Happy Hump Day, Shit Givers.
This week, we’re covering the surveillance tech ICE is using and your digital rights at the border, the legal defense funds keeping people out of deportation proceedings, the groups holding families together, and the bigger policy fight underneath it all.
You don’t have to do it all on your own. You just have to do your part, and join the people all over the country already doing incredible work.
Let’s go.
— Willow
Face Off
Homeland Security has been expanding its use of facial recognition tech, scanning faces at the border, in courthouses, and increasingly in the interior of the country with little oversight or consent. And if you are crossing the border this summer, remember that your phone is fair game too.
Here’s what you can do:
Lawyer up
Behind every arrest stat is a person who needs a lawyer, and immigration court doesn’t guarantee you one the way criminal court does. People with legal representation are way more likely to win their case than people without.
Here’s what you can do:
Support broad-spectrum immigration advocacy and legal defense with the American Immigration Council (go).
Get legal tools to immigrants and communities supporting them through the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (go).
Fund legal, social, and advocacy support for people facing deportation with the Florence Project (go).
Keep families together
Kids are showing up to immigration court alone. Families are being split apart. The ripple effects show up in ordinary ways: households suddenly unable to make rent because a breadwinner was detained, and so on.
Here’s what you can do:
Fight family separation directly with RAICES (go).
Protect kids who cross the border alone with Kids in Need of Defense (go).
Support what “welcoming the stranger” looks like in practice with the Catholic Legal Immigration Network (go).
Provide direct rent, food assistance, and mutual aid to immigrant households with CANDO (go).
The bigger picture
Underneath the individual cases is a policy fight over what immigration enforcement is supposed to look like, and a healthcare system that often fails immigrants and mobile populations entirely.
Here’s what you can do:
That’s it for this week. Look out for your neighbors.
Thank you — as always — for giving a shit.
— Willow
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