ACUDIR: Alameda County United in Defense of Immigrant Rights

ACUDIR has a broad definition for immigrant justice. We envision a coalition led by and for immigrants and their organizations that organizes and base-builds in the community to end all deportations, to liberate all immigrants from detention, to end the militarization of the border, and to fight for human rights for all immigrants: citizenship, housing, employment, education, health care, retirement, and dignity and respect. 

Within Alameda County we will build a coalition of individuals and organizations that are collectively fighting towards local wins such as establishing sanctuary for all within homes, workplaces, schools, places of worship, and beyond—and to keep ICE jails out of our community, and also engaging in a larger statewide and national fight for human rights and dignity for all immigrants!

Points of Unity

1. Build up the immigrant rights movement.  We want to engage not from a place of reaction or defense, but rather from a place of power and the strength of our past wins.  We want to build up leadership and capacity for the immigrant rights movement because we know beyond the current political moment our struggle is protracted, and we will continue our fight until we win!
2. Center those most impacted by border detentions, deportations, and xenophobic immigration policies that criminalize our right to move and exist.  We want the voices of immigrant communities to guide and be present in our organizing, and we want to elevate the power, resilience, and creativity of those communities as we build up our campaigns and engage in this struggle.
3. Build our campaigns, communities, and movement work towards an end where migration is recognized as a human right.  We are not looking to bow down, ask for amnesty, hide in the shadows, or limit our vision to small gains that benefit a few and allow others to stay vulnerable to xenophobic policies.  We want a world without borders, detention, and deportation, a world where the humanity of immigrant communities is recognized with dignity and respect.
4. We fight against all state tools that seek to cage, militarize, deport, surveil, and brutalize our communities.  As immigrants we refuse to allow our movement to follow a carceral ideology that seeks to divide our communities between the “good and bad immigrant.”  We refuse to support or engage with any state force, from police to ICE, to the military, that serves as tools to maintain dehumanizing conditions for our communities locally and abroad.  La policía, La migra, La misma porquería! 
5. Our fight is international and anti-imperialist.  We know immigration policies and patterns are directly linked to U.S. military aggression and intervention and the land, resources, and human capital that imperialist powers seek to take from our home country.  We know war and economic devastation in our home countries have led to forced migration, and the demand for cheap labor has brought many of our people to the belly of the beast.  As we wage our struggle for immigrant rights, we do so knowing our fight spans beyond U.S. borders and is deeply intertwined with people’s movements worldwide against imperialism and colonialism.  
6. We Keep Each Other Safe! As a coalition, we will aim to elevate the strengths within our communities and commit to doing base building, capacity building, and supporting our communities to organize themselves as our first line of protection and strength.