Dear Friends,
For the past couple weeks, Critical Resistance Los Angeles (CRLA) has been mobilizing with our local movement partners in the migrant rights movement to take to the streets to defend our communities in face of Trump’s new administration’s aggression through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
As threatened, the largest deportation program to date is already underway in only four weeks of Trump back in office. From January 22 to January 31 alone, over 8,200 people were arrested by ICE – the largest and most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the country, tasked with policing migrants. In Los Angeles, where City Council passed a sanctuary city ordinance late last year that is supposed to prohibit city resources or personnel from being used in federal enforcement of immigration policies, the LA offices of Homeland Security Investigations and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) are working with other agencies to carry out the federal immigration hunt and crackdown locally.
We must not allow Trump’s criminalization of immigrants to divide our communities. Migrant justice and the struggle for immigrant rights are not matters of good vs bad immigrants or of protecting only “hardworking” migrants. We know that the system of imprisonment targets marginalized communities, and we know that the policing and enforcement of immigration is one of the largest parts of the prison industrial complex (PIC). Once more, immigration policies are based on white supremacy and xenophobia, racism, and punishment and don’t take into account the social and economic needs of people entering, living, and working in the US. Scapegoating and criminalizing immigrants legitimizes the state’s violence of caging people and tearing apart families, keeping our communities divided at a critical moment when we must unite and join forces against fascism.
Continuing to band together with our movement partners moving forward, CRLA is joining a new coalition called the Community Self Defense Coalition LA, a network of Latino, Black, Filipino and Jewish organizations in LA and across Southern California working to defend and protect immigrants from ICE raids and attacks.
Meanwhile, our communities are still reeling from the loss and widespread fear from the LA fires, as our city now faces steep challenges with rebuilding, relief, and preparation for more climate disasters. The LA wildfires exemplify the fused link between the PIC and ecological crisis and destruction. We see this through tactics the police state uses during crises to fear-monger around looting, while Angelenos are struggling from the impacts of climate crises created and exacerbated by corporations. We also see this through the way our imprisoned comrades are on the frontlines of the climate crisis – both as firefighters working to save lives as well as youth and adults trapped in cages awaiting evacuation and release.
According to Ella Baker Center’s Hidden Hazards report, 18 of California’s state prisons are located in areas vulnerable to one or more climate hazards, including wildfires, extreme heat, and flooding. The worsening climate crisis exemplifies the extremely urgent need for a roadmap for prison closure, decarceration, and just transitions, by repurposing closed facilities in non-carceral ways or returning land back to Indigenous peoples. This is why CRLA has been working tirelessly with our sister chapter in the Bay Area for the last few years in the statewide campaign to close at least 10 California prisons with Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB).
In Issue 41: Ecological Justice of The Abolitionist newspaper, organizers and imprisoned advocates with the Close California Prisons Campaign describe the importance of prison closure and land-back in the context of the 2021 Dixie Fire — the second largest wildfire in state history. Imprisoned in California Correctional Center (CCC), located within the fire’s hazard zone, prisoners describe being “without electricity, sitting caged for 28 days with no power, living in a smoke-filled building, no lights, no air conditioning.” Inside advocate Duane Palm explains how organizers’ fight inside shifted from “getting the power turned back on into the fight to close the prison down, because the prison couldn’t be fixed.” Prison closure is an urgent ecological priority, and therefore, as all of Issue 41’s feature articles argue, PIC abolition is a much-needed strategy to save the planet from ecological demise.
Our fight for PIC abolition and ecological justice must be anti-colonial. There is much to learn from Indigenous practices for maintaining healthier, intentional relationships with the land and all of its habitats. In Issue 41, Indigenous activists and scholars discuss Indigenous practices of fire management called “cultural burns” both as resistance to the colonial, carceral state and as a way to care for the land, each other, and all living creations and beings. Efforts to control Indigenous people through suppressing cultural burning practices coupled with hyper production and exploitation of the land under capitalism is deeply hypocritical. While the PIC works as a tool to take away autonomy and economic self-sufficiency of Indigenous people, activist and fire practitioner Tony Marks Block shares that “bringing fire back is then a struggle for Indigenous independence and autonomy.”
You can read all of and download Issue 41 of The Abolitionist for free on CR’s website here.
In these times of rapid climate devastation alongside increasing fascist threats and attacks on our communities, our hearts go out to you, our comrades. CRLA sends love to those of you and your loved ones who have been impacted by the devastating LA wildfires over the past six weeks, as well as the immigration and policing crackdown that have already rounded up hundreds of our folks in the first month of Trump’s presidency.
Uplifted by the ways Angelenos are keeping one another safe in the face of grief coupled by the rise in fascism, we’d like to share a few resources we have found helpful if you need support or are looking for ways to support:
- Mutual Aid Resources
- Rent Gouging Information
- Youth Justice Coalition Emergency Funds
- Immigrant Support and Resisting ICE
Toward liberation,
-CRLA