Our Mission
Freedom for Immigrants is devoted to abolishing immigration detention, while ending the isolation of people currently suffering in this profit-driven system.
We are the only nonprofit in the country monitoring the human rights abuses faced by immigrants detained by ICE through a national hotline and network of volunteer detention visitors, while also modeling a community-based alternative to detention that welcomes immigrants into the social fabric of the United States. Through these windows into the system, we gather data and stories to combat injustice at the individual level and push systemic change.
Our Values
Through a collaborative process among visitation programs at our October 2017 National Visitation Retreat, we have affirmed the following five values:
1. We are dedicated to abolishing immigration detention while supporting the organizing and power-building initiatives of those of us who are most impacted. We support policies that advocate for improved conditions of confinement provided that they do not conflict with our goal of ending the detention system in its entirety.
2. We are a coalition of people who have directly suffered the injustices of immigration detention and people in solidarity. We are guided by the experiences and leadership of those who are or have been on the inside. Forging meaningful person-to-person connections is transformative and foundational to our movement.
3. We know that the immigration detention system is built upon a long history of white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism. It intentionally functions to dispossess marginalized communities and peoples of their homes and their histories.
4. We understand that our service and advocacy efforts, including visitation, can never be politically neutral. We reject any framework that is purely charitable and replicates structural power inequalities at the interpersonal level.
5. We recognize that the U.S. immigration detention system is the largest in the world and that the U.S. government and prison-industrial complex have played an active role in the development and infrastructure of detention systems in other countries. By changing the ways that immigrants are treated here, we are part of an international movement to transform state and community responses to migration so that immigrants are no longer caged, but welcomed.
Learn more about why our core values are critical to our support for people in immigration jails and prisons and our fight to end immigration detention.