Abolishing immigration detention is a global movement.
Freedom for Immigrants launched our international organizing arm in 2018 with the goal of building a global movement of immigration detention visitation programs.
We recognize that immigration detention thrives in secrecy and isolation.
This is why governments have purposefully failed to protect a right to visitation. In the United States, there is no freestanding right to visitation and visitation programs have been temporarily barred from visiting. However, Freedom for Immigrants has fought and won countless battles to protect the free speech rights of both visitor volunteers and people in immigration detention who speak out against the system.
While the European Union and member states have begun to protect the right of persons in immigration detention to receive visits, for the most part, countries around the world have cut off access to the outside world for people in immigration detention.
State governments and multi-national prison corporations do not want immigrant rights advocates working in international solidarity with one another. Our work across borders threatens the stability and growth of the immigration detention industry that is rapidly expanding.
In addition, many countries have third country agreements with one another that take advantage of a loophole in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. While the Refugee Convention prevents countries from sending refugees back to their country of origin, it does not prevent countries from sending refugees to a “safe third country.”
A Safe Third Country agreement is a bilateral treaty under which one country can reject and return an asylum seeker to another safe country. The United States currently only has a Safe Third Country Agreement with Canada, which mirrors early twentieth century border practices that sought to exclude African Americans. Europe’s Dublin Regulation similarly allows EU countries to send asylum seekers back to the first EU country they entered. The United States has tried to negotiate similar agreements with Panama, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. And in January 2019, the United States unilaterally announced the implementation of the Migrant Protection Protocol, which allows U.S. border officers to return non-Mexican asylum seekers to Mexico as their claims are adjudicated in U.S. immigration courts.
In addition, the United States has signed Asylum Cooperative Agreements (ACA) with countries in Central and South America. For example, the United States’ ACA with Guatemala enables the United States to rapidly expel non-Guatemalan asylum seekers to Guatemala without allowing them to lodge asylum claims in the United States.
We cannot stand for this.
International law has enshrined the right to visitation during immigration detention. It is time we defend this right.
Visitation programs have the power to expose in a consistent manner the human and civil rights abuses rampant in immigration detention systems across the globe and facilitate the organizing of detained immigrants across states and borders.
That is why Freedom for Immigrants is committed to helping communities start new visitation programs and to creating a communication platform for all visitation programs worldwide.
Our ultimate goal is to build a world where no person is imprisoned for crossing a border.
Resources & Work
Moral Outrage Transcends Borders As Pandemic Reaches Inside Immigration Detention: An open letter from Freedom for Immigrants and the Association of Visitors to Immigration (AVID) to the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom calling for the release of all people from immigration detention on behalf of 40 visitation groups representing 1,778 volunteers who regularly visit people in 47 immigration detention facilities in both countries.
Let Us In: An Argument for the Right to Visitation - Published by Springer Press, our article sets forth the first comprehensive look at the challenges associated with starting and maintaining an immigration detention visitation program and the U.S. and international laws that affect immigration detention visitation.
Canadian Constitutional Challenge to the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) between Canada and the United States - Freedom for Immigrants provided testimony in this lawsuit brought by Amnesty International, the Canadian Council for Refugees, and the Canadian Council of Churches, resulting in a Canadian federal court ruling that the safe third-country agreement is unconstitutional.
Investigating U.S. Involvement in Global Detention Expansion: The U.S. government has a history of funding immigration enforcement abroad. For example, the U.S. pressured Mexico to start Programa Frontera Sur to arrest and detain migrants en route to the U.S. We are calling for an investigation into U.S. involvement in expanding India’s camps for Muslims.
Sharing Lessons Across Borders: Freedom for Immigrants partners on special projects with organizations in other countries to uplift lessons learned.
Learn more about the location of immigration detention facilities around the world by visiting the Global Detention Project and the International Detention Coalition.
Join our growing global movement to free and protect people from the bonds of immigration detention today!
We are aware of over 25 immigration detention visitation programs outside of the United States.
Please contact Layla Razavi at LRazavi@FreedomforImmigrants.org if:
You run an organization or group outside of the United States that visits people in immigration detention, or
If you want to start a visitation program or network in your home country.