This article includes overflow from UIDN’s March e-newsletter. If you’d like to receive it directly, sign up here.
With ICE employing increasingly brutal tactics, intimidation techniques, and outright lies it’s crucial that immigrants at risk and their supporters understand and exercise their rights. That’s why UIDN is stepping up its programs to ensure that everyone is informed and well prepared.
“When you’re prepared, you have much less fear of the unknown,” says Graciela Conkright, the UIDN board member heading Know Your Rights efforts. She describes a “multi-pronged campaign” to help protect everyone — from directly-impacted people to friends, employers, and neighbors who want to help to immigrant-support organizations. UIDN volunteers are widely distributing Know Your Rights (KYR) cards in multiple languages to help immigrants and allies handle an ICE encounter. The cards remind people that, for example, they are not legally obligated to respond to questions without the presence of a lawyer or to admit ICE officers onto their premises if they don’t have a judicial warrant. (Download and print cards and more here.)
For several weeks, UIDN clergy spokesperson and board member Reverend Liz Estes has been preparing allies of vulnerable immigrants for what lies ahead. Her Loving Immigrants presentation details a series of ‘dos and don’ts’ for allies present at an ICE raid, for example. “Everyone can do something,” she says, from observing and documenting ICE actions to supporting local businesses run by immigrants, to donating to support groups such as UIDN or the ACLU, to advocating for legislative action by calling or writing to elected local, state, and federal officials.
continued from the newsletter: UIDN’s KYR programs also encourage families to prepare for the possible deportation of a family member. Graciela notes, for example, that if parents register children with the consulate of their home country now, it may be easier to seek help from their consulate later. Likewise, if parents get each child a passport now, reunions with a family member who is deported will be simpler later. In addition, getting a passport requires written consent from both parents making it nearly impossible if one parent has been deported.
Graciela is shepherding the creation of an online UIDN master KYR library in English and Spanish. The goal is to provide reliable resources that are up-to-date. UIDN will also hold rain-the-trainer workshops and eventually UIDN volunteers will conduct workshops for both immigrants and allies. Encounters with ICE can be highly stressful and intimidating, especially if heavily armed ICE officers hide their faces with ski masks, fail to wear badges, use unmarked vehicles, or present invalid documents. The training will include role-playing exercises to help prepare vulnerable people for ICE interactions by, for example, demanding to see a valid judicial warrant before opening their door.
“A president cannot come and change the constitution with an executive order,” explained Ulster County Sheriff Juan Figueroa during a recent interview with Radio Kingston’s Mariel Fiori. ICE counts on immigrants not knowing their rights. The goal of UIDN’s KYR initiatives is to show them that they do.
