In the past few weeks, we have been deeply upset by the stories of children being separated from their families at the border.  The pictures are important — for their ability to shock us out of complacency with what’s happening right now, and to understand the human impact of this devastating policy.

We also look at them knowing that all imprisonment, detention, and deportation brutally and violently separates families, just as slavery and Indian boarding schools did.

What has been visible is only one small part of the massive and ongoing attacks against immigrants and refugees of color:

• Heavy Restrictions on legal migration including:
  • The Muslim Ban
  • Revocation of Temporary Protective Status, stripping legal protections for over 300,000 people from Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan and Nepal
• Doubling ICE Raids at workplaces
• Terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program
• Increase in mass prosecutions and intentionally separating children from their families at the border to discourage migration
• Reversing hard-fought for precedents that granted asylum to people fleeing domestic violence and/or gang violence, which immigration lawyer Kathryn Shepherd, called “essentially a death sentence to potentially thousands of people fleeing harm.”
• Repeatedly attacking cities with sanctuary policies, and threatening to cut federal funding to them
• Pledging to Build the Border Wall
• Regularly attacking immigrants in the news with vicious explicit racism
• Supporting a new proposal called The Securing America’s Future Act (HR 4760), which according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center “targets black immigrants by eliminating the diversity visa program; tears families apart by drastically reducing family immigration; further militarizes border communities; harms low-wage immigrant workers already vulnerable to abuse and exploitation; and seeks to facilitate the automatic detention and deportation of most anyone who has contact with the criminal justice system”
• An expected new proposal that will “make it more difficult for immigrants to obtain a green card or extend a temporary visa if they or their dependents—including U.S.-citizen children—use any of an expanded range of cash or noncash public benefits or tax credits for which they are eligible”

At the same time as this all-out war on undocumented people intensifies, we continue to see powerful examples of resistance and solidarity, like the community response to the arrest of 97 workers in an ICE raid on a meat processing plant in Morristown Tennessee this April. The rapid response network mobilized opposition to the deportations, organized legal and financial support — bringing 35 of the 54 people who were shipped out of state back home on bond — and sent people to testify to Congress about the devastation caused by the raid.

And activists in Washington state just launched  the Chinga La Migra organizing tour by locking  down outside the offices of ICE and Customs and Border Protection in Seattle to draw attention to the unrelenting struggle against detention under the leadership of those detained.

Close to 1.5 years into Trump’s presidency, we can’t let ourselves acclimate to this reality.  All over the US, immigrants, their families and communities are mobilizing to stop this vicious immigration policing and supporting each other to survive it. And we must join them.

To help in this effort, Catalyst Project co-created training curriculum to support non-immigrants to take strategic, effective and accountable collective action in solidarity with immigrant communities toward the end of deportations, detentions, and discrimination.  Please share and use it with your groups and communities.  “Immigration Justice Movements in the Time of Trump”

Mijente

National Day Laborers Organizing Network

National Domestic Workers Alliance

Arab Resource and Organizing Center

Desis Rising Up and Moving

Cosecha

Black Alliance for Just Immigration

Immigrant Youth Coalition

California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance

United We Dream

With love and rage,
Isaac Lev
on behalf of Catalyst