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Freedom for Immigrants 10th Anniversary Celebration!
Freedom for Immigrants turned 10 in 2022, and we have been reflecting on our journey all year long. This April, we held our anniversary celebration in Los Angeles. With the help of our community members, partners, and supporters, both old and new, we honored our past and left encouraged and energized to
continue the work that lies ahead. The celebration provided us the opportunity to recognize Famyrah Lafortune, an outstanding volunteer with our National Immigration Detention Hotline, for all of her hard work and dedication. We then presented the Rev. John Guttermann Legacy Award to Detention Resistance in honor of their powerful work building leadership
with impacted people in the Otay Mesa Detention Center and within
the San Diego community. We also heard from Carlos Hidalgo, a member of
FFI's Leadership Council, and FFI board members who reminded us of the impact of our work over these past 10 years.
We know that no one group or organization can do this work alone, and being able to celebrate this milestone in community with
with directly impacted leaders, supporters, and movement partners both local and national, was a great reminder of our collective strength. We return to the realities of our fight to abolish immigration detention renewed by the support of our partners and ready to forge new connections on the road to abolition.
Rachel joins FFI as our Director of Operations & Administration. Based in Seattle, Rachel is a first-generation immigrant who comes to FFI with more than 20 years of non-profit experience. Her personal and professional experiences have affirmed for her the need for dedicated and focused collaborative efforts to dismantle exploitative and inhumane systems. Rachel’s background includes more than 10 years of programmatic experiences in refugee resettlement at World Relief, where she worked with national and local staff to implement employment programs across the country. She also served on World Relief Seattle’s Advisory Committee to guide key decisions which impacted the large refugee and immigrant communities in western Washington.
Rachel joined FFI in 2023 and oversees key administrative day-to-day functions. She is responsible for building and supporting equitable processes and policies for all operational aspects of the organization, including key pieces of people and culture such as hiring, compensation, and benefits. Rachel also serves on FFI’s anti-racism committee to ensure alignment with the organization’s anti-racism goals and plan.
Visitation is not only important for the well-being of detained individuals and their loved ones; it’s also a key tool we use on the path to abolition, as in-person monitoring allows us to document abuse in real-time, foster community and organizing efforts inside detention, and ultimately build a world in which we are all free.
After fighting to restore social visitation to immigration detention over the past two years, we’ve now won the full reinstatement of visitation to immigration detention centers nationwide!
Our national campaign — which brought together a powerful coalition of dozens of our partners, local detention visitation groups, and detained community members — organized for nearly two years to pressure the Biden administration to update its visitation policies after ICE exploited the pandemic to deny visitation.
With this vital form of human connection now restored, people in detention won’t be as isolated from their family and friends, and community groups can resume their critical in-person monitoring of human rights abuses happening on the inside.
To further explain this news, our Policy Director Andrea Carcamo teamed up with Amilcar Valencia from El Refugio in this short video to tell you everything you need to know about the updated visitation guidelines. You can also learn more about how to plan your next visit here.
Visitation is not only important for the well-being of detained individuals and their loved ones; it’s also a key tool we use on the path to abolition, as in-person monitoring allows us to document abuse in real-time, foster community and organizing efforts inside detention, and ultimately build a world in which we are all free.
The Road Ahead: Challenging Continued Reliance on Detention
As seen at both the border and immigration detention centers across the country, the Biden administration is pursuing harsh enforcement-based policies that mirror those of its predecessors following the end of the cruel asylum ban known as Title 42. The end of Title 42 brought forth a slew of
asylum restrictions, and the number of people incarcerated by ICE and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) is on the rise. Immigration detention of any form and any length is inhumane and deadly. In June, 42-year-old
Ernesto Rocha-Cuadra died in ICE custody at the privately-operated detention center in Jena, Louisiana. He died under suspicious circumstances after ICE had been incarcerating him for over a year, which included time in solitary confinement.
And in May, 8-year-old Anadith Tanay Reyes Alvarez, who dreamed of becoming a doctor one day, passed away inside a Border Patrol station in Harlingen, Texas. After a week in CBP custody, Anadith fell severely ill, and she soon lost the ability to walk and struggled to breathe. Outrageously, she died after officials ignored her mother’s pleas to call an ambulance for several days.
Anadith’s and Ernesto’s deaths are only the latest atrocities in a long history of tragedies resulting from the decades-long, bipartisan push to prioritize deterrence and detention over compassion and humanity.
To explain more, Layla Razavi, FFI’s Interim Executive Director, penned
At Freedom for Immigrants, we’re fighting for the freedom and dignity of all people. In the future we envision, Ernesto, Anadith, and their families would be welcomed with care — not detention. Thank you for your continued support and partnership in helping us reach that future.
Convening Hotline Volunteers in the Bay
At the start of the new year, we convened a group of FFI hotline volunteers in the Bay Area to strategize and envision a world without detention. We got the chance to connect in-person and build lasting relationships with each other while we celebrated our work and ate delicious pupusas!
We dove deep into the challenges of being abolitionists who are trying to drive system change while also balancing addressing the more immediate needs of people currently in detention. Our end goal is abolition, but whenever possible, we work to provide direct support to those on the inside — things like
commissary, sponsorship, and pen pal referrals. We engage in this direct support work to address the urgent and serious needs of people inside detention, but never to the detriment of our efforts toward abolition or structural changes.
This balance can be extremely hard to navigate, and that’s no accident. Oppressive systems intentionally make it so that our movement has to make these hard choices — choosing between fighting for someone's immediate needs or choosing to fight for a different future. The group also discussed how hotline volunteers often don’t see the fruits of their labor in every individual hotline call. But, over time, each logged call is critical to larger
This work wouldn’t be possible without our dedicated and powerful team of volunteers who devote their time, skills, and compassion. We are grateful for the amazing volunteers that fuel our policy, monitoring, and narrative change work! If you’re interested in becoming a hotline volunteer with FFI, please fill out a volunteer application!
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