Roqayah is off this week, so Kumars is joined from the top of the hour by Kimberly Galindo, lead organizer for Southern California’s High Desert region with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, an alliance of over 40 civil society organizations providing support to immigrant communities. Kimberly starts off by describing about her own political development growing up undocumented and later becoming a DACA recipient. She gives listeners an introduction to ICIJ’s various aid projects and advocacy campaigns since the start of the pandemic, recounting their spectacular direct action at the governor’s mansion in Sacramento California, where 14 undocumented organizers and immigration attorneys were arrested after chaining themselves to Gavin Newsom’s front gate demanding an end to ICE transfers and the release of those behind bars as coronavirus runs roughshod through the US prison system.
Kimberly talks about her work acting as a liaison with detainees at the privately-owned Adelanto Detention Facility, detailing what she’s seen and heard of the conditions there. Kimberly and Kumars discuss a number of recent news items that throw the Trump administration’s genocidal immigration agenda into sharp relief, including reports of mass, nonconsensual hysterectomies performed in a Georgia ICE facility, and Kimberly shares her perspective on the flaws of DACA, Barack Obama’s legacy in immigrant communities, and the resonance of immigrant struggles in a moment of unprecedented visibility for the politics of prison-industrial complex abolition.
You can follow ICIJ on Twitter @IC4IJ and learn more about their work at ic4ij.org, and you can donate to their Adelanto bond fund here.
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