Paradigm Shift

Ready or not, it's here.

Welcome to 2025. Change is not coming. Change is here. It might not be the sort of change you hoped for or expected. But denying the reality of change will not make it go away.

I’m back in 2025 because so many of you have reached out with your questions, or worries, and your goals, hoping that we could reinvigorate the parasocial community we’ve created over the years. I find these connections powerful not only because of the ability to lift up folks’ work and amplify the knowledge and wisdom you all share with me, but also because of the positive feedback loops these connections create among us.

This is a space where I’ll offer lessons learned in struggle over the past two decades, since first approaching immigration and the law as an ESOL tutor in the Cobb County School system. I encountered a racialized caste system there built in part on the U.S. immigration system. While my foolhardy belief that we could dismantle that system using the law might be excused by my youth, ignorance, and experience, the lived reality of trying to live in and help embody a world where all human lives have value and everyone can live up to their full potential (or not) feels urgently needed in this moment.

Alongside the retrospective piece will come primary source documents so you can assess for yourselves and draw your own conclusions. The hope is, and has always been, that these lessons might catalyze collective struggles for a better world, and support our collective fight to achieve it.

If were are tapped in to the energy of the present and paying even passing attention to what’s unfolding on this little blue marble in the cosmos during this blink of the universe’s conscious awareness of itself, we know things are going to keep getting more intense. That energy is powerful. It can be scary.

Nearly everyone I talk to about this moment feels a whole lot of fear and anxiety—regardless of how they voted. Some believe the incoming U.S. political order will resolve the causes underlying their fear of fentanyl, drug cartels, terrorist attacks, economic difficulty, and violence. Most don’t.

Our assignment during our time in these meatsuits, as I understand it, is to adapt and evolve toward higher consciousness and love.

Living fully present in our shared realities, studying and applying our histories critically discerning truth from fiction, and collectively updating our mental models of our world to incorporate all of the evidence around us, rather than only that evidence which fits our dominant paradigms, will be essential for our survival and flourishing. Welcome to 2025.

Ninth Circuit Affirms $23M Tacoma Trial Verdict Against GEO

As I was drafting this “Welcome Back, There’s a Paradigm Shift, Get Ready” post, I got big, breaking news.

The CM/ECF notification that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had decided the appeal in history’s first-ever jury verdict awarding incarcerated workers the minimum wage. A divided court of appeals affirmed the $23M trial verdict we won against GEO in 2021. Here is a link to the decision.

I will host a live video presentation on this and the other ICE detention labor cases tomorrow at 3pm east.

Biden’s Legacy of Death and Disappearance in the Deportation System

Journalist María Inés Taracena published a story for Prism yesterday that anyone here should read and take to heart. It’s a timely and vital recap of Joe Biden’s disgusting legacy of preventable death and disappearances in the deportation space. He and the people around him bet they could cruelty their way to victory in the border discourse—a bet I and many others explained to them they could never win. More to come on some of the cases mentioned in Maria’s piece very soon.

Sharing a Vital Resource - Know Your Rights Camp Autopsy Initiative

Finally, wanted to share an invaluable resource I learned about at the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab (PJIL) Deaths in Custody Conference in Austin last November: Free, independent autopsies.

Know Your Rights Camp’s Autopsy Initiative provides free independent autopsies to the loved ones of people who die in the custody of prisons, jails, and police. KYRC is Colin Kaepernick’s effort to mitigate some of the harm of modern racialized state violence.

One feature of that harm is the tremendous financial stress and pressure a death in custody or police killing imposes on families. The gofundme-mealtrain-tamale sale-fish fry-public begging ritual the state puts families through after killing their loved ones is one of the hardest to endure. Free second autopsies make it so folks don’t have to.

Since 2017, collectives we organized with helped raise more than $100,000—nearly all in small, individual donations—for families to help figure out how their loved ones died and the lay them to rest with dignity and care. Calling all the well-off people we know asking them to spare $50 for a gofundme is not the most dynamic or supportive crisis response tactic. But it’s often necessary. These procedures can easily run $5k-$10k, depending on where a person died, how complex it is to get the autopsy scheduled, and what testing might be needed. And they change outcomes.

I learned about this effort from Dr. Roger Mitchell, who co-authored the essential Death in Custody with Jay Aronson. Dr. Mitchell emphasized the importance of independent autopsies for survivors of fatal state violence. He is right. Among the many losses people suffer upon getting the terrible call that their loved one is gone is the epistemic injustice of not knowing how they passed. Those without resources to undo that injustice, including by retaining their own forensic pathologist, live with the harm forever. Doubt lingers about the official story, often because it keeps changing inexplicably, or seems too unbelievable.

Like many in the packed auditorium who have made studying and preventing in-custody deaths our life’s work, he has seen autopsies that at best don’t reflect the medical evidence, and at worst offer fake medical diagnoses as a cover-up for foul play. Dr. Mitchell, who recently became Dean of Howard Medical School compared the work of modern death documenters to the efforts of Ida B. Wells to expose the horrors of lynching.

As he conjured this image and supported it with example after example, I thought of Dr. Mitchell’s July 15, 2020, testimony before a House panel regarding the deaths of indigenous migrant children in CBP custody. Together with a colleague from Harvard, Dr. Mitchell deployed his expertise as D.C.’s Chief Medical Examiner to obliterate the DHS’s official story of how these children died. Inspector General James Cuffari admitted during the hearing to not gathering Border Patrol agents’ text messages because, his investigators concluded, their stories were otherwise credible. How nice. The evidence that could have undermined their timeline wasn’t gathered, lest it undermine their timeline. And that would have worked. The government that blamed the children’s deaths on their parents would have gotten away with it, had it not been for Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Danaher—the House-contracted pediatric care expert. The truth mattered to those children’s parents, even if it didn’t matter to James Cuffari and Congress.

Unfortunately, all signs point to an increasing number of people dying in custody. But this time, for now, KYRC and the Autopsy Initiative will be there to assist loved ones in finding out how, and seeking justice in one of its many forms.

I wish I could have seen Colin Kaepernick win his battle against the NFL’s entrenched racism. But this is better. Deep, deep gratitude goes out to everyone involved in this project.

Paradigm Shift

Finally, a word about paradigm shift. In his 1962 work, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” physicist Thomas Kuhn described scientific knowledge and advancement as something other than a gradual accumulation of theoretical and practical understanding leading to an ever-more cohesive understanding of our existence. Instead, he proposes periods of profound crisis when the theories we use to describe reality no longer explain it.

Epistemologically, ontologically, and spiritually, we as a species are long overdue for a paradigm shift. I believe it is happening, and will explain why in a separate platform, which I’m calling Alien|age. I’ll serialize some of that work here, in case folks are interested.

Something I began reciting when I was 10 years old while participating in Odyssey of the Mind keeps echoing in my head: “Let me be a seeker of knowledge. Let me travel uncharted paths. And let me use my creativity to make the world a better place in which to live.” Described as a pledge participants made to ourselves and each other, I think it sums up how I’ll try and approach this work.

Welcome / Gratitude

Last, but not least, I want to a warm welcome to all of you new readers who subscribed between the time I stopped publishing in July 2024 and today. Your presence here is seen and appreciated. And thanks to all the smart folks / Substack creators who’ve helped our new friends discover this space. Hopefully my recommendations will drive as much traffic to your work as yours have to mine.

Finally, I also want to express gratitude for everyone who stayed connected during this hiatus — especially you paying subscribers. Your generosity makes this work possible, and I really, really appreciate it.