Amanda Díaz

Senior National Hotline Manager | She/her

Amanda Díaz was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her experiences as a child of undocumented immigrants incited a sense of obligation and commitment to detention abolition, liberation, and dignity for undocumented people.

Amanda was first exposed to abolitionist values as an undergraduate learning about egregious human rights violations at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. She founded a club on campus called Advocates for Detained Voices that works to elevate the organizing efforts of people detained, alongside La Resistencia, a grassroots undocumented-led grassroots organization. As part of her leadership of the organization, Amanda coordinated monthly Solidarity Saturdays, collected and drafted grievances from people in detention, built relationships with families affected by family separation, and leveraged her universities privilege by redirecting university resources toward bonds to support the abolition of the Northwest Detention Center.

Prior to joining Freedom for Immigrants, Amanda worked as a community organizer for an immigrants’ rights organization in Seattle, Washington. Amanda built a powerful base of committed leaders that ran local campaigns in support of immigrant and Black and brown communities, including affordable childcare and achieving state-wide dual-language education in elementary schools. She trained and recruited grassroots leaders to advocate for various state policy reforms that protect the rights of immigrants, including Keep Washington Working, groundbreaking sanctuary legislation that prohibits local law enforcement from enforcing immigration laws and state legislation to oppose the expansion of additional ICE beds and detention centers in Washington state.

Amanda graduated from the University of Puget Sound and created her own field of study by combining the disciplines of political science, Latino/a studies, sociology, and anthropology to explore the importance of racial and ethnic politics, narratives, knowledge, and power, and their relationship to law, immigration, and national politics across the Americas. As the capstone to this major, she conducted 10 interviews with currently and formally detained people at the privately-owned Northwest Immigration Detention Center. Through this oral history, she was able to listen, contextualize, and synthesize their stories in order to elevate their stories for change. Amanda holds a B.A. in American Border Studies and enjoys painting sunsets, reading, and rollerskating in her free time.