Dreaming, Telling, Occupying, and Destroying: Interest Convergence between Militarism and Social Justice in the DREAM Act and the Repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

Distraction from Bigger Dreams

The NPIC, MIC, and politicians have also undermined social-justice visioning by taking attention and resources away from potential changes that would more radically transform society than either the DREAM Act or the repeal of DADT could. These other movement campaigns range from legislative initiatives for comprehensive immigration reform or the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to much more fundamental demands for structural change and radical redistribution of wealth, power, and resources.

Proponents of the DREAM Act emphasized the positive impact that it could have on those undocumented young people who would for the first time be able to continue their education without fear of imminent deportation and who would gain a viable path to citizenship. They also pointed out that while more comprehensive legalization may not be politically feasible at the time, the DREAM Act was a more viable measure that could still make a concrete difference in marginalized young people’s ability to access necessities and opportunities. While some had concerns about the military component of the bill, they stressed the notion of increasing choices for immigrant youth and not forcing undocumented students to bear the burden of US militarism with increased risk of deportation and even more limited possibilities for education, legal status, and eventual citizenship.

On the other hand, many activists and community groups worried that the DREAM Act created strong, unjust incentives for young immigrants to join the military, where they would have to put their lives and bodies at risk and endanger or destroy the lives and bodies of other people of color around the world.¹ Because the DREAM Act denied access to financial aid for higher education, military service could have become the most practical means to attend college for many immigrant youth. As a part of resistance to US imperialism and militarism, many did not want to support a bill that could make the US military stronger or more effective or feed it more Brown and Black bodies to use on the front lines.

However, the organizations with the most funding, infrastructure, and mainstream recognition barely acknowledged the emergence of these vibrant critiques and debates. It is striking that even in united work on LGBTQ and immigrant rights issues, the DREAM Act, gay marriage, and the repeal of DADT remained central, rather than issues like police violence and incarceration that profoundly impact LGBT immigrant communities of color.² As Yasmin Nair writes, “[t]he current discourse on queer immigration presents an idealized and bourgeois version of transgender and queer immigrants, a discourse that makes the reality of the prison industrial complex completely invisible.”³

While internal debate over tactics can be a positive and necessary aspect of any sort of political struggle, the work of the MIC, the NPIC, and the Democratic Party to make the DREAM Act with its military provision seem like the only feasible option seems to have limited the immigrant-justice movement for some time. Over the course of years, the scope of the “dream” diminished as certain immigrant rights groups acceded to—or at least continued to support the bill despite—additional compromises and limitations on the grant of rights originally envisioned. To the extent that the DREAM Act itself was a profound compromise in the name of political expediency from a push for comprehensive immigration reform or an end to deportation, it represented a significant narrowing of political vision.

In the case of the repeal of DADT, the NPIC again played a key role in funneling resources and attention toward this issue rather than other arguably more urgent ones. The repeal of DADT became a central issue for the Log Cabin Republicans, who filed a successful lawsuit, Log Cabin Republicans v. United States, to challenge its constitutionality. Most, if not all, of the other mainstream, big-budget LGBQ organizations also worked in favor of the repeal. These organizations included Lambda Legal, the Human Rights Campaign, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Get Equal.⁴ One organization, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), was formed with its entire mission devoted to repealing DADT.

Again, although DADT indisputably discriminated against LGBQ individuals, many community and grassroots advocates questioned the reasons for the amount of money, time, energy, and support invested in its repeal. Concerns queers have expressed about the DADT repeal include that it is a part of a broader damaging trend of gay assimilation; that it gains limited rights for some LGBQ people at the expense of many others demonized through current warmongering; that it consumes movement resources without addressing the needs of the most vulnerable people in queer and trans communities; that it supports and expands an MIC causing death, destruction, and domination throughout the world; and that the jobs it provides LGBQ people access to are dangerous, poorly compensated, and not what many LGBQ workers want.5 Many LGBQ and trans people and groups have invested their energy in fighting against war and imperialism and for broad economic justice instead of fighting for the ability to join the military. As one commentator described the message of the fight against DADT, “[t]he end result will not be true societal transformation or liberation for LGBTQ people, but the promotion of politics of assimilation that do not represent or address the interests of much of the ‘community.’”⁶ In contrast, legislation to protect LGBT rights outside of the military, through efforts such as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, has not fared well.⁷ As Ethan Weinstock explains:

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace [Note: some versions introduced have failed to include gender identity and therefore protections for trans people], has been introduced and failed to pass in the Congress every year since 1994. … The elimination of discrimination in every workplace, not just the military, should be a priority. We need to make it clear that repealing DADT is a hollow victory and a diversionary tactic that we aren’t going to fall for.⁸

While the passage of ENDA will not greatly help low-income people, people of color, undocumented people, and queer and trans people who cannot get jobs at all, it is significant that a federal bill protecting LGBTQ people from being fired because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity has yet to pass. Beyond ENDA, queer and trans people need real, nondiscriminatory access to benefits, ID, healthcare, housing, jobs, and education; an end to police profiling, brutality, criminalization, deportation, and incarceration; and the ability to express our genders, build our communities, and love one another free from harassment, discrimination, and violence. While getting ENDA to pass has proven much harder than getting the repeal of DADT to pass, getting Congress to pass a law that would radically redistribute wealth or take any other measure to address these more fundamental problems for LGBTQ people has not even been on the table.

Assessing Impact and Telling Dreams

The fight for and defeat of the DREAM Act have not improved political or material conditions for undocumented immigrant youth. The defeat of the DREAM Act has left immigrant youth at least as vulnerable to detention and deportation as they were in the past, and with just as little access to education. Despite his support of the DREAM Act, Obama has actually increased repression of immigrants through raids, employer sanctions, and the militarization of the borders.¹ The Obama administration has boasted about the number of “illegal immigrants” who have been deported since he took office in 2008 and has expanded the rhetoric around catching the “criminal alien.”⁹

However, since the defeat of the DREAM Act, many immigrant communities have pushed forward even more daring dreams to meaningfully address the conditions of poverty, violence, and diminished life chances in many immigrant communities. While the defeat of the DREAM Act is certainly not a good thing—it is an example of toxic xenophobia and racism—the work of immigrant communities since that defeat has given us a glimpse of the potential for a movement not distracted with a too-easy promise of incremental legislative reform that would build the MIC. While many concluded that the defeat in 2010 ended any likely passage of the DREAM Act in the near future, immigrants and allies have, if anything redoubled their efforts for justice.

These organizers have had concrete, if smaller-scale, successes. For example, in 2012, the Obama administration finally created a policy of “deferring action” and granting temporary employment authorization for some young people who arrived in the US as children.¹⁰ This relief—called “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA)—is only available to young people who are students, received a high-school degree, or are veterans honorably discharged from the armed services, and is not available to anyone with certain criminal convictions. Thus, while it does not give immigrant youth any permanent lawful status and maintains close ties with the MIC and PIC, it does help some immigrant youth avoid deportation and have a better chance of getting jobs for the time being.

Immigrant organizers have also built broad, strong coalitions that reject the “deserving”/“undeserving” division among immigrants and contest all detention and deportation. DACA’s limited opportunities for status and the defeat of the DREAM Act have sparked immigrants and allies and have created a surge of civil disobedience, art, and organizing to demand more than the DREAM Act and more than comprehensive immigration reform. With rallying cries like “Undocumented, Unafraid, and Unapologetic,” “2 million too many” and “Not1More,” and with tactics ranging from “undocuqueer” art projects, the “No Papers, No Fear” ride for justice, infiltration and exposés of immigration detention centers, rallies and marches, and physical blockades of ICE detention facilities, these movements have sustained a grassroots surge demanding true justice.¹¹

Material conditions facing marginalized queers have not substantially changed with the repeal of DADT. While queers may now have greater job opportunities within the armed services, in order to take those jobs they must be willing to kill and die, risking their bodies and souls in service of the US imperialist agenda. After service, many LGBQ people, like other veterans, will likely live in poverty, attempt suicide, and find inadequate support from the government at whose behest they fought. Meanwhile, queer and trans people—particularly queer and trans people of color, immigrants, disabled people, youth, and elders in our communities—continue to face high rates of homelessness, poverty, and incarceration. The meaningful acts that the federal government could take to improve these conditions, from passing ENDA to closing prisons, from ending deportation to creating affordable housing, have remained untouched.

Since the repeal of DADT, it seems that for the most part the military has continued with “business as usual.” It is likely that formal discharges of service members for being LGBQ have ended, while discharges of service members for being trans continue. More LGBQ people in the military have probably chosen to come out. While good data does not yet seem to be available about harassment and violence toward LGBQ people in the military since DADT was repealed, it seems unrealistic to assume that it has ended. Certainly, despite the fact that women have been permitted to serve since 1948, rape and other violence directed toward women in the military has continued intensely.¹² Harassment of soldiers for any reason, including their sexual orientation, has also been prohibited for a long time, but those prohibitions have not actually prevented such harassment.

Since DADT has been repealed, we have not noticed a broad refocusing of priorities in the LGBQ movement to more radical goals. If anything, we have seen celebration of the military, including viral circulation of romantic images of gay soldiers kissing.¹³ This homonormative feting of militarism has excluded any critique of what the government orders these adorable queer service members to do to human beings and communities overseas, sweeping away any residual concerns about war and mass death and destruction on a wave of misty-eyed romanticism.

What’s more, some in LGBQ and trans movements have now decided that the “next frontier” is not ending war, making sure trans people can get access to healthcare, or keeping queer and trans youth of color out of prisons, homeless shelters, and deportation proceedings, but instead making sure that trans people can now enjoy the same access to military employment as cisgender queers. This new focus seems to come largely from cisgender LGBQ organizations and people with very little in the way of ties to trans communities, and from a few famous or wealthy White trans veterans, such as Kristin Beck and Jessica Pritzker.¹⁴

The exclusion of trans people from military service is a bit more complex than DADT was. Trans people can be court martialed for “conduct unbecoming” if caught cross-dressing, but can also be excluded from service or medically discharged for having had genital surgery or having psychiatric diagnoses like gender dysphoria. Of course, these are only a few of the wide range of physical and psychiatric experiences and diagnoses that can lead to exclusion or discharge from service. Thus, the pursuit of trans inclusion in the military not only sparks division between those who oppose military expansion and those who support it, and between those who think other work is more urgent for trans communities and those who do not, but also potentially between nondisabled trans people and disabled people.

The divisions over trans inclusion in the military and the treatment of trans prisoners took a particularly sharp twist in the controversy surrounding the actions of Private Chelsea Manning, a trans woman who revealed confidential information about US war crimes through WikiLeaks and who was court martialed and sentenced to serve time in a military prison. While some people in queer and trans communities have hailed her as a hero, others have distanced themselves from her because of her actions. Thus, if anything, the distraction from opportunities for greater social change has only increased through the fight for, celebration of, and follow up on the repeal of DADT, at least among mainstream LGBTQ organizations.

Despite the negative impact of the NPIC, MIC, and electoral politics on immigrant justice and LGBTQ liberation struggles, the fight for the repeal of DADT and especially for the DREAM Act has given us a valuable legacy and opportunity to learn. Many undocumented immigrant youth gained organizing skills, networks, and experience through their fight for the DREAM Act that they are using for continued, more radical activism and organizing. Also, the pro-militarism of these movements has galvanized many immigrant youth and queers to increase their anti-war activism and arguments.

Many immigrants, queers, and queer immigrants have raised their voices to provoke a deeper and ultimately more transformative understanding of the problems we face.

Yasmin Nair teaches us that:

[i]n order to create real change, we have to center the violence at the heart of these experiences, to speak and write of them as experiences with the brutal power of the state, not as a narrative about good versus bad immigrants. If we are to undo the prison industrial complex and interrogate its relationship to racialized immigration, gender, and sexuality, we need to first make manifest the violence that marks immigration from the start: the violence at the border, the sexualized brutality, the psychic and epistemological violence at the heart of the family that compels children and women in particular to remain silent, the violence of gender normativity, and the crushing force that dehumanizes and kills immigrant detainees.³

Indeed, the very fact that military recruitment is particularly focused on youth of color, immigrant youth, and now likely queer youth, gives people in these communities a particular form of power. As Dena Al-Adeeb explains:

Despite the coercive conditions of participation, the participant army should not be absolved from self-reflection and accountability for its role in furthering and engaging in colonial violence. Therefore, since communities of color, and especially youth of color, are targeted for recruitment into the military, we have the power to challenge the military-industrial complex. We are the ones charged with ending this war.¹⁵

At the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, we are vulnerable to the same influences as others in the NPIC. We consciously seek to resist these influences through deliberately working at the intersections of multiple forms of oppression, including race, class, immigration, gender identity, and sexuality. We also combine community organizing and legal strategies and structure our organization in a way intended to increase accountability to those most impacted by our work rather than to foundations, government, corporate, or other funders. We develop and prioritize close relationships with grassroots trans and queer people of color organizing projects and we self-govern through a collective that is majority-trans and majority-people of color.

As a result of these commitments, we have not been directly involved in the struggles to repeal DADT or pass the DREAM Act. Instead, we have provided direct services to trans immigrants and homeless or incarcerated trans veterans, supported work to increase access to ID for immigrant and trans communities, and organized to end the PIC. Also, we have joined with many other groups to fight the implementation of Secure Communities (S-Comm)¹⁶ , the Criminal Alien Project and 287(g)—each of which expand collaboration between local law enforcement and immigration and endanger all immigrants and people of color, especially trans and queer immigrants and people of color. As Andrea Ritchie explains: “Concerns about the consequences of S-Comm for LGBTQ people go far beyond what will happen once they are deported—homophobia, transphobia, violence, and denial of basic needs await them in US immigration detention facilities.”¹⁷

The fact that over 60 LGBT organizations have signed on to a statement for an immediate end to S-Comm and more than 70 have endorsed the Not1More campaign against deportation is an encouraging sign. New organizing is also happening. Bash Back! Denver (2009) has invited us to “Be one of those queers you’ve heard about—Undermine the Army’s Ability to Fight!” as a part of their queer counter-recruitment campaign. In 2013 and 2014, we have witnessed incredible acts of solidarity with undocumented immigrant communities and resistance to deportations by queer and trans allied organizations. One non-profit organization (and close ally of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project), Southerners on New Ground (SONG), has built a multi-pronged campaign as “LGBTQ Southerners Join the National Day of Action[s] to End Deportation.”¹⁸ As SONG collaborates to organize towards an end of deportation, they are careful and thoughtful to include allies in this struggle. As one SONG member, Suzanne Pharr, explains about one protest against deportation:

In Atlanta when 4 of us Songsters joined our political partners to block entry to the ICE facility on Tuesday, we received support from SONG members from all over the South and nation. … Our arrest, as four white people with the privilege of unearned citizenship, was small in the face of the arrests of immigrants who have built our current economy and now are being terrorized by the US government, torn from families and home. On this day of Trans Remembrance, I think of queer and trans people who are also threatened with loss of employment, of safety, of home, and of lives. The connections are impossible to ignore. Like all of you, I cannot let my silence or lack of action give support to such injustice. Together, we will move the South and the nation toward justice for all our people.¹⁹

During the protests, police officers urged Suzanne Pharr to “just leave,” explaining, “this is not your fight.” She of course responded to the contrary: “this is everybody’s fight.”¹⁹ This example illustrates the ways in which our struggle for liberation must be inclusive, not exclusive. SONG’s actions helps us visualize a step forward towards our actual dreams of solidarity and liberation.

Conclusion

The DREAM Act and the repeal of DADT present powerful examples of the ways in which seemingly progressive political efforts can be strategically coopted to support US imperialism, especially during times of war. Although the DREAM Act would have opened up avenues for undocumented immigrant youth to obtain some sort of legal status in the United States and possibly some higher education, it also would have provided a means to a larger military. The repeal of DADT formally allows LGBQ individuals to participate in the US military without being closeted; it also works to build the military. As both the DREAM Act and DADT were attached to the National Defense Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year 2011, it is transparent that they worked in favor of and in unison with a larger military interest.

It is telling that since the repeal of DADT succeeded, the focus of mainstream LGBT organizing in relation to the military has not overall shifted to counter-recruitment, anti-militarism, veteran support, or other more progressive or coalitional alignments. In fact, in response to the repeal of DADT, some LGBT groups have celebrated the military, and some have seized on trans inclusion in the military as the next frontier to conquer. Since the defeat of the DREAM Act, however, much immigrant youth organizing has become more inclusive and radical, using direct action tactics to stop detention with the campaign slogan “Not One More!” LGBT immigrant youth leaders at the forefront of this movement have become increasingly outspoken about their full lives and experiences, as symbolized through undocuqueer projects and more. While extreme violence continues to shape the lives of many LGBT people, immigrants, and people targeted by the military, we support and admire the shift in strategy on the part of so many immigrant activists, and we wish to further build coalitional and intersectional work.

As the theory of interest convergence explains, incremental social change is often rooted in defending or building the power of the elite. Both the DREAM Act and the repeal of DADT demonstrate this phenomenon, in that both benefitted the liberal non-profit sector (by building momentum around potentially winnable campaigns on behalf of sympathetic populations and serving as fundraising tools) and the Democratic Party (by supporting limited “rights” for LGBQ people and immigrants while diverting attention from other concerns and issues). DADT repeal also benefitted the MIC (by explicitly providing ways to recruit more people into the military without a draft and by positioning the US military as “gay-friendly” in contrast to supposedly exceptionally homophobic Muslims). Simultaneously, these efforts positioned “deserving” LGBQ people and immigrants against those who are “undeserving.” That one effort succeeded and the other failed reflects the less perfect interest convergence in the case of the DREAM Act, which would have provided some limited material benefits to certain immigrant youth outside of the MIC.

We hope that we can not only learn from the limitations of struggles for legislative reform in social-justice movements, but also that we can learn from the inspiring work that people have done from the grassroots in fighting for justice. Even with the setbacks and the military’s interest in using our bodies to fight their wars, we have opportunities for radical power. We are the ones charged with ending this war.

1. Juarez, “Rethinking the DREAM Act.” [↩] [↩]
2. Hector Luis Alamo, Jr., “LGBTQ and Immigration Reform: Two Movements Joined at the Heart,” Hispanically Speaking News, Oct. 6, 2011. [↩]
3. Nair, “How to Make Prisons Disappear,” 136. [↩] [↩]
4. “President Obama Signs Historic ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Repeal Bill,” National GLBTQ Task Force website, Dec. 22, 2010; Get Equal, “Campaign: To Repeal DADT,” Getequal.org (No longer available online.) [↩]
5. Kenyon Farrow, “A Military Job is Not Economic Justice,” Huffington post, May 25, 2011; Gays Against Gays in the Military, http://invasionanniversary.blogspot.com/ (last accessed Oct. 12, 2015); Gabriel Arkles, “No One is Disposable: Going Beyond the Trans Military Inclusion Debate,” Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 459-514 (2015). [↩]
6. Xavier Luis Burgos, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Challenge Anything,” Jan. 23, 2011. [↩]
7. Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2007, H.R.2015, 110th Cong. (2007). [↩]
8. Weinstock, “Activism Under Obama.” [↩]
9. Shankar Vedantam, “U.S. Deportations Reach Record High,” Washington Post, Oct. 7, 2010; (Un)Documenting, “Why Undocumenting? A Manifesto,” (Un)Documenting (blog). [↩]
10. Immigration Equality, “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).” [↩]
11. “Who We Are,” Immigrant Youth Justice League; Julio Salgado, “I am UndocuQueer,” Julio Salgado (blog), Jan. 13, 2012; No Papers No Fear: Ride for Justice website (blog last updated Sept. 4, 2013). [↩]
12. Nancy Gibbs, “Sexual Assaults on Female Soldiers: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Time, Mar. 8, 2010. [↩]
13. Matthew Rosenbaum, “Homecoming Photo of Gay Marine Kissing Boyfriend Goes Viral,” ABCNews Blog, Feb. 27, 2012. [↩]
14. Chuck Hadad, Susan Chun, and Dana Ford, “Former Navy SEAL Comes Out as Transgender: ‘I Want Some Happiness,’” CNN, Jun. 7, 2013; Brian Solomon, “Jennifer Pritzker Becomes First Transgender Billionaire,” Forbes, Sept. 16, 2012. [↩]
15. Al-Adeeb, “Reflection in a Time of War,” 116. [↩]
16. In 2014 Secure Communities was repealed and replaced by the Priority Enhancement Program. “PEP begins at the state and local level when an individual is arrested and booked by a law enforcement officer for a criminal violation and his or her fingerprints are submitted to the FBI for criminal history and warrant checks. This same biometric data is also sent to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) so that ICE can determine whether the individual is a priority for removal, consistent with the DHS enforcement priorities described in Secretary Johnson’s November 20, 2014 Secure Communities memorandum. Under PEP, ICE will seek the transfer of a removable individual when that individual has been convicted of an offense listed under the DHS civil immigration enforcement priorities, has intentionally participated in an organized criminal gang to further the illegal activity of the gang, or poses a danger to national security.” http://www.ice.gov/pep. In reality, it functions almost exactly the same as Secure Communities. [↩]
17. Andrea Ritchie, “Coming Out Against ICE “Secure Communities” Program,” Andrea’s Blog, posted Feb. 16, 2011. [↩]
18. LGBTQ Southerners Join the National Day of Action to End Deportation, Apr. 2, 2014. [↩]
19. Ibid. [↩] [↩]