Last winter, as anti-immigration enforcement surged around the country, but especially in Minnesota and New York, Sara wrote about the phenomenon of No Sleep (aka No Sleep for ICE) protests at budget hotels, what we can learn from them, and the place of cultural criticism in an emergency.
Here’s a teaser: The first thing this situation illustrates for me is how deeply interwoven we all are. You simply cannot attempt to remove entire communities from a city or a nation without society unraveling. This has been apparent everywhere ICE shows up, but hotels are a stark example. Another cruel absurdity (absurd cruelty?) among the blitzkrieg of cruel absurdities: ICE needs hotels to achieve its goal of removing “illegal immigrants”…And if they achieve it, they will have no hotels to stay in. In fact, a recent report from the union UNITE HERE shows that U.S. hotels are on the verge of a sector-specific recession due to the dual pressures of staffing shortages related to workers’ fear, regardless of their “legal” status and a steep decline in travelers from outside the U.S.
Read all of No Sleep Protests and Budget Hotels in the ICE age on Substack.
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