Freedom for Immigrants supports ICE Out of California, a statewide coalition of community organizations, advocates, and community members organizing and advocating to defend Californian immigrant communities from detention and deportation by working to disrupt and end local law enforcement collaboration with ICE. We support the coalition in opposing harmful, criminalizing legislation while fighting for laws that uphold dignity and freedom for our communities by disentangling the prison and immigration systems. Learn more here.

Alongside a powerful coalition of local groups and impacted leaders, Freedom for Immigrants helped introduce the New York Dignity Not Detention Act (S316 Salazar /A4181 Reyes) and continues to fight for its passage. The New York DND Act gets New York out of the business of immigration detention by prohibiting any person or entity in the state from owning or operating immigration detention facilities, entering into new detention contracts or receiving any payments related to detention, or renewing any existing detention contracts, and requiring any governmental entities with active contracts to exercise the termination provision of their contract. Learn more here. 

Freedom for Immigrants supported New Jersey’s 2021 landmark law prohibiting the state from entering into or renewing local and private contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), marking a momentous victory in the movement to end the detention of immigrants. FFI worked for years in partnership with communities across the state and alongside people in detention to achieve this victory and get one step closer to fully ending the state’s involvement in the federal immigration detention system. New Jersey became the fifth state to pass legislation that would ban or limit immigration detention.

Freedom for Immigrants drafted and co-sponsored the Dignity Not Detention Act (SB 29) in 2017. This law effectively freezes the growth of for-profit immigrant prisons in the state of California. The bill also prohibits cities and counties from entering into new, or modifying existing, contracts with private prison companies with the purpose of expanding immigration detention. And it makes California the first state in the country to require private immigrant prisons and jails to comply with open record laws. Your state can be next! Check out our Guide to Dignity Not Detention in Your State.

Freedom for Immigrants and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center consulted on and heavily advocated for an amendment in California’s budget (AB 103). Gov. Jerry Brown signed this budget action into law in June 2017, and California became the first state in the country to put a moratorium on all new contracts between California municipalities and ICE for immigration detention expansion for the next 10 years. The budget action also gave the state Attorney General the power and resources to monitor all public and private immigration detention facilities in California.  

In 2017, Freedom for Immigrants advocated for and co-sponsored legislation to ensure that county jails cannot move toward video-only visitation. We ultimately won with AB 103, which prohibits local immigrant jails that provide in-person visitation as of January 1, 2018, from converting to video-only visitation. The bill also prohibits local immigrant jails from charging for visitation when visitors are on site. 

Building off of the Dignity Not Detention Act, Freedom for Immigrants in 2019 was part of a coalition of immigrant rights and criminal justice advocates that passed AB 32 in California to phase out private prisons in both the criminal and civil context. However, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the portion of the law pertaining to private immigration detention facilities in 2023; the court deemed the law unconstitutional as applied to private detention contracts for ICE and other federal agencies, though the ban remains in place for private prisons in the state. 

Freedom for Immigrants endorsed and supported the introduction of this groundbreaking bill in 2023, with our Executive Director also speaking at a Congressional briefing and panel discussion in support of the bill. The New Way Forward Act rolls back harmful immigration laws that, for decades, have led to racial profiling and disproportionately resulted in the incarceration, deportation, and destruction of families of color and immigrant communities. Learn more here.

Freedom for Immigrants endorsed this bill, first introduced in October 2017 in the House and reintroduced in 2019, which builds upon our achievements in California. FFI has supported a Working Group convened in Washington, D.C., to work alongside allied organizations to continue advocating for the legislation as it’s repeatedly reintroduced in Congress. 

Freedom for Immigrants stood alongside partner organizations in calling on ICE to reduce its detention levels. We utilized biweekly monitoring reports on COVID-19 to help pass in the House of Representative the HEROES Act and advocate for other laws. Learn more here.

In 2013, Freedom for Immigrants launched the #EndtheQuota Campaign on Twitter with our award-winning video, “34,000 Sold,” catalyzing a renewed national effort by over 20 nonprofits to end the Congressional bed quota that required 34,000 people to be in immigration detention each day. Since 2009, congressional appropriations laws had tied funding to a minimum number of immigration detention “beds.” The #EndTheQuota Campaign contributed to the introduction of the first-ever amendment (the Deutch-Foster Amendment) to eliminate the detention bed quota in the 2015 House Appropriations bill. Although the Amendment did not pass, in 2017, with support from legislators such as Senator Cory Booker, the bed quota language was removed during appropriations negotiations. However, local detention quotas still exist that require ICE to pay private prisons and local jails for a certain number of beds even if there isn’t a requirement to fill them, which leads to confusion as to whether the agency should be working to fill the beds. 

Building off of the momentum in California, Freedom for Immigrants wrote a federal budget amendment, introduced by Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (WA), to stop immigrant detention expansion nationwide. Although the amendment failed to pass the Senate, the amendment was heard on the House floor in 2017 and passed in the House of Representatives in 2019.

Freedom for Immigrants drafted the Detention Oversight Not Expansion (DONE) Act, a bicameral bill first introduced in May 2018 and reintroduced in July 2019 by then-Sen. Kamala Harris (CA) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (WA) that would prohibit the expansion of immigration detention, improve oversight of these facilities, and fund community-based alternatives to detention. 

After the popular Netflix show Orange Is The Black featured Freedom for Immigrants’ National Immigration Detention Hotline throughout Season 7, the first Trump administration shut down our hotline. Freedom for Immigrants sued ICE with pro bono counsel from Hueston Hennigan. We won a preliminary injunction, requiring the hotline to be restored nationwide. This case is ongoing.

Under the first Trump administration, the U.S Department of Justice sued California in an effort to strip the state attorney general of the power and resources to monitor ICE detention. Freedom for Immigrants supported the California State Attorney General in defending this lawsuit with an amicus brief with pro bono counsel from Pillsbury. A federal court upheld the law as constitutional. 

The City of McFarland violated SB 29 in approving permits for the largest expansion of immigration detention in California history. Freedom for Immigrants and the ILRC sued the City and GEO Group with pro bono counsel from Nossaman LLP. We won a preliminary injunction.

Both GEO Group and the U.S. Department of Justice sued California over its ban on privatized immigration detention centers. Freedom for Immigrants supported the California State Attorney General in defending this lawsuit with an amicus brief with pro bono counsel from Constantine Cannon. Although a federal court upheld the law as constitutional, particularly as it applied to ICE, this portion of the law was eventually defeated in 2023 in a ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. 

Since 2013, the government has infringed on the First Amendment rights of these programs over a dozen times. Freedom for Immigrants has successfully fought for reinstatement of visitation rights in each of these instances. This time, we have had enough. Along with the Etowah Visitation Project, Freedom for Immigrants sued the Etowah County Sheriff’s Department in federal court with pro bono counsel fromReed Smith LLP. 

Freedom for Immigrants provided testimony and heavily advocated the Federal Communications Commission to create a rule to lower phone call rates from immigration detention centers. In 2015, the FCC created a rate cap for all interstate phone calls.

Freedom for Immigrants worked with allied organizations to urge ICE to create the Stakeholder Visitation Directive, which allows groups to request a tour of an immigrant detention center and conduct interviews with people who sign up. 

After ICE rescinded all social visitation in March of 2020 due to COVID-19, FFI led a nationwide coalition of nearly 30 Visitation Groups and other partners in a campaign to pressure ICE to fully reinstate visitation rights, successfully restoring a vital form of connection for people separated from their families and communities in the isolating detention system. Learn more here.