Twenty years ago, the Shahani family, Subash Kateel, and Maria Muentes came together and founded Families for Freedom. Their goal was to fight against the deportations ravaging our communities and separating our families.
Families for Freedom has changed tremendously since its founding. We have implemented new programs, grown our membership, built alliances, and much more. As of recently, we started going through a revitalization process. We now have a new director and a fresh team of committed staff to carry on our initial vision: people who are directly affected, accessing and building power where needed, lead a movement that engages members and allies to roll back the mandatory detention and deportation provisions of the 1996 laws, to change the way the US sees and treats immigrants.
We at Families for Freedom see the brutal immigration enforcement regime as having a crushing human toll on New York immigrant communities, and those are around the country at large. The process of detention and removal destroys the economic security of already marginalized migrant families, removing members to countries they barely know, whilst leaving their families in economically and socially precarious situations here in the US.
Our team aim to support migrants by providing accompaniment to ICE check-ins , detention center hotlines (to assist detainees in making calls to their family, attorneys and courts so that they don’t feel alone), and providing direct resources for migrants in the city.
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Proactive campaigning
Our ultimate goal is to play a role in the conversion of the US immigration regime into one that has human rights and justice as its guiding principles. This requires a campaigning strategy that not only advocates for those within the system, but also looks to shift policy and legislation at the local, state and national level so that the most damaging effects of the enforcement regime are rolled back. We do this through active lobbying and advocacy with elected officials and engagement with the public discussions concerning the policing, detention and deportation of immigrants. -
Migrant Support
We have been assisting migrants by providing them with essential items for clothing , coats, blankets, shoes etc. We also help them complete immigration forms such applications for asylum and green cards.
Additionally, we offer them a safe haven as most of them are homeless and can use our office address to ensure they do not miss important immigration mail.
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Grassroots leadership and community organizing
We believe that those most directly impacted by US immigration enforcement policies are in the best position to provide the support to others going through the same traumatic experience. Our leadership have personal experiences with the intricacies of the US deportation system, we understand the emotional toll it has, and are well experienced in resisting it. Through this community based organizing, we aim to lighten the burdensome load that families with members in the system are going through.
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Women's Right
We continue to fight against the criminalization of a person's rights to bodily autonomy and advocate for healthcare accessibility for all, and to demand the release of incarcerated women across the nation.
FFF History throughout the years
20 years ago, three families came together to confront the largely invisible crisis of deportation. Together they broke the silence and overcame the isolation that many families face when one of their members is facing deportation. Creating an informal network focused on providing mutual support and education, the Shahani Family, Subhash Kateel, and Maria Muentes formed Families for Freedom (FFF). They met in small apartment living rooms overflowing with people from all continents of the world. From these three founding families' vision grew a powerful organization that has involved hundreds of families fighting on the frontlines of this nation's immigration debate.
Families for Freedom emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 and the increased policing and surveillance of Arab and Muslim communities. Under the guise of the “war on terror”, thousands of people were ripped from their families, locked in detention centers and eventually deported. In the early 2000s, we were faced with a dangerous issue. Deportation was, and still is, a huge problem in the United States.
In the decades following the passage of harsh legislation like the Patriot Act, many immigrant communities who were not a part of this target population felt they were immune to the destructive immigration enforcement policies of the George W. Bush administration. However, with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, this new national security focus began to fuse with the country’s thirty-year focus on immigrants with criminal convictions. This process has deep roots, but was turbo charged during the Ronald Reagan administrations “war on drugs” and “war on poverty” – and given bipartisan support through the passage of Clinton era immigration enforcement legislation like the “Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996”.
As the new millennium progressed, pre-existing divisions between the “good immigrant” and the “bad immigrant” were consolidated through a toxic media landscape, resurgent grassroots xenophobic attitudes, and the emergence of relentless federal enforcement bureaucracies like the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol. Much of the national debate and policy decisions focused on allowing “hard working” immigrants to stay whilst deporting those with criminal convictions, even after they served their sentences. This logic continued under the Obama Administration, who, despite making promises to overhaul the US immigration enforcement system, turbo charged criminal based deportations and engagement, deporting over three million people during its two terms.
By the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the US deportation had become a sprawling system with public and private interests undergirding its yearly expansion. Feeding this sprawling system of removal is an archipelago of over 200 than 200 jails and detention centers that make up ICE’s detention system. Many of the immigrants detained in ICE’s nominally civil system are held in county and local jails that contract with ICE to detain immigrants. The rest are held in dedicated immigration detention facilities run by ICE or contracted to private prison corporations, including family detention centers that hold mothers and children. Today, even in Joe Biden’s administration, mass deportation and detention of migrants continues to take place, and we continue to fight against the inhumane machine that mistreats migrants to this very day.