Undocumented and Unafraid: California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance
As they sped between meetings and juggled campaigns, Sandy (CIYJA’s Statewide Director) and Anacaren (CIYJA’s Development Manager) hopped on the phone with Blue Heart to share their work.
Lindley Mease (Blue Heart): I would love to hear a little bit about the two of you. Could you start with the brief story of how you came to where you are today and key points in your life as an organizer?
Sandy: I’ve been with CIYJA for the longest out of all of the staff — five years. Actually before joining the staff I was a member of CIYJA.
I am undocumented. I am a DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipient. I joined CIYJA as a member through one of the Sonoma teams. I was organizing locally and had the opportunity to be the northern organizer with CIYJA. For the past year and a half or so I’ve been in this wonderful leadership position of being CIYJA’s Statewide Director.
The way that I went through CIYJA’s leadership pipeline is how we envision our leadership development in community. Someone like me — and I’m only 25 in the moment — going through being a member and really being cultivated and supported through my leadership development to become a leader in my region and then assuming responsibilities and really having amazing opportunities to work with the rest of the CIYJA staff in all of the state. That has been really exciting.
I would describe CIYJA is as my political home and my movement family. I was drawn to CIYJA and the movement back in 2011. I was attending college at Sonoma State University and at that time I was not only the only person of color in my classes, but I was definitely one of the very few undocumented people on campus. And my campus had no idea what to do with me. (laughs) So I was really drawn to this community group that I found through Facebook that was supporting undocumented youth and their experience. It was like the groundbreaking moment, because a lot of us who are older youth didn’t really grow up with universities that have Dreamer Resource Centers. We grew up in institutions where it was still like “Don’t talk about it!” “Don’t mention to anyone your status.” Being part of this community group was the very first time that I was able to vocalize being undocumented. I was experiencing what being undocumented meant but no one was saying to me, “This is what you should expect. You’re going to have to…” Even many of my counselors both in high school and in college didn’t know what to tell me.
So organizations like CIYJA were super critical for me because they helped me have a better understanding of what it meant to be undocumented, what challenges I was going to face and what resources and tools were available to me. It was not just about access to resources, but also for me to feel empowered.
All of us at CIJYA have been undocumented or were formerly undocumented. We are not only working from a place of “we love doing this work and feel the hunger for social justice” but we are also all directly impacted by the system. We do what we do with love and compassion and commitment creating community and a political home for other youth.
Anacaren: I am the Development Manager with CIYJA. That’s my official title but I do a lot more outside of that helping with program work in the Central Valley.
I think the moment that I became politicized was when my sister graduated high school and turned eighteen. We were in the southeast L.A. area. She started organizing with this group called Union de vecinos. I must have been about 14 years old at the time — which is now about 15 years ago. They were already starting to do work around gentrification and rising rents and the conditions that folks were living in that particular city. So, I was 14 and my sister was 18 and my mom was like, “Hey, so if you need volunteers on the weekend you can take your sister.” We were doing door knocking at the time and visiting with folks, with tenants, and talking about the conditions that they had. So that was my first real WOW moment. I really dreaded at first having to spend my weekends doing that, but I saw this community power around organizing and base-building.
Similar to what Sandy is saying, at the time there was no DACA. There was no financial aid for undocumented students, so I actually spent four years in a community college and it wasn’t until 2012 that I transferred out. I felt like I really got lucky. I wasn’t able to transfer out because of money. I had worked and paid all of my community college — full-time. But I was able to get financial aid once I transferred to UC Berkeley. So I moved up to the Bay Area. Then I was involved with CIYJA indirectly through the IYC (Immigrant Youth Coalition) which was one of CIYJA’s affiliates. So I was involved with CIYJA then around 2013.
Once I graduated from UC Berkeley I started working with ACCE (Alliance Californians for Community Empowerment) which is also a statewide organization. I was doing a lot of political education with their members. What attracted me to them was that they also did base-building, door-to-door knocking, organizing communities. They helped to win rent control in the city of Richmond.
Lindley: Oh wow!
Anacaren: Yea! That was super big! It was all community-led — by people impacted by displacement, by really bad housing and living conditions.
It wasn’t until Trump got elected that I made plans to move back to L.A. Even though I am not undocumented anymore, I am a legal permanent resident now, my family is mixed status. And I am the only within the CIYJA team who has legal permanent residency. It was just so important to be with family after being gone for five years living in Oakland. So I moved back to LA and a lot of things shifted for me. I decided that I really wanted to put my skills of organizing and base-building into immigrant rights organizing.
This is just my observation, but there’s not a lot of folks doing organizing for undocumented people. There’s a lot of legal service providers. In general there’s a lot of direct services, but there is not a lot of people doing base-building and organizing. That really shocked me when I moved back to L.A. County.
A lot of people like to use the terms “we are speaking for the voiceless” or “we are an advocate for the voiceless,” but I really believe that actually we should just pass the mic! People have a voice. We are taking over platforms to speak for ourselves. We are taking that power back.
Lindley: Could you talk a little bit more about why base-building — that particular type of community organizing — is so important to the theory of social change that you hold?
Sandy: We want to lead with the most directly impacted people. We really want to illustrate what it looks like to be creating leadership development — a leadership development pipeline — so that we can actually lead with the most directly impacted folks.
Usually in the immigrants’ rights movement there have been really heavy compromises where one community is going to be impacted by another community getting their rights more amplified. So for us it was like, if we are leading with the folks who are most directly impacted then the decision-makers, the people in power will already be interacting with people who will be impacted by any compromise or any watered-down version of any policy. That is the vision for us.
Lindley: Could you give me kind of the elevator pitch on the basic programs that you have?
Sandy: We support immigrant political knowledge and organizing skills so that they are able to have access to change. Our work is centered around building political knowledge and critical thinking so that we are building opportunities for youth.
The current campaign work that we do is centered around detention and deportation. Specifically we see that immigrant communities are criminalized. So, we organize to hold local law enforcement accountable and other power-players who play a role in supporting Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda and funneling folks through detention and then deportation.
We also look at detentions and connect policing and the criminalization of immigrants to detentions to the mass incarceration system — the prison industrial complex — because that is where the immigration policies stem from. I think that there is a term “crimmigration.”
We’ve been illustrating and connecting how the criminal justice system has spread to the immigration system.
Of all the folks who have been deported from California, over 73% have had some interaction with local law enforcement. So we know that local law enforcement is playing a chief role in funneling our folks.
Sandy: We’ve developed a model of a community-built defense to deportation. It’s about know-your-rights: what do you do when somebody is detained?
With the new administration there was huge need for a CIYJA strategy. We — along with the Immigrant Youth Coalition — had been leading a very grassroots effort to defend our community with community. We expanded and share our strategies, with this program we built called “Promotoras” which is for promoters of self-defense and self-empowerment. People in community can defend each other. We started with a cohort in San Francisco of twenty-eight folks and then followed with fifteen folks in Kern County.
Anacaren: We’ve done youth summits in the past and one and two day retreats, but the Promotoras program is more of a longterm commitment.
The more you really engage folks in intensive intentional political education over an extended period of time, the more committed and self-identified as empowered people are.
I also say that the best organizers are the ones who don’t do all the work themselves. We don’t want to concentrate the power in just a few affiliates or leaders in a community. We really want to build capacity for folks to build leaders. When we say “leadership development” we really mean it.
Now we are in Fresno doing a four week Cultivators of Resistance Internship Program. This time there are twenty-three undocumented and immigrant youth who we will be spending four weeks with.
My vision is that we build a movement of critical thinkers, of folks who feel empowered enough to continue to really fight for our communities.
Lindley: You mentioned empowerment and building political power several times. It seems like you are building leadership skills to play both an inside and an outside game in state politics and local politics. Can you talk a little bit more about what political power looks like for you?
Sandy: If we go back to the Dream Act in 2012, CIYJA had been recognized as being more on the radical side. We engage in civil-disobedience and direct action when necessary. Even back in our initial formation, our very first statewide director at that time was leading the national strategy on DACA. When the decision on DACA was made we were leading the occupation of Obama’s re-election camp — just holding down the line until we were sure and the announcement had been made.
What is super special about CIYJA is that those who are inside look to CIYJA for strategy but its strength is playing the outside strategy. We wanted to ensure that DACA happened.
In 2012 with the very first pro-immigrant statewide policy that helped limit the way that local law enforcement collaborates with ICE, CIYJA occupied the Sheriffs Association Building that was the office in opposition to making this legislation happen. After we occupied the Sheriffs Association Office we were able to neutralize them and successfully pass the first state legislation.
We’ve been the outside player holding elected officials accountable. Even when elected officials are supporting immigrant rights, we want to build strong political leaders that are pushing the least compromise possible, so that we are not sacrificing one group for the benefit of another.
A really good example is when CIYJA and some of our CIYJA youth leaders interrupted and took over Pelosi’s press conference. It had been almost two decades that the Dream Act hadn’t happened, that youth had been undermined by leaders who had not represented their values. We supported our youth leadership in pushing a platform that launched the Clean Dream Act and starting dialogues that say: we can achieve a policy without compromising a community.
Trump rescinded DACA initially because he needed a political tool to be able to further his anti-immigrant agenda, specifically on enforcement in the field as well as the border. The action that we led wasn’t initially as popular, but as we engaged in the action, it kept unveiling, it was being exposed that Democrats were not holding the line as strong as possible. Folks really have been appreciating that the tactic we used helped build the Clean Dream Act campaign.
After that action we were in-touch with national partners in D. C. and they informed us that Pelosi’s position completely changed on immigration. Before her tone was “What can we do to protect just DACA recipients?” and she was not looking at what cost. After that action she asked more questions and pushed back on field enforcement which was our huge concern. Even though border enforcement is also a huge challenge, field enforcement is in our communities. They are running raids, waiting for folks outside courtrooms and stuff like that. We have been super critical and really pivoting the strategy.
CIYJA has been super-visionary in stating that there is a whole other world that is possible. It’s not just a matter of what’s on Democrats’ agenda — or either party.
Lindley: So much of your work is around narrative strategy in terms of criminalization. How do you think about narrative strategy in your work? You’ve also brought up compromise multiple times. How do you grapple with when to come to the table and when not to?
Sandy: We have affiliate membership with ASPIRE [https://sfbay.aspireforjustice.org] who is actually based here in San Francisco they are the very first national API [Asian Pacific Islander] undocumented youth group. We’ve been learning so much through them about how narratives are so complex and identity is so complex.
We do acknowledge that a lot of the narratives, the stories that have been shared have been very Latinx-centered. Because of that there’s only a couple of experiences that are perceived. We’ve been really working at expanding the narrative because we believe that the more folks understand different experiences and ways that they have been failed by any permanent protection, then we are able to expand focused thinking and not just believe that we need only one law or one policy.
We actually need to get rid of the complete system because in the end all of these individuals’ experiences will not be fixed by a single policy. It’s actually the system that has failed everyone.
We hear really amazing API stories about folks who left China because of the politics there and maybe settled in Peru or Mexico and then were again displace from there and had to come. There are folks from so many different experiences that are not really centered and therefore people don’t have a deep understanding of the causes of emigration and how the U.S. has impacted all these other countries. The U.S. has created this mass global displacement of people with no accountability. Instead of providing a solution, the U.S. is criminalizing them and not providing them permanent protection from political turmoil that the U.S caused. That’s how we look at narrative.
We have been super-invested in uplifting central California’s experience. Trump politics at the national level is central California politics every day.
When people look at California, even though we have been leading the nation in having the most strong policies, that is only true in the Bay and in LA. When you look at central California, you have a sheriff, for example who says “I am the Arpaio of California!” and that he wishes his county was in Arizona so that he could take advantage of racial-profiling laws. It is super scary for folks. We’ve been really trying to uplift central California’s youths’ experiences; a lot of them are working in the fields, in factories, regardless of whether or not they have DACA.
There are so many narratives to share about how folks are impacted by the criminal justice and immigration systems and displacement. I think thus far immigrant rights conversations have been really narrow. We just launched an effort called “Coming Out of the Shadows” to incentivize folks to write their truths, write their experience. We want to support folks in sharing unpopular experiences that usually don’t make the news or aren’t written or talked about, just to illustrate a broader, bigger picture of immigration.
Lindley: Part of why we formed Blue Heart is we wanted to educate folks, especially younger folks about why philanthropy is a contradictory sector and challenge some of the underlying assumptions that are there. Could you talk about challenges that you’ve had with raising money or interacting with donors. What is the role of development in your work and how has it served or not your mission?
Anacaren: It is challenging to find funding. A lot of our funders are Bay Area-based so we are really looking at Southern California. Partly because L.A. County has the largest number of undocumented folks — more than any other county. We really like to think of our funders as our thought-partners. We can be real with and talk to them. So far their reaction to that has been really positive. Our funders have become part of our team, instead of determining our work and telling us what we need to do.
The amazing thing about CIYJA is that we are not only doing political education and popular education with our affiliates and with elected officials — and politicians, but also with funders. Last year we had a Funders Briefing where we were very real about the experiences. We brought a bunch of our affiliates out to be a part of the conversation, to say, “This is what the Bay Area is looking like… This what’s happening in southern California…. And here is what the Central Valley is looking like. Here are our needs; and here is our strategy.”
It’s getting people to buy into the organizing strategy that CIYJA uses that is a challenge. It’s not the traditional narrative. Take, for example, the Keep-families-together narrative — is it just the traditional families who should be kept together? This excludes LGBTQ folks. Or are we talking about both traditional and non-traditional families?
A lot of our narratives are not super popular or dominant. We are really pushing the issue within the immigrant story of how criminalization plays out. For undocumented folks who have prior criminal convictions, what are the conditions that make for this for a lot of black and brown folks in poor communities? The level of exposure to local law enforcement is so much higher for these folks. It is very difficult to get on with your life without having any contact with local law enforcement.
So, it’s about doing that political education with funders and really getting them to be part of our team. We are the radical immigrant rights organizers, but really that means that we have values. We are not willing to compromise.
Sandy: I think that youth organizing is just difficult movement work in general because youth is such a transitioning age. There is a lot happening for youth and young adults, but this is the most pivotal moment for building critical thinking and values, for how they are going to combat oppression wherever they are, and in whatever role they play.
There are challenges for funders to invest in areas where there is no infrastructure, so it is just like being risk-takers! We do want to build in Kern County and in Fresno where there is nothing. So we are always looking for where there are gray areas and we want to build those areas.
Rather than crowding our efforts where efforts are already happening, we really want to go into areas where we know undocumented folks are not being supported and aren’t having any access to resources.
Lindley: In your wildest dreams what would CIYJA and the movements you are a part of look like in two to three years?
Sandy: In two to three years I’d like for us to have a really expansive network in Central California, specifically for youth to be able to connect and build support systems. I’d love to see a super intersectional movement of gender, of working class folks doing economic work, of folks doing criminal justice work. At the end of the day our targets are the same.
Our broader vision is to build a more intersectional movement, especially for immigrant rights. We need to figure out what that means for an immigrant rights movement that has been mostly reformist. How do we work hand-in-hand with our criminal justice partners who have been pushing more of an abolitionist agenda?
At CIYJA we definitely support more of an abolitionist agenda and we’re trying to identify how we move immigrant rights movements to be abolitionist. Immigrant rights movements have been reformist for a long time and have undermined criminal justice efforts. Through a lot of the local work that we’ve been doing supporting, working and learning from our partners who are doing criminal justice work, we are being more intentional about understanding their efforts so that we echo those efforts in the work that we are doing.
Part of the challenge of movement work is that the strategy of our oppressors is to have us work in silos. But we are all really connected in the work that we are doing. CIJYA really feels the success of what we’re doing together when we, for example, hold local sheriffs accountable.
Lindley: Beautiful! Do you have anything you’d like to say to people like our Blue Heart members about how they can show up or support your movement?
Anacaren: We are promoting our manifesto about abolishing ICE, because we are really trying to guide what that might look like — which is visionary. We wrote an eight-page manifesto that really delves into what it looks for communities to abolish ICE.
The manifesto has been inspiring folks to build study groups and workshops, and they are using it in occupies throughout the country to inform and build political education. This would be a super great tool for people to use to understand what it means to abolish ICE and what that would look like.
Lindley: Thank you so much for dropping so much knowledge, for your work.
To learn more about Blue Heart and sign up to receive resources about our partner grassroots organizations, visit www.blueheartaction.org.
