About Us

Freedom for Immigrants is an immigrant-led, abolitionist organization committed to ending immigration incarceration. We organize alongside leaders directly impacted by immigration detention, their families, and communities across the country to advance our liberatory vision of abolition. Our work is guided by the wisdom of those who have experienced detention firsthand. We believe these leaders are the heart of our movement and the true experts in our fight for collective liberation. 

Through organizing, strategic communications and storytelling, and other forms of advocacy, we fight to free people from detention and shut down deadly detention centers while also working long-term to structurally realign our societal priorities away from criminalization, detention, and deportation and toward non-punitive, humane, and welcoming policies.

Informed by Black abolitionist visionaries who have paved the way before us, we understand immigration detention as one thread in the broader web of mass incarceration and the criminalization of Black and brown people. We fight for everyone — regardless of prior contact with the legal system or criminal record — as we practice community care and build popular support among the public for our vision. 

 

Mission Statement

Freedom for Immigrants is an abolitionist organization that envisions a world without prisons or cages of any kind. We work to abolish immigration incarceration, recognizing we are part of a broader movement fighting for our freedom at the intersection of mass incarceration, immigration enforcement, and the deprivation of Black, brown, and Indigenous people’s autonomy. To empower our communities, we organize alongside and follow the leadership of currently and formerly incarcerated immigrants. We recognize our work is necessarily tied to broader efforts to eradicate white supremacy and the systems that sustain oppression. By cultivating the community-centered solutions that breathe life into our collective liberation, we actively build a future in which all people can move freely and thrive. 

Theory of Change

  • At Freedom for Immigrants, abolition means centering love, which is embodied in community care, abundance, and interdependence. It’s building a society in which Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) can live in safety and lead dignified lives, where the sacred and human rights of self-determination and freedom of movement are realized for all. Abolition is the presence of true accountability that addresses conflict without criminalization. It is more than a vision; it’s a strategy, a way of life, and a tool we employ to end all forms of physical, mental, and spiritual imprisonment and replace them with collective care and human dignity. 

  • We recognize immigration incarceration is just one strand in a broader web of racism, mass incarceration, policing, and border enforcement. In fact, so-called “detention” is an outgrowth of the anti-Black mass incarceration and policing systems, which have served to enforce colonial and racist practices and policies. These irreformable, interconnected, and profit-driven systems are the modern-day, physical embodiments of white supremacy and the state’s enforcement of anti-Black racial terror and xenophobia.

    Ending immigration incarceration is necessarily tied to, and starts with, Black liberation. Our mission of abolition is also informed by the historical frameworks of Indigenous resistance and wisdom. Therefore, our efforts are interwoven with the broader struggles to eradicate the domestic and global systems that sustain white supremacy: racial capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, borders, systems of policing, mass incarceration, criminalization, punishment, surveillance, and the ongoing wars and climate catastrophes that displace and dispossess people across the globe. 

Principle 1: We follow the leadership of directly impacted people both inside and outside of the organization

We resource, support, and follow the leadership and expertise of directly impacted people who align with our vision for collective liberation. The people who have been harmed by the systems we are fighting to dismantle should be leading the charge. We organize, build power, and create solutions by following the direction of people with lived experience of incarceration to advance our goals. We work to center and help bring to power the real experts — those who have suffered oppression — while dismantling the over-reliance on institutional experts.

Our role is to ensure directly impacted people are fully and equitably included in all places decisions are made so that they may lead our organizational priorities. We support those who step into their own power and autonomy to share their expertise. We believe that for people to organize most effectively, they need resources so they can act from a place of stability, capacity, and strength. 

Principle 2: Our movement building is intersectional and strives for Black liberation

We understand that our freedom, and in fact our very survival, is interconnected, leading us to support and follow the leadership of Black-led and criminal injustice system abolitionist groups, as well as work alongside aligned struggles of those most impacted by oppression. Therefore, we organize at the intersection of the criminal injustice and immigration, or “crimmigration,” systems. 

When Black people are free, we will all be free. This is the lens through which we measure our success. Therefore, we work to ensure that none of our efforts will further harm Black communities. For example, when we advocate for the closure of an ICE incarceration center, we’ll advocate for the full demolition of its walls to block the prison industry’s repurposing of prisons, which primarily leads to the imprisonment of Black individuals.   

Principle 3: Organizing is how we’ll achieve our future

The best way to disrupt the detention machine is to agitate from inside the house. Therefore, we build the power of, invest in, and grow the leadership of values-aligned Black and brown organizers inside immigration prisons. 

Our organizing is rooted in relationships — with directly impacted people, their families and loved ones, and with community partners. While we organize and develop solutions with leaders inside, we work to activate and mobilize our community on the outside, serving as a bridge between inside and outside organizing when necessary. By supporting and growing the power of directly impacted people, we work to shift the narrative and perceptions of immigration, incarceration, and their intersections. We rebuild our community’s trust in each other, and in our ability to create a different future for our people. 

Principle 4: We employ internal practices to combat toxic non-profit industrial complex structures 

We strive to embody our values in our internal practices and ways of operating. We acknowledge that we exist within the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC), and therefore must actively combat the harm endemic to this mode of work.

Our team strives to center our internal culture around healing, wholeness, honesty, collective care, and joy. We commit to continuous learning and relationship building that focuses on authenticity (vs. professionalism), abundance (vs. scarcity), and accountability (vs. bypassing). Just as we take our strategic direction from directly impacted people, we will prioritize hiring people with lived experiences of oppression for all roles within the organization. 

Principle 5: We seek to build the world we envision

What would our world look like if we successfully rid ourselves of systemic oppression? This is the future we seek to build through our actions and community building. We work to transform the very conditions that give rise to harm so that all can live in safety and dignity. We’ll prioritize community care models centered around healing, our freedom of movement, and all other basic human rights, such as access to holistic health, including mental, physical, and spiritual care, food, housing, education, transportation, and employment. As prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, "Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life-affirming institutions…abolition's goal is to change how we interact with each other and the planet by putting people over profit, welfare over warfare, and life over death."