organization, and all of a sudden funders are coming to you wanting to give you money. All of a sudden youre in every single newspaper. All of a sudden youre taking your families all across the city, and all of a sudden everyone wants to have a piece of you, and I still have a real fulltime job and doing this work on top of that and all of us are trying to do the best we can, and were getting buried in work. We were still doing it, though.

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Amnesty Internationaland Human Rights Watch, speci callykept trying to access detainees but couldnt just go to the detention centers and say, Were Human Rights Watch, and wed really like to talk to the detainees. We gave them the rst access that they could have so that they could do their reports. We had a catalog of names. Visit this person. Visit this person. Visit this person. We met the Human Rights Watch folks there a week a er the protest, maybe two weeks. Right at this small cuchifrito restaurant right by the jail. And we gave them names. And we said dont go in as Human Rights Watch, you go in as if you were visiting a family member, and thats how they were getting the rst set of information. I eventually got laid o from work but still stayed at DRUM as a full-time volunteer. In the meantime, a lot of in ghting happened in the organization because we started this organization in our living rooms and it had grown so fast. A bunch of the original folks ended up leaving. And the next thing you know, it was like Japanese television wants to follow us around, HBO wants to do shit on us. eres also this thing where some of us out there talking to the press as members are volunteers. Some of these volunteers are doing this insane amount of work but not getting any recognition. ey are not getting paid for any of this, but they are doing this as if its a part-time job. As if its a full time job. And so, obviously, theres some tension that erupts. And the one thing I realized is that when people are doing free work, when theyre doing a lot, you have to give people love. I dont care where theyre from. Anyway, we raised the bail fund for the detainees. But part of the problem with the bail fund was that the rst two guys who got out I had to front the cost out of my savings, and I never got that money back. You know, two guys got out, one of them doesnt have a place to stay, and I eventually put them up in my place for a year. A er we helped get Human Rights Watch access to detainees, they wrote a report that led to the O ce of Inspector General investigation. en we started to do these community workshops again. Honestly, before then, folks didnt understand what this post-9/11 detention work was about. A er that everyone understood. I mean it wasnt just us that created this

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understanding. But we were part of a small number of people who had some deep relationships with a lot of folks inside the detention centers post 9/11, like Shubh and Adem Carroll from Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). And then we started working more closely with lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to try to arrange as much representation as possible as we could for some of these guys. For a period, it felt like we knew hundreds of people who got deported. Some of the leaders whom we worked with, because their husbands had gotten deported, they had relocated back. So with all of this leadership development, we would build with new leaders, only to see them leave the country and then new development had to be done with new leaders all the time. PK: So you were doing more of the family-based work even thenit wasnt just the visitations. SK: It wasnt just visitation. Basically, myself, Aarti [Shahani], and other folks had started these family meetings before 9/11. I had met Aarti at a protest on Fathers Day, I believe in 1999 or 2000, something like that, right a er her father had been released from detention, in front of Varick Street Detention Center. We said, lets start doing these multi-family gatherings where all of our groups come together, and we do recruiting outside of Varick Street Detention Center in the visitation line. And so we had a couple family meetings like that which brought together Latino, South Asian, and African family members of people facing deportation. ose meetings were really incredible, and some of the families that came out of those meetings eventually became the original members of Families For Freedom. But Aarti had to go back to school, and so I kept this nascent group going. It was a coalition e ort. We wanted to make sure that it wasnt any one organization so that the families themselves would have ownership over the group instead of organizations. So I just kept in touch with some of the families, and kept doing as much of the work as possible, but by now were getting phone calls

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from people needing help (because of a deportation problem) and the phone calls became overwhelming. PK: Were you guys getting calls from other parts of the country as well? SK: Yeah, we were getting calls from everywhere. Once I started at DRUM as a fulltime volunteer, all the calls were coming my way. And, honestly, it was overwhelming. I mean once the phone calls started coming into the o ce, I couldnt visit as much. I had to rely on volunteer visitors. uality control started to decline because morale was fallingwe were visiting hundreds of people. We were developing close relationships with people and their families who invite us into their homes, and then you see people fucking gone, just deported and their families ripped apart. Hundreds of people. You hear people break down crying over the phone daily. Or seeing people getting angry at you because they dont think were doing things well, but how are you supposed to say, Im a damn volunteer. I mean we were supposed to be organizing folks, ghting for rights and all that, but it was a daily struggle just to answer the phones. PK: And theyre going through all these di erent emotions SK: Yeah. Volunteers are getting burnt out and you know, theres no shrink you could visit. I stopped eating. Im eating a freaking chicken roll a day or some weird shit like that. Im taking money out of my own pocket to pay for organizational stu . Other folks are taking money out of their own pockets to pay for stu . It was intense. A couple of events that were signi cant at that timethere was a public hearing that was supposed to be with the head of INS. She was a no-show even though she promised to come. en, a er that day, we had one meeting with some family members to prep for that meeting, and a er that I had a really bad falling out with one of the volunteers. en a couple days later I had a nervous breakdown in the o ce. I thought I had to go to the hospital. I had just nished writing a complaint letter to the INS (thats what it was called still back then) about the way some detainees in

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Passaic were being treated. I just got really angry and I wrote out this letter and I copied a bunch of organizations and I threatened to go to the press. By the end of the weekday, they responded and did everything we asked them to do. And I was like, Holy shit, this works. But then right a er that I literally had a nervous breakdown. I lost it. I had a seven-and-a-half-year-long relationship that ended in September, like two weeks a er 9/11, and I didnt even think about it. My mom was sick in the hospital sometime when other things were happeningI didnt even go see her in the hospital, becausewhatever. None of that even fazed me until me and the volunteer had the falling out. And then when that happened, I just lost it. Everything started to hit my head, and then psshhh. So a er I had a nervous breakdown, I came back to the o ce two days later and started to try to do work again like nothing happened. People on the outside would see amazing work. I always hated that phrase. On the outside people see amazing work, but on the inside we were getting more resources to do stu , but we still werent able to manage those resources, because we had lost half of our organizing team to burnout and falling outs. at summer I le DRUM. Aarti came back from school. Both of us got fellowships to start organizing with families facing deportation in a more sustainable, sane way. Families For Freedom was born. One of things we decided we wanted to make sure we did is, with Families For Freedom, we wanted to make sure that it was multi-ethnic and it was evenly divided between Latino folks, South Asian folks, West Indian folks, it was more completely multi-racial, and it was completely multi-status, so it included people whose loved ones were facing deportation because of the post-9/11 stu , because they were long-term residents who had served time a er an o ense, and because folks were undocumented. We would use the family meetings to build family as a primary basis, a base for organizing. ats what Families for Freedom came out of. at happened almost instantaneously, in August 2002 or something like that. Yeah. Families for Freedom. e name Families for Freedom came about in November 2002. But we had the meetings prior to 9/11. But then the grouping of folks regrouped in August or September.

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PK: So you moved from one organization to a new one, but then the work with Families for Freedom was also intensethe existing structure plus all the 9/11 stu on top of it. How did you sustain the energy to keep going? SK: Well, number oneI have rarely had a better work partner my entire life than Aarti. Number two, the rst group of members who helped birth Families for Freedom were just beautiful, dedicated human beings. We had to do real work. We had to make sure that folks understood that we were serious from the get-go because otherwise, if we werent working, we were nothing. ats one thing we always learned, that you cant argue with good work a er a while. PK: ats right. Work speaks.

SK: So we busted our ass. We put out a press release like every two days. We started accompanying families to the deportation o ce when their loved ones were getting deported. But with Families for Freedom, we made a very speci c rule, that to be a volunteer, to be anything with Families for Freedom, you had to be directly a ected. Which is both a good thing and a really bad thing. e problem was, eventually, by the fourth or h year, we would have people who werent directly a ected who just cared about this issue, and thered be no avenue to get them involved and no alternative structures to get them involved. We could have built up a signi cant base of allies. We created a sort of family of families facing deportation. It was beautiful. ere are still people who are like little brothers, sisters, uncles to me. e thing is, building personal relationships has the power to overcome a lot of barriers. Post-9/11 it was pretty common for South Asian families to say, Oh, dont deport me, Im not Mexicanuntil you are in a room with a Mexican mother losing her son, going through the exact things you as a South Asian father are going through. at was the power of what Families For Freedom (FFF) did and continues to do.

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PK: But on the organizing side, you werent focused on the substantive issues for what put them in detention, right. Because you couldnt do all those di erent issues. SK: Honestly, between the organizers of FFF and the members of FFF, I dont think there was any part of work against detention and deportations that we didnt do at least once. Our members went through so much that we ended up doing so much. PK: It feels like there are some signi cant lessons that you realize now, a er being in the middle of that intense work, right. I was trying to stay informed, and I didnt have any idea of half of the work that these groups were doing or that other people were doing. But it doesnt seem like there were necessarily ways that people could support either, right? SK: No, there were ways, but not enough ways to accommodate the sheer volume of people that wanted to get involved. is was for two reasons. First, a lot of our organizations were small. But also, a lot of us were ideological and rigid and mistrustful of creating an organization open to a lot of people. In retrospect, that was just stupid. We cant be afraid of more people getting involved just because we as organizations are having growing pains. As people le groups, a lot of them started their own projects and they were forever changed by the stu that had happened. It was good, you know. Not all of it was good. But they were the ones to take the lens of 9/11 and really think about the way they wanted to do their organizing. PK: ats true. I guesssometimes its easy to look back and say, those tensions, those splits that always seem to happen in organizations, could we have done anything to avoid them. SK: erere parts you couldnt do anything about. So things you couldnt do anything about are, rst of all, we all grow too big, and small organizations that had virtually no budget suddenly had a $100,000 budget within a year.

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From having no o ce space and no full-time sta to having multiple sta members within a year. You had a lot of organizations that were getting a lot of money doing nothing. And organizations getting no money and doing too much. at was a cause for tension. ere is a need for general accountability if shit happens and ways for people to process the con icts between them. But honestly, the work was just crazy. Another part of it is we were taking on a really big fucking beast. And we were doing work that was at the forefront of what everyone was talking about doing. With amazingly few resources. And then too many resources that we had to deal with all at the same time. And to grow progressive spaces, you have to really be willing to engage people that dont know shit that want to know, and people that dont agree where you could possibly agree. PK: I agree with that. Its harder to nd that middle ground; its easier to draw a line and say, You t and You dont t, Youre in and Youre out. But I agree with you, we need to have that regular reevaluation of our methods. SK: And its real important to slow down a er you do a lot of shit. Take stock. PK: Yeah. ats a good lesson. Hard enough for individuals, and for organizations, even harder. SK: Another thing, at least campaign-wise, being an organization that is small and doesnt have a lot of resources: it is ok to blu when confronting power. But you never make the rhetoric outmatch your realities. It is the easiest way to lose relevancy and e ectiveness. For example, the 2006 immigration protests, they were a massive uprising, no doubt. Community organizations did play a role in the attention and consciousness-raising against H.R. 4437 (the Border Protection, Anti-terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005), but no matter how much they fronted, they were not responsible for bringing those hundreds of thousands of people out. So when they started to take credit for it, and then in 2007, they couldnt

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bring those same numbers out, people called their blu . And by people I mean people in power. And we lost a lot of momentum that we have never been able to bring back. PK: But how do you avoid that? SK: ats why you gotta be really careful to make sure that your rhetoric doesnt outmatch your reality. I think a big problem for the average, small nonpro t social justice organization is that some point in time, it starts believing its own hype. Once it start believing its own hype, then problems start to happen. PK: So how do you think this applies to other groups, what we see now in these movements? SK: In some ways, you see this in di erent groups working on di erent issues together. But at the same time, theres a lot of missed opportunities; it still feels like theres a huge disconnect despite the work that weve all done post 9/11 and post 2006 (the immigrant rights protests). ere is still a huge disconnect between communities facing deportation, detention, and general disenfranchisement. ere still seems to be this disconnect in terms of how we build a mass-base progressive movement based on the real leadership of people in real communities and not based on the cult of personality. I keep saying that the immigrant rights movement is still the single biggest social movement in the country. Its still one of the very few movements that is capable of bringing out people in the hundreds of thousands with relative ease. But at this point that power is only being utilized to prevent bad things from happening. Even the people I disagree with the most in the movement, its really hard for me to say they dont do X right. ey dont do Y right. I still know that they are still working more than forty-hour work weeks, still working at least a minimum of sixty hours a week for little pay. Some arent getting paid to do

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it. What I can say we are failing at is communicating what we do to the largest number of people. And communicating it on our own terms. One thing is, though, we still need organizations in our communities that are building and working with people who are South Asian. We still need viable, diverse groups based in the day-to-day experiences of poor and working South Asian folks through which they can connect to other communities. PK: So do you feel optimistic about the future, given the experiences over the past 10 years plus? SK: No, I get pessimistic sometimes. When H.R. 4437 was dra ed in 2005, I was like, Were dead. ere I was, some esteemed organizer whos supposedly a role model for others, and I thought we were dead. en regular folks come out in the millions and they fought with us, saying, You are not going to dehumanize us. e largest protests since the Civil Rights Movement. So Im sort of not allowed to be pessimistic. Each of our people who wakes up and feels the power to change things reminds me of that.

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