Undeterred: Show Up For Immigrants
Immigrant and refugee families, like many families, are made up of diverse members. This diversity is evident in the different hues of our skin, our gender identities, our ages, our documentation status, and our faith traditions. Our cities, state, and country are stronger for this diversity of experience, as we pursue freedom and opportunity. Yet we often come under attack and face separation of our families for the perceived threat of our the diversity.
On Tuesday, April 11, in a memo to all federal prosecutors, Attorney General Jeff Sessions deepened the attack on our families and community, declaring that all who ‘harbor’ undocumented immigrants will be charged with felonies. In the wake of earlier anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-refugee executive orders, many community members are already living in deep fear and isolation.
Now families with mixed documentation status and other community members face heightened threats to their safety and freedom just for going about their lives.
Taking a child to school or the doctor, going to work or a family dinner, visits to church, temple, or the mosque, can now result in the prosecution of teachers, doctors, employers, priests, imams, rabbis, regardless of immigration status. This, on top of the already inhumane separation of families.
This administration has made clear its agenda: to systematically use unjust laws and policies to make criminals of black and brown communities, to ‘other’ and dehumanize us. But this is a minority view. We are the rising majority who are undeterred in our quest for a world where laws and policies — and those who make them — center love, family, and dignity for all people.
Mobilize the Immigrant Vote will continue to show up in defense of our families and communities across California, Arizona, and Texas, and especially those who live at the border. We call on all people who believe in true justice to protect and defend mixed status families, to continue to take action as we march, protest, and open our wallets to support organizations at the front line of the resistance. Until such a time that we have a federal government that honors and safeguards our humanity, we:
… call in every language, feel our itching throats shake the whole wide world with voices that will not cease until we are heard. Until they honor the living song of our wronged names, our silenced names, all our names. Until the wars on our humanity come to an end. We are not going anywhere, we will stand here and all over and call until all chains are broken. And they take down the fence and dismantle the bars. And erase the lines and open the borders. And shatter the ceiling. And justice comes to our neighborhoods. And the world at last guarantees our living.
Because you are not free until all of us are free.
And we won’t stop calling until our voices rearrange the world into a place that looks like home, we will call. — NoViolet Bulawayo, Until We Are All Free Declaration of Unity
