OUR BEGINNING
Freedom for Immigrants was co-founded by Christina Fialho and Christina Mansfield with the goal of exposing and abolishing U.S. immigration detention. In 2010, Fialho and Mansfield co-created the first detention visitation group in California at the West County Detention Facility.
After the successful formation of the visitation group at West County—a detention facility which had one of the most restrictive visitation policies in the U.S. before the visitation program—Fialho and Mansfeild then joined forces with four other visitation groups around the country and established the National Visitation Network.
In 2012, Fialho and Mansfield formed this network into a non-partisan, non-profit organization called Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC).
Between 2012 and 2017, CIVIC grew the National Visitation Network to include visitation at 55 immigration detention centers, and launched the largest national toll-free and secure hotline for people in immigration detention.
In 2018, CIVIC changed its name to Freedom for Immigrants and began expanding its programmatic work to include policy advocacy, communications and narrative change, and community-based programs that serve as an alternative to detention.
THE STORY OF OUR NAME
"Nobody's free until everybody's free."
– Fannie Lou Hamer
In 2018, Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC) changed its name to Freedom for Immigrants after a private prison company began using a confusingly similar name to our original name, CIVIC.
In October 2016, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the oldest private prison corporation in the world, changed its name to CoreCivic. We immediately hired trademark attorneys to fight this violation of our organization’s common-law and other trademark rights in the word mark CIVIC.
Refusing to change its name, CCA attempted to buy us out with a settlement that contained a strict confidentiality and anti-disparagement clause. We refused to settle. Rather than spending years fighting in the courts, we chose to change our name, disassociating ourselves from a corporate entity that cashes in on human suffering.
We wanted our new name to align with our mission to free all immigrants from the bonds of immigration detention.
WHAT IS FREEDOM AND WHO IS FREE?
The meaning of freedom and those who are entitled to it has been a recurring battle throughout U.S. and world history. And to this day, countries continue to deny people their right to exist freely.
We chose the word “freedom” because it has never been a fixed concept in U.S. history.
Although the U.S. Constitution lists liberty among our inalienable rights, the U.S. government for centuries has deprived many people of it, from Native Americans to people stolen from Africa and enslaved for profit, to the Japanese Americans who were sent to internment camps in the U.S. during World War II.
Today, tens of thousands of people are deprived of their freedom in abusive and secretive immigration detention centers across the country on any given day.
We also want to reclaim the word freedom and shift its meaning to one of empowerment, not disenfranchisement. In truth, freedom exists within us. It is not for the privileged few—it is a right for all.