Powerful Organizing through the FFI National Hotline

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Dear Friends,

Freedom for Immigrants’ staff are passionate about our abolitionist mission, and it shows in their work! To better highlight the critical advocacy undertaken by FFI staff and people in detention across the country, we will begin to share wins and updates from our program staff on a monthly basis.

Today, we’re excited to kick off this new series with an update from FFI’s National Immigration Detention Hotline.

Before you read the exciting update below from Amanda Díaz, FFI’s National Hotline Manager, I’d like to share a quick note about these emails. In our effort to be purposeful in the way we communicate with you, we ask that you please take advantage of the “Update Your Preferences” option at the bottom of this email in order to tailor your email settings and select your preferred topics.

As always, thank you for your continued support!

In Solidarity,

Wensley Peguero
[email protected]
Development Director
Freedom for Immigrants

National Immigration Detention Hotline
Amanda Diaz

Connecting people with Resources

Freedom for Immigrants’ National Immigration Detention Hotline has answered over 3,800 calls to date in 2022 from individuals detained in immigration detention centers. Volunteers answering calls have worked to support hotline callers by connecting them to their family members and loved ones, sharing resources, and providing abuse documentation support. The free and secure hotline serves as an indispensable resource to people in detention, and it has proven to be invaluable to our goal of abolishing immigration detention entirely.

Fighting for clean air and water in ICE detention

Earlier this year, nine individuals detained at the Imperial Regional Detention Facility in Calexico, CA, submitted a multi-individual civil rights complaint with federal agencies in response to unsafe living conditions due to hazardous air, dust, mold, and drinking water contamination.

Freedom for Immigrants, along with EarthJustice, Innovation Law Lab, Desert Support for Asylum Seekers, California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, and the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, submitted the complaint to the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Imperial County Board of Supervisors, and Management & Training Corporation, the private prison company that owns and operates the detention center.

As a result of this complaint, a coalition of organizations was created, and they continue to push for the closure of the Imperial Regional Detention Center! This new advocacy would not have been possible without the powerful internal organizing of individuals like Ramon Dominguez (who has been in ICE detention at

Imperial for over three years) who organized individuals in their pods and in the cafeteria to call the FFI national hotline to submit their testimonies and accounts. The act of speaking out and filing a complaint takes a lot of courage, especially when the system of immigration detention is very much designed to disempower and dehumanize people at every turn.

A Safe Space for People in Detention to be Heard

In the month of April, we’ve onboarded over 15 new hotline volunteers! With these new additions to our team, we are now able to support detained individuals in over 19 languages including Haitian Creole, French, Mandarin, German, Czech, Slovak, Korean, and Telugu.

While this is a great success, we are still in need of volunteers who speak languages other than English or Spanish, including Indigenous languages, in order to support as many people in detention as we can. If you are interested in joining the FFI Hotline Volunteer Team, please fill out our volunteer interest form.

In Solidarity,

Amanda Diaz
Hotline Manager

Show your support today!

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Freedom for Immigrants

1322 Webster St Ste 300

Oakland, CA 94612-3218

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