The city in the age of Trumpism: From sanctuary to abolition

The age of Trumpism

The constellation of ideologies, discourses, and alliances that make up Trumpism is not a uniquely American phenomenon. Around the world, right-wing populisms and chauvinist nationalisms are on the rise. These are often articulated with agendas of neoliberalism and comfortably reside within liberal democracy, as in the case of the Modi regime in India. Nor is Trumpism new. Its racialized logic is only the most recent iteration of “racial terror,” a phrase I borrow from Paul Gilroy’s (1993) seminal book on modernity, The Black Atlantic. In the United States, the practices of exclusion and expulsion at work in the Trump regime inhabit a post 9-11 machinery of deportation and surveillance developed under various American presidents including Obama. They are also embedded in the histories of settler-colonialism and chattel slavery through which a “possessive investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz, 1995) has been constructed and maintained in the United States. Put another way, Trumpism can be viewed as a renewal of white supremacy, specifically as a renewed institutionalization of white power in statecraft.

There is of course a specific form and affect to the “raciology” (Gilroy, 2000: 139) of the Trump regime, “a stimulating world of signs to which racial difference” is “absolutely fundamental.” From the Muslim Ban to the border wall, Trump and his inner circle of advisors and cabinet members routinely villainize and criminalize racial others, whether it be as immigrants from “shithole countries” (Dawsey, 2018), or as “crime-infested, breeding” communities in “sanctuary areas” (Trump on twitter, 18 April 2018). Such xenophobia is a constant feature of Trumpism and must be understood as an ideological commitment. While Stephen Bannon, white nationalist and media mogul, is no longer part of the Trump White House, the notorious executive order known as the Muslim Ban was his project. It is therefore important to take a closer look at the specific contours of his raciology, notably through a novel which is purported to have deeply influenced him. Titled The Camp of the Saints and authored in 1973 by Jean Raspail, this French novel has recently been shown to be a prominent feature in several lines of alt-right thought and organized white supremacy (Jones, 2018). It tells the story of the invasion of France by an “armada” of Indians, “thousands of wretched creatures” with “fleshless Gandhi-arms” led by a “turd-eater” (Blumenthal and Rieger, 2017). The influx is enabled by liberal politicians and religious leaders in Europe, including a pope from Latin America, and it sets into motion what the novel describes as the end of the white world. The novel’s white heroes, the only fully human depictions, take up arms to defend the last vestiges of European Christendom. Bannon has repeatedly cast immigration as the end of the white world, an “invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe” and indeed as a “global Camp of the Saints” (Mathis-Lilley, 2017). His framing is neither novel nor exceptional. As Jones (2018) reports, other white nationalists have expressed great admiration for the novel. Matthew Heimbach, key organizer of the KKK rally in Charlottesville, enthusiastically recommended it to his followers. Over a decade ago, William F. Buckley Jr, inspired by the book, had asked the following about immigrants and refugees: “What to do? Starve them? Shoot them? We don’t do that kind of thing—but what do we do when we run out of airplanes in which to send them back home?” The crisis then is not only one of an invasion by racial others; it is also the weakness of inaction by those perceived to be sympathetic to the cause of immigration. Blumenthal and Rieger (2017) argue that this is the significance of the question posed by Bannon to Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first Attorney General, during the presidential campaign: “Do you believe the elites in this country have the backbone, have the belief in the underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian West to actually win this war?” Winning the war rests on violence, specifically a demonstrable commitment to racial terror. Jones (2018) opens her essay on the influence of The Camp of the Saints with this scene from the novel:

The French president asks his army to consider shooting refugees on sight: “I am asking every soldier and officer, every member of our police—asking them from the depths of my conscience and my soul—to weigh this monstrous mission for themselves, and to feel free either to accept or reject it.” Raspail makes clear that the president, bowing to liberal sentiment, should have never allowed the army a chance to object. As a result of its left-wing decadence and self-hatred, Europe fails to realize the threat it faces until the refugee hordes land and pillage.

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Figure 1.

Bannon's whiteboard.

The city as sanctuary

One of the first acts of the Trump regime was an executive order issued on 25 January 2017, titled “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States.” Arguing that illegal aliens were a “significant threat to national security and public safety”, it directed all jurisdictions to comply with federal immigration laws and noted that those failing to do so would not receive federal funds. In particular, the order called out “sanctuary jurisdictions” and their refusal to enforce federal immigration law. Here it is worth clarifying the scope of sanctuary. Currently, in the United States, it is a prohibition on the cooperation of local law enforcement with federal immigration enforcement, or what is known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The sanctuary designation does not mean that ICE cannot implement deportation in these cities. It simply means that local police forces do not facilitate such deportation. Several of the priorities and accomplishments on Bannon’s immigration wish list, such as the Secure Communities program and the 287(g) partnerships, aim at strengthening local cooperation with ICE enforcement.

Since that initial executive order, the Trump regime has been at war with sanctuary jurisdictions. In turn, these jurisdictions have pledged noncompliance. For example, in defiance of the executive order, the mayor of Boston declared that he would use city hall as a last resort to shelter undocumented immigrants (Irons and Guerra, 2017). A few days later, the city of San Francisco sued the Trump administration, charging that its threats violated the states’ rights provision of the U.S. constitution. These legal battles have intensified during the past year. As the Justice Department has sought to punish sanctuary jurisdictions, specifically by withholding law enforcement grants, cities have sued. In one such legal challenge, the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, argued that the Justice Department’s compulsion for cities to comply with federal immigration law would “federalize local jails and police stations, mandate warrantless detentions in order to investigate for federal civil infractions, sow fear in local immigrant communities, and ultimately make the people of Chicago less safe” (Jarrett and Kopan, 2017). Research conducted by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center shows that there has been an expansion of sanctuary jurisdictions since the election of Trump (Avila et al., 2018). At the same time, in states such as Iowa and Tennessee, new laws now ban sanctuary policies and threaten to punish sanctuary cities by withholding state funds (Quinlan, 2018).

The struggle over sanctuary can be placed in the long history of immigration policy in the United States, notably the repeated illegalization of immigrants. But Trump’s executive order can also be understood in relation to antebellum fugitive slave laws and the resistance they engendered. As legal scholars have noted, at stake in these laws and their central legal case, Prigg v Pennsylvania (1842), were “questions of state enforcement” (Kraehenbuehl, 2011: 1466), similar to “the modern question of what role states can serve in enforcing federal immigration law by arresting, detaining, and prosecuting federal law.” The first Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1793, enabled the capture of alleged slaves without the procedural protections required by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, notably protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Viewed as legalized kidnapping, the act was met by fierce abolitionist resistance as well as by legal challenges by Northern states, including personal liberty laws that were “designed to frustrate enforcement” (1474). In the landmark 1842 case, Prigg v Pennsylvania, the courts asserted the exclusive authority of the federal government over the regulation of fugitive slaves but also concluded that states cannot be compelled to enforce the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. Put another way, states “were prohibited from passing laws that frustrated the purposes of federal law with additional procedures. States could, however, either assist in enforcing federal law or refuse to aid in enforcement if they so desired” (1474). Northern states became “jurisdictions of underenforcement” (1474), mirroring today’s sanctuary jurisdictions. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 addressed such underenforcement by placing fugitive slaves in the control of federal commissioners, criminalizing any efforts to aid fugitives, and forcing citizens to serve as slave patrollers. As Sinha (2016) argues, “it bypassed the rule of law by requiring all fugitives to be brought before federal commissioners and flouted the process by disallowing the testimony of suspected fugitives, trial by jury, and habeas corpus” (501). But “this unconstitutional and iniquitous law”—the words of abolitionist Lewis Tappan—also sparked widespread rebellion and popularized states’ rights in the North (503).

The illegalities of the state

In an essay titled “Slavery in Massachusetts,” Henry David Thoreau (1854) reflects on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and notes:

The whole military force of the State is at the service of a Mr. Suttle, a slaveholder from Virginia, to enable him to catch a man whom he calls his property; but not a soldier is offered to save a citizen of Massachusetts from being kidnapped!

Thoreau’s words are applicable not only to the antebellum fugitive slave laws but also to the era of Trumpism and the struggle over sanctuary in the United States. As I have noted earlier, sanctuary cities can be interpreted as jurisdictions of underenforcement of immigration law. But also at stake are the procedural protections guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. In particular, recent legal battles around sanctuary jurisdictions have been concerned with the ICE detainer, a central mechanism of immigration enforcement and deportation. As the Immigrant Legal Resource Center has noted, “ICE detainers are not warrants and do not meet basic Fourth Amendment requirements.” In recent cases, federal courts have ruled that ICE detainer requests are unlawful detention and that “local agencies do not have legal authority to hold people based on civil immigration violations.” Indeed, despite the characterization by the Trump administration as places of lawlessness, sanctuary cities might be more appropriately understood as cities that abide by the Fourth Amendment. The ILRC reports that “as of late 2017, more than 760 counties have policies against holding people on ICE detainers” (Avila et al., 2018).

The illegality of the ICE detainer provides important insight into the constitution of sovereignty. As in my previous work on urban informality, I argue that attention to technologies of exception might be especially productive. For example, in her analysis of neoliberal forms of government, Ong (2006) shows that sovereign rule is often implemented through zones of exception. Such invocations of exception produce a “pattern of noncontiguous, differently administered spaces of graduated or variegated sovereignty” (7). In this case, what is at work is not only a technology of exception but also one that makes possible the exercise of sovereign rule through illegality. Following Agamben (2005: 2), we can understand the ICE detainer as a “state of exception,” one that is a “dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics.” Agamben associates the state of exception with “modern totalitarianism” and “a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.” But he also argues that such a “permanent state of emergency” has become one of the features of democratic states as well.

What is crucial is the relationship between the illegalities wielded by sovereign authority and the production of what De Genova (2002) has called “migrant illegality and deportability.” On the one hand, the border stages the “spectacle” of illegality, bringing into sharp focus the figure of the “illegal alien” (422). On the other hand, the law remains elusive and invisible, thus establishing racialized migrant illegality as a “natural fact.” De Genova terms this the “legal production of migrant illegality,” a process closely intertwined with various regularizations and amnesties but also with various illegalizations. Take for example Coutin’s (1995: 549) analysis of how the sanctuary movement of the 1980s was criminalized through a production of “legal truth” that designated sanctuary workers as “alien-smugglers.” Such frameworks mirror the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and its criminalization of those aiding fugitive slaves. I argue that such criminalization must in turn be understood in relationship to the illegal production of federal immigration enforcement and its violations of the Fourth Amendment such as in the ICE detainer. Contesting such illegality has been an important feature of the sanctuary movement. Coutin (1995: 553) thus details how, in the 1980s, sanctuary workers in Tucson, Arizona, interpreted their activism as “civil initiative,” one in which “individuals carry out just laws their government is ignoring and misinterpreting.” Ridgley (2008) thus sees the sanctuary city as “an important site from which to challenge the criminalization of migration.”

But there are stark limits to the potentiality of sanctuary as a space of resistance to deportation regimes and to the illegalities of the state. In the United States, sanctuary jurisdictions rely on, and even consolidate, local police power. Specifically, the local refusal to enforce federal immigration law rests on local authority, notably the authority of the police. Sanctuary then is a paradigm of liberal inclusion, extending rather than limiting state violence. In fact, in the age of Trumpism, the struggle over sanctuary has been waged in the name of national security and safety. Trump himself has sharpened the language of raciology, most recently by characterizing “sanctuary areas,” especially those in California as a “ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept,” one that stands in opposition to the demands of the “people of the State” for “Security and Safety” (Wolf, 2018). The defense of sanctuary jurisdictions has also turned on an argument about security and safety. Take for example an opinion piece by the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a police research and policy organization:

Police chiefs know that today’s unreported domestic violence or sexual assault or robbery can become tomorrow’s reported homicide. This is a special concern in immigrant communities, where many people fear that cooperating with the police may lead to scrutiny and even deportation. It’s why cities have adopted policies like the one in Los Angeles, and it’s why police departments have invested considerable time and resources to build trust and cooperation with all of their communities, including their immigrant communities. They know that when people step forward because they trust their local police, communities are safer. (Wexler, 2017)

The implications are significant. Sanctuary jurisdictions, while hailed as a beacon of hope in the resistance to Trumpism, cannot be easily reconciled with social movements, notably the Movement for Black Lives, that have drawn attention to state violence, especially the murderous character of local police forces. Put bluntly, many of the prominent advocates of sanctuary, such as Rahm Emanuel, former Obama Chief of Staff and now mayor of Chicago, are also fierce advocates of the expansion of police power. Such police power must be understood in the long history of racial terror. That terror did not end with slavery but rather took on new forms, including as Gilroy (2000) notes, “coercive regimes…under the banner of freedom” (193). Thus, while Rahm Emanuel and Jeff Sessions might be on opposite sides of the legal battle over sanctuary jurisdictions, they are united in their defense of such coercive regimes underpinned by local police power. When Sessions recently praised the Anglo-American heritage of the office of the sheriff, he was in fact celebrating a long history of racial terror that hearkens back to slave patrols (Savransky, 2018). Practical raciology, as Gilroy (2000) argues, has repeatedly legitimized and rationalized “industrialized killing” (144). Sanctuary thus reveals how state protection and state violence are intimately linked.

At the threshold of empire

The roots of the sanctuary movement in the United States lie not so much in asserting local authority as it does in resisting American imperialism. In the 1980s, churches and synagogues, and then cities, provided refuge to asylum applicants fleeing war in Central America, notably Guatemala and El Salvador. The majority of these refugees were denied asylum and faced deportation. The sanctuary movement provided refuge, even at the risk of prosecution by the federal government. In particular, the movement had a keen sense of how refugees were fleeing violence instigated by U.S. interventions in Central America. It thus built imaginations and practices of transnational obligation and responsibility. Sanctuary was not only protection for asylum-seekers but also a practice of exposing the dispossessions, theft, and murder through which the state exercises spatialized power. Take for example San Francisco’s City of Refuge Ordinance in 1989 which provided asylum rights for refugees fleeing persecution in El Salvador and Guatemala. Section One of this ordinance stated,

The people of the United States owe a particular responsibility to political refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala because of the role that the United States military and other war related aid has played in prolonging the political conflicts in those countries. (Ridgley, 2008: 79)

Similar ideas of sanctuary can be found in the European debates about refuge, asylum, and hospitality. Darling (2010) notes that in the United Kingdom, the City of Sanctuary movement originated in Sheffield in 2005 and was meant to express “welcome and hospitality towards asylum seekers and refugees” (125). He argues that it was underpinned by a “spatially extensive sensibility,” a “relational reimagining” “to create a politics that was local, yet outwardly engaged” (131). Following Amin (2004) and Massey (2007: 179), Darling (2010: 132) sees this as a “politics of propinquity,” a “spatial grounding” of responsibility for the “stranger within the gates” as well as to the “strangers without the gates” (emphasis in original).

One of the most ambitious visions for a city of refuge comes from Derrida. In 1996, in a speech to the International Parliament of Writers convened in Strasbourg, France, Derrida makes the case for hospitality. Already in place was a network of cities of asylum and a resolution by the Council of Europe to protect writers who faced threats and persecution. Formed in the wake of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, such protection was seen to be an expression of both transnational obligation and liberal freedoms. The European Charter of Cities of Asylum of 1995 thus declared a “twofold protection of the writer; on the one hand, the right to freedom of expression and, on the other hand, the right to asylum.” In this way, the charter declared the city itself as “a community with an unshakeable faith in the democratic values of freedom and law.” In his speech and in the essay, “On Cosmopolitanism,” which he subsequently writes, Derrida (1997: 17) dramatically broadens the charge of refuge. Eschewing the focus on the writer, he argues that cities must protect the “foreigner in general, the immigrant, the exiled, the deported, the stateless or the displaced person.” “Ethics,” he insists, “is hospitality” (emphasis in original).

Derrida’s (2005) challenge to the limits of protection extended by the European Charter of the Cities of Asylum is part of his broader insistence on an “unconditional law of unlimited hospitality” (6). Building on the writings of Levinas on refuge and rejecting Kantian notions of cosmopolitanism, Derrida (2000) emphasizes hospitality, extended “not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other” (25). The city is an important figuration in Derrida’s conceptualization of hospitality. As Damai (2005) argues, for Derrida, the “city embodies the figure of the other itself” (70).

Derrida is of course pushing against the limits of Kantian cosmopolitanism. Kant, Derrida (1997: 21) argues, formulates hospitality as “the right to visitation,” not “right of residence.” Right of residence, for Kant, “must be made the object of a particular treaty between states” and is thus “dependent on state sovereignty.” Derrida (1997) on the other hand, makes a distinction “between two forms of the metropolis: the City and the State” (3). For him, the city of refuge or “free city” is one that “transforms and reforms the modalities of membership by which the city belongs to the state.” It is “above nation-states” (3–4, 9). The freedom of the city does not rest on police power. Instead, Derrida (1997: 15, 3) calls for a restriction of the “legal powers and scope of the police” and places questions of rights, refuge, and asylum in the political authority of the city and its relationship to the “renewal of international law” (emphasis in original). Isin and Rygiel (2007: 198) thus celebrate Derrida’s cities of refuge as “acts of resistance,” as “abject spaces that are not spaces of abjection but spaces of politics.” In particular, they argue that such cities are autonomous and semiautonomous zones where “the rule of law of the state is suspended for hospitality.”

Derrida’s exposition of hospitality has been understood as a radical ethics of cosmopolitanism. As Barnett (2005) notes, for Derrida, hospitality is not “a gift in the conventional sense exchange for something (for example, for good conduct, or respect for the law)” (13). It is neither liberal inclusion nor multicultural tolerance. These, as Barnett argues, pivot on “secure self-possession.” Instead, Derrida’s unconditional hospitality “is a response to an unanticipated arrival, to a visitation without invitation” (13). Most significant, hospitality proceeds not from the security of self-possession but rather from its lack. Barnett (2005) thus observes that “the unexpected visitor, as a figure of alterity, overwhelms the self-possession of the subject” (13). Indeed, Derrida’s conceptualization of hospitality is ultimately a resignification of the meanings of host and guest, self and other, native and foreigner. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida (1999) states that “hospitality precedes property” (45). This in turn allows him to resignify the host as residing in a home “which, in the end, does not belong to him.” As Carroll (2006) writes, “What is original, what makes hospitality in its most radical, implacable sense, therefore, possible is not possession but a ‘radical dispossession’”(822). Dikeç (2002: 236) emphasizes that Derrida’s concept of hospitality is about recognition rather than tolerance. In turn this recognition is tied to dispossession. This is similar to what Butler (2001) discusses as “an account of oneself” (22). She argues that

the terms by which I confer recognition are not mine alone…I am, as it were, dispossessed by the language I offer…in this sense…I can never offer it…as a pure offering, since I am receiving it at least potentially and structurally, in the moment, in the act, of giving.

But where does this idea of radical dispossession come from? Carroll argues that Derrida’s notions of dispossession, of personhood that must be conceptualized as exile, refugee, and guest rather than as proprietor and host, derives from the “remains of Algiers,” or a “Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian genealogy.” Derrida (1996), in Monolingualism of the Other, writes:

I lost and then gained back French citizenship. I lost it for years without having another…And then, one day, “one fine day,” without, once again, my asking for anything, and still too young to know it in a properly political knowledge, I found the aforementioned citizenship again. The state, to which I never spoke, had given it back to me. (15–16)

Algeria haunts Derrida’s concept of unconditional hospitality. It disrupts settled notions of personhood. It marks what Derrida (1996) calls the “disorder of identity” (29). It renders impossible any notion of inclusion that is not already entangled with expulsion, any notion of modernity that is not already constituted through colonial violence. I interpret Derrida’s philosophy of refuge as locating the city not at the heart of the nation but rather at the threshold of empire. In insisting on the unconditional nature of hospitality, Derrida (2005) emphasizes the idea of threshold, including the threshold of the home. As I have already discussed, this threshold is one of resignification where home becomes a site of radical dispossession. Sanctuary, I thus argue, is not a scalar politics of sovereignty or a secessionary politics of freedom. It is the threshold of empire, a resignification of arriving and belonging.

However, Derrida’s concept of unconditional hospitality requires critical interrogation. As Damai (2005: 89) argues, while the “other of Europe” features prominently in his writings, including in his presentation of himself as “exemplary Franco-Maghrebian” or “uprooted African,” “the other is granted a place only in relation to Europe.” In particular, Damai emphasizes that Derrida’s city of refuge relies on a “highly calculative and selective genealogy” (Levinas on biblical and Talmudic traditions as well as interpretations of the medieval European city) that “takes us back… to a selected aspect of the Enlightenment tradition.” Put bluntly, “Derrida’s critique of Kant does not go a long way in exposing the anthropological, colonial and racist impulses in Kant’s writings, which in turn would have helped Derrida’s own project of hospitality to decisively move beyond Kant” (Damai, 2005: 90). Colonialism, in Derrida’s writing, appears as a haunting, a disorder of identity for the Franco-Maghrebian Jew. The racial terror of colonialism, especially the brutal longevity of the French occupation of Algeria, slips out of view. And perhaps this is why Derrida is able to conceptualize radical dispossession as a universal condition, as one that destabilizes host–guest relations everywhere. While the refusal to recognize proprietorship resignifies possession, including self-possession, it also suggests that such refusal has equal meaning for colonized and colonizer.

Indeed, Derrida’s ethics of cosmopolitan humanism shares some of the conceits of liberalism. As Baring (2010) notes, “publicly Derrida remained silent on the question of Algeria for most of his life” (257). In private, he took issue with scholars such as Pierre Nora whose writings exposed the complicity of French Algerian liberals in the occupation of Algeria. Derrida, Baring (2010) suggests, was “torn between a colonial regime towards which he felt grave misgivings and a French republican tradition to which he expressed a strong allegiance” (241). He thus asserted that “the anticolonial revolution can only liberate itself from factual Europe or the empirical West, in the name of transcendental Europe, that is Reason” (Derrida in Baring, 2010: 257). Reason could only be organized under the sign of Europe. Later, in the 1990s, when Derrida breaks his silence on Algeria, when he reframes his identity as Franco-Maghrebian, “as a black and very Arab Jew,” “on the margins of Europe,” rather than as French Algerian, he continues to center Europe, its linguistic culture, and its traditions of Reason. Put another way, it is only Europe that can grant sanctuary to those constituted as the other of Europe.

In an essay titled “The European Question: Migration, Race, and Postcoloniality in Europe,” De Genova (2016b) observes that Europeanness is “once again an elusive master signifier” (75). In particular, there is a preoccupation with the “Migration Question,” with the “migrants…crashing the gates.” But, as De Genova (2016b) argues, “in response to the hegemonic entrenchment of the Migration Question…we must critically posit the European question from the vantage point of the cross-border mobility of migrants and in light of the enduring ‘coloniality of power’ that contemporary borders imply” (78). The European question, he thus emphasizes, is a “racial problem – a problem of postcolonial whiteness.” It is this postcolonial whiteness that haunts Derrida’s ethics of cosmopolitan humanism and brings it into close relationship with what it seeks to disrupt, notably liberal inclusion.

From sanctuary to abolition

In the age of Trumpism, sanctuary has become a terrain of struggle. Despite their limited scope, sanctuary jurisdictions in the United States are being hailed as a symbol of resistance and defiance. Cities of refuge in Europe have been celebrated for “opposing racism and xenophobia in order to build a culture of hospitality” (Gilroy, 2018: 19). This turn of phrase comes from Paul Gilroy’s 2018 Antipode lecture which sought to rethink humanism outside of raciology. Yet, in that lecture, Gilroy also praised the “vernacular connections” and “oppositional commitments” at work in European sanctuary cities and sought to draw inspiration from them.

In this paper, I have argued that the journey through meanings and practices of sanctuary lead us to colonialism and imperialism. At this threshold of empire, biopolitics cannot be kept apart from racial terror. The management of life is inevitably entangled with the determination of death. If we are to envision Derrida’s free city as a distinctive formation of sovereignty, then it is necessary to consider that necropolitics, or the “power and the capacity to determine who may live and who must die,” is, as Mbembe (2003) states, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty” (11). In this final section of the paper, I point to how such considerations require what Sundberg (2015: 210) has described as the “rerouting” of theorists such as Agamben through “sites of European imperialism and settler-colonialism.” As Sundberg (2015: 223) notes, this in turn reconfigures conceptualizations of space and sovereignty, bringing into clear view how state sovereignty rests on dispossession and genocide.

In seeking to generate critical readings of sanctuary, I turn to the black radical tradition. I am especially interested in black radicalism as an epistemological project. Following Robinson (1983: 73), I understand this tradition not as a “variant of Western radicalism whose proponents happen to be black,” but instead as an analysis of “human exploitation woven into the interstices of European social life from the inception of Western civilization.” It is thus that Robinson (1983) reads Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction as a “theory of history” (196). And Kelley (1983) in his foreword, reads Robinson’s Black Marxism as an intervention that “parallels that of Said’s Orientalism” (xiv). I argue that the black radical tradition as epistemology is of vital importance for a critique and reconfiguration of sanctuary. In particular, it shifts us from sanctuary and refuge to abolition.

As Paik (2017) has argued, liberal notions of sanctuary fail to challenge the criminalization of “targeted peoples” which has been integral to immigration policy. In doing so, it “shores up the notion that undocumented immigrants deserve inclusion in the community, but contingent on their submission to the capitalist extraction of their labour and to the state’s (racialised) criminal justice apparatuses” (16). Such elisions continue even in the radical ethics of Derrida and other poststructuralist thinkers. Their invocation of dispossession is a prelude to the ethics of hospitality, a refusal of property and its proprietary prerogatives. But we must ask: who has the privilege to thus refuse property and eschew personhood? The self-owning and earth-owning?

Following Bonds and Inwood (2016: 715), I argue that even the question of privilege, specifically white privilege, is insufficient here. They call for a focus on white supremacy “as the foundation for the continuous unfolding of practices of race and racism within settler states.” Whiteness, as they note, “is constituted in and through the bodies, property, land, and labor of people of color and that continues to animate structural inequalities long after the first seizure of indigenous territory or the final slave has been freed” (722). I argue that meanings and practices of sanctuary carry legacies of what Ranganathan (2016: 5) describes as “racial liberalism,” including “conjoined processes of racialized property making and property taking” (emphasis in original). This in turn rests on ideologies of freedom.

What if we were to start not with the ideal of the free city, of a zone of autonomy, but instead with the plantation? There is an extraordinary set of descriptions in Chapter VII of Du Bois’s (1903) magisterial book, The Souls of Black Folk. Titled “Of the Black Belt,” it starts with the train from the North thundering through the “crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left.” Du Bois writes of Atlanta as bordered by “the land of the Cherokees,” the spot of Sam Hose’s lynching, and “the remnants of the vast plantations.” He writes of the “black tenant” and the “shadow-hand of the master’s grand-nephew or cousin or creditor” that collects “the rack-rent remorselessly.” “Only black tenants,” he observes, “can stand such a system and they only because they must.” And then as he approaches the Black Belt, below Macon, “the world grows darker”:

The Indians were removed to Indian Territory, and settlers poured into these coveted lands to retrieve their broken fortunes. For a radius of a hundred miles about Albany, stretched a great fertile land, luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory, and poplar; hot with the sun and damp with the rich black swamp-land; and here the corner-stone of the Cotton Kingdom was laid.

To shift from sanctuary to abolition is to rethink the ideal of the free city. It is to embed Derrida’s notion of radical dispossession in the colonial violence through which the capacity to own self and earth is produced. These in turn rest on what Gilroy (2015) has termed the “politics of truth” (7). When Derrida insists that anticolonial thought must rely on Reason and that such Reason is synonymous with “transcendental Europe,” he is telling the “story of humanism…as a kind of European coming-of-age story” (Scott, 2000: 119). It is this type of humanism that Gilroy (2015) seeks to subject to the “trials of racial critique” (12). Put another way, Gilroy (2015) seeks a “refiguration of the human outside of raciology” (7). I see this to be an urgently necessary project in the age of Trumpism, one that confronts “the position of being but not belonging,” “of non-being while being-racialized” (Gilroy, 2015: 11). Such a refiguration is inextricably linked to the politics of truth. Mignolo (2015) argues that “the problem of the Human is thus not identity-based per se but in the enunciations of what it means to be Human” (108). In this sense, sanctuary can be understood as a distinctive enunciation of what it means to be Human, and such an enunciation is one that remains yoked to transcendental Europe and its traditions of Reason.

To shift from sanctuary to abolition is to consider what Gilroy (2015), following Sylvia Wynter, terms the “creative re-enchantment of the human” (19). In his lengthy interview with Wynter, Scott (2000: 197) argues that this “hope of a revisioned humanism” rests “on a radical rehistoricization…a transgressive countermove to the…historiographies of the relationship between Europe and its others.” As in Du Bois’s (1935) seminal text, Black Reconstruction in America, such rehistoricization makes visible the struggle for emancipation. It serves as “a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America.” It “grants historical and revolutionary agency to the Black radical subject” and foregrounds “forms of resistance and rebellion that drew not on European theory, but on cultural resources taught to slaves by their ancestors in Africa” (Johnson and Lubin, 2017: 10–11). Following Gilmore (2017), abolition then can be understood as a form of place-making: “the undoing of bondage – abolition – is quite literally to change places…even if geometrically speaking they hadn’t moved far at all” (231). Such place-making, Gilmore notes, is also “world-making.” Manisha Sinha’s recent history of abolition makes visible such world-making. Centering slave resistance in this history, she highlights the transnational imaginations and practices of abolitionism, one that viewed emancipation as “not only the abolition of slavery but also the liberation of all oppressed people” and that “developed an incipient critique of capitalism that linked the emancipation of the slaves with that of all laboring people” (Sinha, 2016: 339). Abolitionism, she argues, refused “the sanctity of bourgeois society, the nation-state, and empire.”

It is precisely for these reasons that abolition is also a re-enchantment of democracy. Du Bois (1935) centers “abolition democracy” in his account of Black reconstruction. A reorganization of the ownership of self and earth is a vital part of abolition democracy. Du Bois emphasizes that Black reconstruction saw the redistribution of land as a necessary corollary to emancipation. Indeed, as Sinha (2016: 352) details, abolitionists supported land reform as way of challenging capitalism and the system of racial slavery. Needless to say, such land confiscation and redistribution never took place in the United States. Instead, as Du Bois (1935) demonstrates, the “counter-revolution of property” ensured the consolidation of white racial domination through new regimes of racial terror. But dreams of reconstruction persisted. Thus, Du Bois (1935) was to write: “It is quite possible that long before the end of the 20^th century, the deliberate distribution of property and income by the state on an equitable and logical basis will be looked upon as the state’s prime function” (485).

I find Du Bois’s emphasis on the state to be an important intervention in the age of Trumpism. A critical reading of sanctuary attunes us to the illegalities of the state and situates sovereignty at the threshold of empire. Du Bois gives us an exuberant vision of the state. This vision can be interpreted as the “undercommons,” a space created by “fugitive planning” (Harney and Moten, 2013). Drawing inspiration from Muñoz’s “brown commons,” also a space of fugitive encounter, it can be “a transformational infrastructure” for “troubled times” (Berlant, 2016: 398). Indeed, the history of abolitionism is filled with examples of such transformational infrastructure, from the “permanent organizational apparatus of the abolitionist underground” to “independent landowning communities” (Sinha, 2016: 384, 356).

But Du Bois dreams of the state. The state of which he dreams is built through an uprising, the “uprising of the black man” (Du Bois, 1935: 100). For Du Bois, such uprising was most evident in the “desire for schools” and the “organized effort for education.” Freed slaves, he shows, were intent on creating public infrastructures of education, “on a permanent basis, for all people and all classes” (525). It was this demand that “planted the free common school in a part of the nation, and in a part of the world, where it had never been known.”

I argue then that as the plantation and colony is a conceptual palimpsest for the city, so the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands can be understood as a conceptual palimpsest for the state. Such a vision is apparent in the bold and detailed platform of the Movement for Black Lives and its call for reparations, redistribution, economic justice, the end of police power, and much more (https://policy.m4bl.org/). As Kelley (2016) argues, this is a “remarkable blueprint for social transformation…a plan for ending structural racism, saving the plant, and transforming the entire nation –- not just black lives” (emphasis in original). In the age of Trumpism, such plans not only challenge white supremacy and white nationalism but they also articulate a vision of justice that is defies liberal inclusion and cosmopolitanism. At its core, such a vision rests on an epistemological project that refuses a story of humanism anchored to transcendental Europe. “Democracy,” Du Bois (1935) writes, “died save in the hearts of black folk” (24).

In conclusion

The present historical conjuncture is marked by the resurgence of white nationalism in liberal democracies. In the United States, the Trump regime has institutionalized xenophobic ideologies in policies of exclusion and expulsion, including a crackdown on sanctuary cities. Sanctuary, as protection for racial others, has emerged as a space and symbol of resistance to Trumpism. In this paper, I have undertaken critical scrutiny of contemporary sanctuary cities in the United States to demonstrate the intimate entanglement between state protection and state violence. As with many other forms of liberal inclusion, police power is a necessary accompaniment to sanctuary.

Alternative traditions of sanctuary, be it Derrida’s cities of refuge or the sanctuary movement of the 1980s in the United States, resignify the relationship between state power and illegalized subjects. Situated at the threshold of empire, they mobilize transnational and cosmopolitan understandings of obligation and hospitality and challenge key tenets of sovereignty. But such imaginations and practices of sanctuary also rely on Western humanism, offering refuge to racial others from the place of Europe or the free city.

In keeping with the black radical tradition and its postcolonial critique of Western humanism, I call for a shift from sanctuary to abolition. The implications of such a shift are three-fold. The first is a reconfiguration of the ideal of the city as a place of freedom. Abolition geographies brings into view various spatial formations of racial capitalism, be it the colony or the Black Belt, thereby foregrounding the histories of dispossession through which the West and its free cities have been constituted. At the same time, the black radical tradition provides templates for what Kelley (2002) has aptly termed “freedom dreams.” Abolitionism, as a liberation movement, built infrastructures of resistance and refuge, from vigilance committees and the underground railroad to the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, which I see as both precedent and horizon for today’s sanctuary spaces. Finally, the shift from sanctuary to abolition calls into question both liberal and cosmopolitan traditions of Western humanism. At stake is the reworlding of knowledge and the reconstruction of epistemology to make possible enunciations of personhood and rightful presence that are no longer yoked to postcolonial whiteness.