A conversation with Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Robyn Maynard and Mariah Tso, hosted by Interrupting Criminalization
December 2
1 to 2 PM ET PM on Zoom
About this event
How do we communicate and advocate around immigration issues in a way that acknowledges the long history of antiblackness and state violence that form the foundation for the systems we are fighting against today? Join us for a conversation with Kelly Lytle Hernandez, the author of Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control, a revolutionary new history that exposes the "whites-only" roots of the American immigration regime. Hernandez will be joined by artist Mariah Tso, whose illustrations help readers unpack the structures and history behind the current U.S. immigration system, and author and professor Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.
Moderated by Andrea J. Ritchie and Lewis Raven Wallace of Interrupting Criminalization, this discussion will unpack how activists, grassroots organizers, journalists, media makers, and community members can accurately describe the history and present reality of racist immigration policy in our work.
Speaker Bios
Kelly Lytle Hernández
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Professor Kelly Lytle Hernández holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (W. W. Norton, 2022), and Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control (W. W. Norton, September 2026). She is also the founding director and principal advisor for the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which documents the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Mariah Tso
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Mariah Tso (she/they) is a Diné Cartographer and GIS Specialist with the Million Dollar Hoods (MDH) Project at the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. She primarily works as a member of the Million Dollar Hoods, a university-based and community driven research project mapping and documenting the human and fiscal costs of mass incarceration in Los Angeles situated within the larger project of ending mass incarceration. Her most recent work includes Mapping Deportations a website that uses maps, data, and timelines to unmask the history of racism in U.S. immigration enforcement.
Alongside the Indigenous, women-led organization Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO), she created the We are Here: Mapping Indigenous Migrant Languages interactive map depicting Los Angeles’ nearly 11,000 speakers of 17 different Indigenous migrant languages.
In the summers you’ll find her sharing her data and technology skills at UCLA’s Big Data for Justice Summer Institute. Mariah holds a B.A. from Scripps College in Environment, Economics, and Politics and a M.S. from Redlands University in Geographic Information Systems. Learn more about her and explore her work here.
Robyn Maynard
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Robyn Maynard is an author and scholar based in Toronto. She holds the position of Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies and the Women and Gender Studies Institute, where she is the inaugural director of the Black Movement Lab. Her writing on borders, criminalization, policing and abolition has been used to shape law and public policy and is taught widely in universities across Canada, the United States and Europe.
Maynard is the author of two books. Policing Black Lives (Fernwood/Duke University Press 2025) and Rehearsals for Living (Knopt/Haymarket, 2022), co-authored with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, both best-sellers and shortlisted for a number of awards. Other awards include “2018 Author of the Year” from Montreal’s Black History Month and the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQI* Emerging Writers.
Additional writing appears in Boston Review, Washington Post, World Policy Journal, the Toronto Star, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Canadian Woman Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Scholar & Feminist Journal and numerous book anthologies. Read her most recent Boston Review article on anti-Blackness and immigration policing here.
Maynard currently sits on the board of Interrupting Criminalization, where she writes a quarterly newsletter of news and activism about contemporary criminalization in Canada. She is currently working on two book manuscripts on the politics of Black movement and Black migration.
Andrea J. Ritchie
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Andrea J. Ritchie (she/her) is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating, and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She has been actively engaged in anti-violence, labor, and LGBTQ+ organizing, and in movements against state violence and for racial, reproductive, economic, environmental, and gender justice in the U.S., Canada, and internationally since the 1980s.
Andrea is the author of Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies and Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, and co-author of No More Police: A Case for Abolition, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women, and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States.
She co-founded Interrupting Criminalization and the In Our Names Network, a network of over 20 organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people, and led INCITE!'s work on law enforcement violence. In these capacities and through the Community Resource Hub and National Black Women's Justice Institute, she has worked with dozens of groups across the country organizing to divest from policing and secure deep investments in community-based strategies that will produce greater public safety.
For more information, visit Andrea’s personal site and Invisible No More, and follow Andrea on Bluesky at @dreanyc123.bsky.social.
Lewis Raven Wallace
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Lewis Raven Wallace (they/ze/he) is the Abolition Journalism Fellow at Interrupting Criminalization and the author of The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity and Radical Unlearning: The Art and Science of Making Change from Within as well as the forthcoming book from Beacon Press, Journalism as Resistance:How to Fight Authoritarianism with Movement Media and Grassroots Reporting, out in 2027.
Lewis, a facilitator, organizer, and popular educator, previously worked in public radio, and is a long-time activist engaged in prison abolition, racial justice, and queer and trans liberation. Lewis is white and transgender, and was born and raised in the Midwest with deep roots in the South.