Keep fighting for immigrant rights
Many thanks to everyone who made it to the Third Thursdays event Standing with Immigrants and Refugees. What a great turn out!
Third Thursdays Speakers
And many thanks to our wonderful speakers—Kathy Moccio, John Keller, Jaylani Hussein, Pablo Tapia and Sen. Patricia Torres Ray.
Ready to get to work? Here’s what you can do right now.
Follow these organizations from the event on Facebook:
Sign up for action alerts
Subscribe to Sen. Torres Ray’s email updates
Spread urgent DACA information widely
Anyone who is a DACA recipient and whose DACA expires between now and March 15, 2018 must renew their DACA immediately.
Renewals must be received by USCIS no later than Thursday, Oct. 5, 2017 (overnight mail no later than Oct. 4). If they need help, they should call Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota at 651-641-1011, where they have the capacity to serve more people.
Write or call you members of congress
In March 2018, an estimated 1,500 people will begin to lose current DACA status every day. To prevent this, Congress must act to pass the Dream Act into law.
Call your U.S. Senators and tell them to co-sponsor the bipartisan Durbin-Graham “DREAM Act” (S. 1615) to create a legislative fix to the predicament of these young Americans, and take their future out of Trump’s hands.
Call your U.S. House Representative and tell them to co-sponsor Rep. Gutierrez’s American Hope Act (H.R. 3591) to give those with DACA and others who arrived in the United States as children a path to permanent legal status and eventual citizenship.
Don’t know who represents you? We’ve got you covered.
Donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund
Immigration detention is at a high across Minnesota. For example, Sherburne County now has the highest number of detainees. Why? Their jail has a contract with ICE.
The number of immigrant detainees at any given time went from 120 to 250 since the election. They are now selling immigration detention as a growth industry and are currently building more space and adding bunks to existing cells. They are even shipping their own inmates to other jails to make space so they can earn more money on their immigration contract.
Bonds as low as $75 are enough to keep people in detention and from going home to their families while waiting for their case to be decided.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund raises money to get people out of both criminal detention and immigration detention. They have raised $31,000 so far, aiming for $50,000 by the end of the year. If they make this goal, they will have enough to get approximately 10 people out of detention by the end of the year and back to their families.
(Thanks to Postcards for America with this information.)