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ABOLISH ICE | Reading List

30% off books on borders, immigration, and the use of race as a means of division.

Verso Books26 June 2025

The targeting of immigrant communities has reached extraordinary new levels of shamelessness, drawing activists to the streets in protest and sparking fiery confrontations against the state's militarized police forces. The books below were selected to provide histories of immigration enforcement and philosophies of division and pacification.

The selected titles have been discounted 30%

We Built the Wall

by Eileen Truax

Translated by Diane Stockwell

For decades, the American political asylum process has been used to punish enemies and reward friends of the US government. Refugees from Cuba can walk through an open door. People fleeing Eastern ...

Deport, Deprive, Extradite

by Nisha Kapoor

When Minh Pham was extradited from Britain to the US to face terrorism related charges, his appeal against the deprivation of his British citizenship was still pending. Soon after he arrived his ap...

The Dispossessed

by John Washington

Arnovis couldn’t stay in El Salvador. If he didn’t leave, a local gangster promised that his family would dress in mourning, that he would wake up with flies in his mouth. “It was like a bomb explo...

The Beast

by Óscar Martínez

Introduction by Francisco Goldman

Translated by Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Economist & The Financial TimesOne day a few years ago, 300 migrants were kidnapped between the remote desert towns of Altar, Mexico, and Sasabe...

Border Vigils

by Jeremy Harding

Ours is an era marked by extraordinary human migrations, with some 200 million people alive today having moved from their country of origin. The political reaction in Europe and the United States h...

The Hollywood Kid

by Juan Martinez and Óscar Martínez

Translated by Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington

As a boy, Miguel Ángel Tobar fled a small town in El Salvador torn apart by warring guerrillas and US-backed death squads. As a teen in Los Angeles, he fought discrimination and beatings by joining...

A History of Violence

by Óscar Martínez

Foreword by Jon Lee Anderson

Translated by Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington

El Salvador and Honduras have had the highest homicide rates in the world over the past ten years, with Guatemala close behind. Every day more than 1,000 people—men, women, and children—flee these ...

Against Borders

by Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke de Noronha

Borders harm all of us: they must be abolished.Borders divide workers and families, fuel racial division, and reinforce global disparities. They encourage the expansion of technologies of surveilla...

Empire of Borders

by Todd Miller

The twenty-first century has witnessed the rapid hardening of international borders. Security, surveillance, and militarization are widening the chasm between those who travel where they please and...

Humanitarian Borders

by Polly Pallister-Wilkins

*Winner of the International Political Sociology book award for 2023*What does it mean when humanitarianism is the response to death, injury and suffering at the border? This book interrogates the ...

Violent Borders

by Reece Jones

Forty thousand people died trying to cross international borders in the past decade, with the high-profile deaths along the shores of Europe only accounting for half of the grisly total.Reece Jones...

All-American Nativism

by Daniel Denvir

It is often said that with the election of Donald Trump nativism was raised from the dead. After all, here was a president who organized his campaign around a rhetoric of unvarnished racism and xen...

The Jail is Everywhere

by Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs and Judah Schept

Foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Nearly every county and major city in the United States has a jail, the short-term detention center controlled by local sheriffs that funnels people into prisons and long-term incarceration. Jails ...