For the month of April, we honor two dates that speak to the resilience of life under violent systems of control: Palestinian Prisoners Day on April 17, and Earth Day on April 22. Though they may seem unrelated, both are powerful reminders that the fight against cages is a fight for the right to live—a struggle for collective survival and liberation.
Palestinian Prisoners Day uplifts the courage and resistance of Palestinians caged and tortured in apartheid-Israeli prisons as part of a settler colonial regime that uses imprisonment as a key tool of control. This includes over 9,600 Palestinians currently incarcerated by apartheid-Israel in total, including hundreds of children, and over 3,300 prisoners in administrative detention without charge or trial. In the face of this brutal repression, incarcerated Palestinians continue to organize hunger strikes, create underground political education spaces, and remain part of the larger struggle for land, dignity, and freedom.
Rightfully so, the plight of Palestinian prisoners often garners international attention. Most recently, on April 2, 2025, the trial of Anan Yaeesh, a Palestinian political prisoner detained in Italy, commenced amid global calls for his release. Advocacy groups have mobilized to highlight his case, emphasizing the transnational nature of political repression and the need for international solidarity.
Also in April, Earth Day calls us to confront the global systems that exploit land and people. From apartheid-Israel’s ecocide of Palestinian lands and greenwashing of settler colonialism to extractive industries poisoning water in Indigenous territories in Turtle Island (ie the “US”) or expanding prisons and jails on toxic landfills, the prison industrial complex (PIC) is deeply entangled with ecological destruction worldwide. Prisons themselves are environmental hazards—built on contaminated land, polluting the air and water, and disproportionately impacting Black, Indigenous, and poor communities—as proven by decades of anti-prison, environmentalist, and abolitionist organizing, much of which can be learned about in last year’s Issue 41 of CR’s The Abolitionist Newspaper (read in full on our website here) and corresponding episode of our “Over the Wall” podcast on Beyond Prisons.
In the US, abolitionist and environmentalist movements have been actively resisting the expansion of prisons on ecologically sensitive lands.
For instance, organizers with CR’s newest chapter launched earlier this year in Central Appalachia have successfully halted the construction of a federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky yet again, this time by returning the land to Indigenous stewardship through the Indigenous-led Rekindling Project in a fight to stop federal prison expansion on a mountain-top removal site led by the Building Community Not Prisons coalition.
This victory underscores the interconnectedness of ecological preservation, Indigenous sovereignty, and the fight against the still-rapidly-expanding PIC.
Escalating Attacks on Palestinian Solidarity Activists in the US
In recent months across the US, there has been a disturbing escalation in the suppression of Palestinian solidarity activists protesting the US’s funding and investments in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine. The Trump administration has intensified efforts to squash dissent, particularly targeting Pro-Palestinian demands on college campuses.
A prominent example is the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and former Columbia University student. On March 8, 2025, Khalil was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at his residence in New York City. Despite being a legal permanent resident with no previous convictions, Khalil faces potential deportation under allegations of supporting Hamas. His detention has drawn widespread condemnation from human rights organizations, who view it as a blatant violation of free speech rights.
Additionally, the Trump administration has frozen substantial federal funding to several universities, including over $1 billion for Cornell University and $790 million for Northwestern University as part of a broader crackdown on institutions associated with pro-Palestinian campus protests, raising significant concerns about academic freedom and the right to protest.
These actions represent an unprecedented attack on student activism and international solidarity with officials targeting students based on their political views and activism related to Palestine.
Legal experts and advocacy groups have drawn parallels to past anti-communist witch-hunts reminiscent of the “Red Scare” era of policing and criminalization, emphasizing the urgent need to not only defend constitutional rights but the rights of our movements in face of such grave repression.
Intersecting Struggles
Across geographies, we see how the forces that cage people are the same ones that poison the earth: militarism, capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. But we also see resistance rooted in care for life. Whether its prisoners organizing against solitary confinement or land defenders halting pipelines, people are fighting back—not only to survive, but to build a new, liberated world.
This Earth Day and Palestinian Prisoners Day, we recommit to an abolitionist vision that refuses to separate freedom for people from freedom for the land. We honor those imprisoned for their resistance, and those who resist from within the walls. And we continue to raise the call for a free Palestine, for an end to all cages, and for the restoration of life everywhere.
Another world is not only possible—it’s necessary. And it’s already being grown in the cracks of this one.
For a world free of fascism—without walls, cages or borders,
-Critical Resistance