Jamila Hammami is a Tunisian Texan public border abolitionist scholar-activist, resistance archivist, educator, and strategist who has spent over twenty years as a cross-movement grassroots 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 UNHCR in Geneva 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 is a co-founder, co-host, and collective member of the decolonial podcast, Resistant Communiqués Podcast, a digital repository of People’s and Resistance History. Their work bridges organizing strategy, public scholarship and education, resistance archiving, and the front lines of criminal and deportation defense. An Opportunity Agenda Communications Institute and Sundance Creative Change alum, Hammami is a nationally recognized campaign architect, narrative strategist, and deportation defense strategist who wins, currently serving on Deportation Defense Campaigns (DDC) in New York State, and as the PI on a research brief focusing on Clemency Justice and Categorical Clemency in New York State.

 

Hammami’s recent keynote, “Teaching Carceral Logics and Abolitionist Futures” (Stockton University, April 2026), examines universities as border regimes and sites of counterinsurgency. Their scholarship and teaching sit at the convergence of border and carceral studies, empire and anti-imperialism,  community organizing and resistance movements, and political economy, Constitutional Rights, and law.

 

Hammami’s recent writing can be found in Alternatives to the Anthropocene (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 (Aldama & 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 and the necessity.

 

 

Learn more about Jamila here.