Freeing People on Bond for Over 10 Years

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One of the most immediate and visible ways Freedom for Immigrants can make a difference in the life of an immigrant is by posting a person's immigration bond. Our connection to immigrants through the National Visitation Network and our National Immigration Detention Hotline helps us identify the most vulnerable people in immigration detention. Through the help of our supporters, our National Immigration Detention Bond Fund has secured bonds for nearly 500 individuals over the last 10 years! Join us in our "Until Everyone is Free" Annual Appeal. While we celebrate being able to reunite immigrants with their communities, we remember that there is more work to be done and that this is a milestone on the road to abolition.

Support the freedom of all immigrants!

Freeing People on Bond While Working to Dismantle the System

Our National Immigration Detention Bond Fund currently pays bonds to release immigrants detained in the multiple detention centers across Louisiana and California. In addition to escaping the horrible conditions of detention, having a bond paid can make all the difference between a deportation order or years in fighting one’s immigration case.

The need to liberate people from these abusive and secretive detention centers could not be more urgent. At the same time, we recognize that the bond system functions as another tool of the broader carceral system, used by those in power to effectively hold people's freedom under ransom at a time of vulnerability.

Nothing makes this clearer than the arbitrary way in which bonds are set and processed. Judges or Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents set exorbitant bonds with no restriction or oversight. To the frustration of bond fund administrators and families prepared to post bond, ICE offices arbitrarily change the rules on a whim or revoke the bond altogether.

Even after people are free, or more often, transitioned to some form of electronic monitoring and surveillance, they still face the constant fear of having their bond revoked at any time at the discretion of the ICE officer assigned to their case. ICE can even keep the bond money and use a portion of it to fund more detention beds.

Given all of this, why do we pay bonds?
As we fight to abolish detention completely, we

use the state's tools to free people caught up in the daily realities of its inhumanity, using bonds to secure the freedom of people organizing from the inside out to bring the system down, and those in imminent danger of deportation.

But we do so with the awareness of the contradictions of using the same system that we work every day to abolish. To us, bonds serve as a constant reminder that the detention system cannot be reformed. Bonds cannot “fix” the inhumanity of caging human beings in the first place.

We must continue on the path of abolition so that all people can be free and lead dignified lives. In truth, none of us are free until all of us are free.

Jennaya Dunlap

Immigration Detention
Bond Fund Coordinator

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please call us: 510-822-2722, or write us:

Freedom for Immigrants

1322 Webster St Ste 300

Oakland, CA 94612-3218

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Freedom for Immigrants is a 501(c)(3) non-profit based in California