Free Migration Project

The record deportations of the Obama administration, followed by intensified oppression of immigrant communities under Trump, has led people to question the immigration enforcement infrastructure. The new administration is shifting course, but the future of immigration policy remains uncertain. In this environment, demands to abolish ICE and eliminate immigrant detention are growing.

Our immigrant rights campaigns support this emerging movement, including:

• Our struggle to end family detention, which began with the Shut Down Berks Campaign and recently expanded to the national level. 

• Our campaign to end medical deportation, the forced repatriation of critically injured patients without informed consent by hospitals.

• Our work supporting the National Sanctuary Collective, a network of community-based campaigns supporting people who took refuge in sanctuary churches.  

The common thread in these campaigns is FMP’s unique mission to abolish deportation itself. There is now an opportunity to connect immigrant rights advocacy with abolitionist thought and practice. The Elevate Prize would help FMP play a pivotal role in that shift.

I’m invested in working at the intersections of policy advocacy, law, research and community organizing towards the empowerment of the immigrant community. I value frameworks of abolition, intersectional feminism & decolonial practice. We work at the intersection of law & community organizing to promote freedom of movement as a human right. Through focused grassroots campaigns and a public education effort, we're building support within the immigrant rights movement for the abolition of immigration restrictions and an end to deportation. I see my purpose within that work as a facilitator for the community to forge their liberation. Our collective liberation is intrinsically linked, so when I can advocate for and give space to immigrant communities, I'm also working towards the liberation of all people. We play an important role in taking innovative approaches to immigrants rights issues by collaborating directly with grassroots organizations and centering immigrant voices. Our projects can be opportunities for collaboration with bigger advocacy issues like healthcare for all, racial justice & prison abolition. My goals are to make our vision a reality: a world where free movement of people is the legal norm, migration is recognized as a human right and deportation and immigrant detention are abolished.

Tens of millions of noncitizens in the U.S. live under the threat of deportation. Congress cannot pass any legalization program for immigrants, but has agreed that border security and national sovereignty should trump individual human rights. Frustrated with the intractable problems immigrants face and the lack of a bold, human-rights-based policy perspective in the public discourse, FMP was founded in 2016 to push for recognition of a basic right to migrate. FMP believes that the existing global regime of restrictions on migration from poor nations to wealthy ones, often with implicit or explicit racial justifications, constitutes an unjustifiable hindrance to individual liberty and collective advancement.

We envision a world where free movement of people is the legal norm. FMP represents immigrant clients in their legal proceedings, provides legal support and training to organizers and advocates, engages in public education and outreach, litigates in the public interest, and advocates for fair and open immigration laws. FMP works in coalition with grassroots organizations, advocates, and community members to build immigrant rights campaigns with the goal of eventually abolishing immigrant detention and ending deportation entirely.

FMP works with community organizers to elevate public removal defense campaigns to pressure elected officials and government agencies to grant relief in individual cases and implement broader policy changes. Using media contacts, protest actions, digital organizing, and relationships with elected officials, FMP has been able to stop many deportations and achieve protections for classes of people. In cases where an immigration attorney has reached the limit of what can be done using conventional legal remedies, it can be essential to bridge the gap between legal and organizing efforts. FMP manages or participates in such campaigns and also trains attorneys and community organizers to provide the tools to facilitate communication and collaboration between attorneys and grassroots groups on deportation defense campaigns.

FMP also engages in coalition work with grassroots groups and advocacy organizations to combat family detention and ICE persecution of immigrant families. FMP pushes for far-reaching policy remedies rooted in a human-rights based, community-oriented framework. We work with clients and their families and supporters to center impacted people in our campaign work. We take direction from the clients at the center of our public removal defense work, and we work towards productive collaboration with grassroots organizations we partner with. 

FMP is a founding member of the Shut Down Berks Coalition fighting to close the Berks family detention center. In February, all families were released from Berks, although the prison remains open. FMP is building a national effort to end family detention, the Family Liberation Abolitionist Network. FMP took the lead in collaboratively developing a framework of shared values. We engaged with members of Congress to introduce the Freedom for Families Act in April to prohibit federal funding for family detention.

Since 2018, FMP has also helped coordinate the work of the National Sanctuary Collective, working with immigrant leaders living in sanctuary churches. Nearly all have now safely left their churches to rejoin their communities. FMP also coordinates legal defense against egregious ICE civil fines against sanctuary leaders. Last month, DHS announced it would end its civil fines policy and drop pending fines. 

We are leading a campaign to end the practice of medical deportation, the transportation of injured immigrant patients out of the country by hospitals without informed consent of the patient. This practice can result in death or disability. FMP stopped an attempted medical deportation in Philadelphia last year.