There is a productive friction between the life of the mind of an intellectual[1] who documents and theorizes social movements and their solidarity with those movements, often referred to in anthropology as activist and collaborative anthropology (Hale 2008, Hale and Stephen 2013). I have been straddling that tension for my entire career, and it has made me a better scholar (see Stephen 2022, 2025). The collaborative digital humanities project and book project I am currently engaged with embody that tension, particularly in 2025 and 2026 when the U.S. engaged in multiple wars. I focus here on the war on immigrants, which our research team[2] faced continuously. 

When we started our pilot research (with two additional organizations)[3] in 2023, our team was very excited to document as many of the Mesoamerican Indigenous languages in Oregon that we could (based on oral histories of language use with 20 people and a pilot survey), and to develop a set of best practices and recommendations for social service and non-profit organizations. An additional goal was to make visible all the languages and communities in the state to those who were speakers and community members. Hence the name, Invisible No More. What began as a project of making communities visible became a project of thinking critically about when invisibility is itself a form of collective protection.

We built a beautiful map showing the locations of all the different languages with colored dots and size indicating how many speakers there were. This was all done via a short survey on Qualtrics with community-based organization staff working on the project and others on our team serving as navigators. The connections were made based on trust and established relationships. The entire team was trained in conducting the survey, designed the oral history interviews together, and practiced carrying them out. We carried out rich interviews and the beginning of the information that would eventually confirm 50 different Indigenous languages from Mexico and Guatemala spoken in Oregon. Through 2023 and 2024, we went forward with our project, engaging in monthly check-ins and periodic face-to-face encounters.

Our research team held a celebration and viewing of the language map in June of 2024 and shared some of the highlights from the narratives that came out of the interviews. I wrote an initial paper on the idea of transborder territory and the importance of narrative and emotion in stories about territory which travel to the U.S. I also framed the paper in terms of the cumulative dispossession that members of those communities often face through neoliberal development, narco-occupation of their communities, climate change, and different forms of violence, particularly towards women and girls, that caused people to flee. I presented this at the Tepoztlán Summer Institute, which focused on indigeneity that year. I got excellent feedback and created a book proposal. 

With two others on my team—a linguist and a digital humanities specialist from the library—we wrote a three-year Mellon grant proposal to continue the work documenting languages and communities and to expand the interviews to focus on life histories, experiences of discrimination for speaking a language, and experiences with plants, curing, caring, and mutual aid. We received the grant and proceeded with the same title, "Invisible No More: Mobilizing Mesoamerican Indigenous Knowledges for Health and Socio-Environmental Justice." In our grant proposal, we promised to: 1) establish a database and map of Indigenous Mesoamerican languages and communities in Oregon; 2) collect narratives of knowledge systems of health and well-being centered on medicinal plants and other forms of care; 3) put summaries and samples of these systems of knowledge on the language and community map through storyboard software; 4) make the language and knowledge map available on a public website for Mesoamerican communities to access as well as a wide range of service providers in the state who interface with these communities. These activities were focused on visibility and educating a wide public.

We began the work, ultimately collecting about 230 surveys about language and language use and interviewing twenty-four more people, in Spanish and in Indigenous languages. We also worked with other organizations to produce short audios of Know Your Rights in fifteen of the most common languages we encountered. This trajectory was abruptly interrupted. In the fall of 2025, Indigenous and other farmworkers became a prime target of ICE in Oregon. Everything changed. That moment crystallized the high stakes of our work—not only for me but for the entire team. In working with community-based organizations and men, women, children, and families living in real time, the intellectual has to respond to political and social contexts. We decided not to publish our map of Indigenous languages in Oregon and to rethink our goals.

Fear increased as people in the communities where we did the surveys and interviews were being terrorized. In August 2025, four Mam farmworkers were detained in Marion County. On November 5th, eight people were detained in Lane County, and then a week later, sixteen in Salem, Oregon. In early November, I received news that seven people were detained by ICE in one of the communities we are actively working in. I watched a video that documented a woman thrown to the ground by ICE who was repeatedly trying to tell them that she had legal status. She was later released and needed to receive treatment for injuries she sustained. The other people remained in ICE custody. They were all heading out in a van early in the morning to harvest salal in the forests that run along the coast. Those in the van included one person who was in the process of receiving asylum and also likely had permission to work.

I watched the video and found it deeply disturbing. The woman repeatedly screams and asks in Spanish why they are doing this to her. She even tries to address them in English. Even as I processed the video, my mind returned to what I had spent another part of the day doing—a very close reading of a transcript from a conversation I had with a man from the same community narrating the beauty of the forests, pastures, and rivers of his home territory. He then described the tragedy of the Guatemalan civil war that he lived through beginning at age twelve when guerrilla soldiers entered the town, shut the schools, and remained in the community. Later, the Guatemalan army came and burned down many houses, killed many people, and he and most others fled to the mountains where they remained for several years until the army left their community. He worked in Mexico, in other parts of the U.S., and came to Oregon in about 2015. Part of his family received asylum around that time, but he remains vulnerable to this day, as do many other people. I thought of several other people in the same community who had pending asylum cases in which I was an expert witness, and of others I knew who were undocumented.

Everyone on the team was extremely alarmed, trying to do their best, and respond in the moment. As a group, we began to discuss how to shift our research to meet the needs of the moment and to support families who were part of communities being targeted by ICE. We planned how to produce more audio resources in Indigenous languages about how to document a detention and how to begin outreach to select organizations to encourage them to expand their work in Indigenous languages related to immigrant rights, resources, and detentions.

An important part of the discussion was balancing concrete ways to help get some funds out to families and organizations with continuing with our original research objectives to educate the public. In addition, team members expressed the importance of reporting on the impact of ICE raids but also, of trying to change the narrative about immigrants as criminals, continuing our work on the ways that plants, medicinal knowledge, and forms of care and support were ongoing in the communities.

The number of people held in detention by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reached 73,000 by January of 2026, a new record (Montoya-Galvez 2026). Between January 2025 and April 10, 2026, at least forty-seven people died in detention, causing widespread fear in families with loved ones in immigration detention (Calderon et al. 2026). A powerful surge in immigration enforcement took place in the Pacific Northwest from October through December of 2025 (Center for Human Rights, University of Washington 2026). Behind these numbers are the lived realities of families our team worked with. In the winter and spring of 2026, in conversations with trusted members of our research team, families shared some of their practices and lived knowledge about living between invisibility and visibility. They feel high levels of anxiety and stress, along with a loss of mobility and everyday freedom; children have been forced to act as adults accompanying younger siblings to school and shopping; medical appointments have been missed; economic precarity has increased; and social life has been severely limited. The war on immigrants has not only caged people in detention but also in their own homes. Yet those living this embodied trauma are engaging in collective strategies of protection, neighborhood alert networks, family emergency planning, and in some communities using home remedies and engagement with plants and gardens to counter their trauma.

They have strong messages for U.S. leaders, highlighting the need for recognition, dignity, and mutual respect: 

“They should put themselves in our shoes. How would they feel if they were in our situation? If their families were separated, would they be happy? We are not criminals.” 

“We do all of this necessary work that benefits us, but also everyone. Maybe the day will come when there won’t be caretakers, no one to build their houses, no one to harvest their food, no one to cook in their restaurants, and wash the dishes. They should support us now like we have been supporting everyone in this country.” 

“Just like all of us, these leaders are just temporary passengers here on earth. They should remember this and act like humans.” 

Despite the extreme trauma they are experiencing, our project participants project humanity and empathy and ask for the same.

Their narratives demonstrate shared visions for a just future that not only recognizes their ongoing contributions to the communities they live in, but the relationality that exists between Mesoamerican Indigenous communities in diaspora and others they co-exist with in the same town, state, and nation. Their narratives reflect the moral project of comunalidad, which is threaded through all dimensions of life. They articulate a just present and future. Solidarity via political action has become front and center for the project whose audience is Indigenous communities in diaspora from Mexico and Guatemala, service providers and community-based organizations, and the general public.

To better explain these experiences I turned to the longer history of settler colonialism in Mexico, Guatemala, and the U.S. and the ways that U.S. foreign policy and development policy have criminalized Indigenous peoples and constructed them as what I call “preemptive suspects.” I draw from early labelling of them as “terrorists” and terrorist suspects under Reagan (particularly for Central Americans seeking asylum and safety in the U.S.), and then the Bush national security policy of “preemption,” which justified preemptive action to prevent harm to U.S. interests. They become “preemptive suspects,” criminalized, for simply wanting to enter the U.S. despite the merits of individual asylum cases or possible refugee status. The criminalization of immigrants is also directly linked to the expansion of mass incarceration, most recently accelerated by Bill Clinton’s 1994 Violent Crime Control Act among other legislation. This labelling of those coming to the U.S. without documents as criminals and terrorists was greatly amplified during the first and now second Trump administrations.

At the same time that Mesoamerican Indigenous peoples in diaspora in the U.S. are being criminalized, they have and continue to build what I am calling transborder Mesoamerican Indigenous territories. This is done through detailed narratives and memories, what I call Terristories, using the term coined by Métis intellectual and filmmaker Warren Cariou—territories built through portable stories—planting traditional food and medicinal crops on many different garden spaces and using them for curing and nourishment, and mutual aid societies and networks of care. Much of these activities occur in Indigenous languages and incorporate cultural practices. My intellectual challenge has been to think hemispherically and to look at the ways in which Indigenous peoples in diaspora who now reside in what is the U.S. have brought ideas and practices with them that don’t result in the further dispossession of Indigenous peoples and territories based inside the U.S., but instead build territory on a model of relationality, not fixed borders or occupation. I am thinking through my idea of transborder territory through the stories of the people our team engaged with and those that I have worked with as an expert witness in their asylum cases. All the stories are anonymous with identifying details stripped out. We are also creating scripts from our interviews that will become texts and illustrated audio stories with pseudonyms to protect the people whose interviews they are based on but also permit the sharing of information within the diasporic Indigenous communities and with relevant service providers. All of these methods and theoretical tools bring us to an ethical dilemma.

What do we do with these stories? How can we protect people but also try to create a different narrative about Indigenous and other immigrants and all that they bring to the U.S.? Telling stories is an affirmative way to reach people and have them understand the tremendous struggles people have gone through before they arrive in the U.S., while trying to get here, and once they come. How do you tell a story about the joy of planting traditional corn, beans, and potatoes in a local garden while laughing and joking in the sun when people are being kidnapped by ICE? How do you navigate the tension between terror and the quotidian joys of daily life that sustain hope and connection? How do you educate the public and share practical and motivating information while not compromising people's safety? Can ethnography really play a role in that tension? These are not abstract questions. They demand a political and analytical response.

In thinking about the current situation with a war on immigrants and arbitrary detentions and the complete lack of due process and following the law, I am reminded of the political and quotidian everyday living space of COVID-19. It is a different moment in that only part of the population is targeted, but the political free-fall and uncertainty extend beyond the intense hate directed at people for their brown or black skin, language, type of work, and where they live. It is more generalized. Nevertheless, the impact is violently uneven. The U.S. lost 1.2 million legal and undocumented immigrants in the workforce between January and July of 2025, according to a recent study (PBS 2025).

ICE has become the new COVID, as the results in communities are similar—when ICE enters and builds fear and terror, everyone stays home and is afraid to engage their communities. We must not let ICE work as a form of community infection that shuts down the quotidian pleasures of life, connection, and solidarity. As community antibodies, researchers have to stand up with the communities we work with and fight, confront, and speak back. We need to document what is happening, tell these stories to the public, and try to change the public discourse on immigrants as criminals before they even arrive. We can lead with political solidarity and bring it to the life of the mind. There is no other way.

Notes

[1] This essay is written in response to Tommie Shelby’s lecture titled, "Solidarity, Politics, Intellectual Life." 2025 Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts, Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford, CA, November 2025.

[2] Our team includes me, Alex Llumiquinga Pérez and Abelina Pablo (Arcoíris), Dr. Gabriela Perez-Baez (Linguistics, University of Oregon), Gatlin Fasone Alshuyukh and Luz Fandino (Plaza de Nuestra Comunidad), Itzel Hernández Ramírez and Sandra Martín (Bienestar), Kate Thornhill (Public Scholarship Librarian, University of Oregon), Lidia Muñoz Paniagua and Liesl Cohn De León (Anthropology, University of Oregon), Valentin Sánchez (Oregon Law Center).

[3] Pilot research team members included the organizations Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), and Coalición Fortaleza who worked with us from June 2023-June 2024. 

References Cited

Calderon, Ignacio, John Heasly and Suhail Bhat. 2026. "Trump administration’s immigration enforcement." April 10, 2026. USA Today. https://data.usatoday.com/projects/dhs-immigration-enforcement-tracker/

Cariou, Warren. "Terristory: Land and Language in the Indigenous Short Story--Oral and Written." Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Place and Placelessness in Postcolonial Short Fiction, 42.2 (2020). https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.2356

Center for Human Rights, University of Washington. 2026. "New Data on PNW Immigration Enforcement Reveal Powerful Surge in Late 2025." March 11, 2026. https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2026/03/11/new-data-on-pnw-immigration-enforcement-reveal-powerful-surge-in-late-2025/

Hale, Charles, ed. 2008. Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hale, Charles and Lynn Stephen. 2013. Otros Saberes: Collaborative Research on Indigenous and Afro-Descendent Cultural Politics. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Montoya-Galvez, Camilo. 2026. "ICE's detainee population reaches new record high of 73,000, as crackdown widens." CBS News. January 16, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ices-detainee-population-record-high-of-73000/

PBS News. 2025. "1.2 million immigrants are gone from the U.S. workforce under Trump, preliminary data shows." September 1, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/1-2-million-immigrants-are-gone-from-the-u-s-workforce-under-trump-preliminary-data-shows

Shelby, Tommie. "Solidarity, Politics, Intellectual Life." 2025 Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts, Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford, CA, November 2025. 

Stephen, Lynn. 2022. "Using Theory and Ethnography for Asylum Seekers Fleeing Gendered Violence." Annals of Anthropological Practice, 46(1) 67-71. DOI: doi.org/10.1111/napa.12183

____________. 2025. "The Limits and Possibilities of Asylum: Lessons from Expert Witnessing and Working at a Shelter." Latin American Perspectives 52(2): 200-218. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X251319297