Jamila Hammami is a Tunisian Texan public border abolitionist scholar-activist, founder, and strategist who has spent over twenty years as a cross-movement organizer doing what few others can.

Honored as a Frederick Douglass 200 Bicentennial Abolitionist (2019), Hammami’s militarized youth and deep anti-war/anti-imperialist organizing helped shape their founding of the Queer Detainee Empowerment Project (QDEP) in 2014, architecting the first internationally recognized framework bridging prison abolition and immigrant justice and building a community-based model for alternatives to detention for LGBTQIA+ and PLHIV/AIDS, distinguished by the International Detention Coalition (2016) as best practices. Hammami has presented twice at the UNHCR in Geneva, created the nation’s first annual Queer Immigration Conference, and, in 2017, mobilized at the front lines of the first Rainbow Caravan in the Nogales, Mexico borderlands, as the Rainbow 17 demanded asylum under the first Trump administration’s asylum ban. Over almost five years, Hammami and their team fought every case and won every single one. Zero deportations.

Hammami’s scholarship and teaching sits at the convergence of border and carceral studies, community organizing and movements, empire and anti-imperialism, and political economy and law, with recent co-authored work in Alternatives to the Anthropocene (Issue 145, Radical History Review, Duke University Press, 2023) titled “A Roundtable on Environmental Injustice and Border Abolition,” a co-authored chapter titled “Resistance Archiving: Reflections on the IMMPrint Detention Stories Project” in Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands: Confronting Trump’s Reign of Terror (A. Aldama & J. Ordaz, Eds., University of Arizona Press, 2024), and a forthcoming solo-authored article in Decolonial Dispatches (Sociologists for Palestine, 2026) tracing the state’s weaponization of migration policy to criminalize resistance and dissent.

Learn more about Jamila here.