Community-led Visitation Groups continue to operate and work to end the isolation and abuse of people in immigration detention by providing vital resources and in-person solidarity.

Visitation is a critical tool that allows people in detention and communities to build and maintain relationships and human connection. It’s the primary form of communication immigrants in detention have with their families, communities, and loved ones. Community visitation is also critical to monitoring human right abuses in immigration detention. 

Through the National Visitation Network, community connection with people inside detention evolved from a largely isolated experience to a thriving, nationwide community of thousands of trained and resourced community members offering tangible support. Freedom for Immigrants forged strong, collaborative relationships with Visitation Groups to facilitate connection between people inside detention and the groups on the ground best equipped to provide local support.

Visitation Groups across the country are now well connected to each other and to FFI and equipped with enhanced capacity and resources to carry forward the work. Guides for visitation coordinators and volunteers, training materials, and toolkits remain available to the public to support new and existing groups. 

About the National Visitation Network

Over the years, FFI’s National Visitation Network: 

• Led community members to gain access to local ICE detention centers and supported the formation of their own independent Visitation Groups to provide resources, connection, and solidarity with people detained.

• Offered trainings to build community volunteers’ capacity to engage with a trauma-informed, anti-racist, and intersectional lens. Training topics such as LGBTQ+ sensitivity, challenging saviorism and undoing white supremacy, addressing the false “good immigrant” vs. “bad immigrant” narrative, and understanding the connections between community accountability, racial justice, and following the leadership of those most impacted by systems of oppression. Other trainings centered on political education and skills-based learning on topics such as campaign planning, engaging in advocacy with congressional offices and government oversight bodies, utilizing media to amplify the voices of people detained, and inside-outside organizing strategies.

• Built community knowledge and capacity to provide critical direct services to people detained, such as visitation, pen-paling, sponsorship, support finding legal assistance, human rights advocacy, and money for basic needs.

• Worked collaboratively to win major campaign victories, such as closing ICE detention centers throughout the country and pressuring ICE to reinstate community visitation after its multi-year blockage following COVID-19. FFI’s Visitation Network also built power by working alongside people detained and their families and other community partners to strengthen internal organizing efforts, including mass labor and hunger strikes. 

Find a Visitation Group in your state:

• ARIZONA

• CALIFORNIA

• COLORADO

• FLORIDA

• GEORGIA

• IOWA

• LOUISIANA

• MICHIGAN

• MINNESOTA

• NEBRASKA

• NEW HAMPSHIRE

• NEW JERSEY

• NEW MEXICO

• NEW YORK

• OHIO

• PENNSYLVANIA

• TEXAS

• VIRGINIA

• WASHINGTON

Rev. John Guttermann Legacy Award

Congratulations to the honorees of the Rev. John Guttermann Legacy Award, an honor that was awarded annually to recognize the extraordinary work of Visitation Groups. Learn more here.

Our national campaign to #ReinstateVisitation won!

About the Reinstate Visitation Campaign

After fighting to restore social visitation inside immigration detention for over a year, our campaign won the full reinstatement of this vital form of connection in 2023. ICE initially revoked visitation at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020.

With social visitation now restored, people in detention won’t be as isolated from their family and friends, and community groups can resume their critical in-person monitoring of human rights abuses happening on the inside. 

To understand ICE’s new guidelines, read this explainer and watch this video.

Learn more about the campaign, including a timeline and summary of media attention.

About the bond fund

Freedom for Immigrants began piloting a bond fund program in 2010; in its early years, we would help families raise funds to pay the bonds of their loved ones. In 2013, we began serving as the obligor for some of these bonds, and in June 2018, with the support of the James Irvine Foundation, we officially launched our National Immigration Detention Bond Fund. During the span of this program, we raised over $3.6 million to pay the immigration bonds of over 460 people. 

Freedom for Immigrants provided individuals it bonded out with critical wrap-around services through its proven case management program to document, support, and enhance the likelihood of success for their case. Learn about our campaign to bond out people from the West County Detention Facility in Richmond, California, when its contract with ICE was terminated. 

Learn more: What’s a bond?

Detained immigrants, including people arrested in ICE raids and mothers separated from their children at the border, sometimes have the opportunity to be released on a cash bond — which is like bail — while fighting their immigration cases.

However, many families cannot afford the high bond amounts set by ICE or immigration judges. There is no upper limit for immigration bonds, but Freedom for Immigrants has documented immigration bonds ranging from $1,500 to $250,000, with a median of $4,250 and an average of $14,500.

Without the ability to pay a bond, longtime lawful permanent residents, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants who may be eligible for relief from deportation are forced to languish in immigration detention. Many fall victim to predatory bail bond companies. For example, Libre by Nexus forces customers to wear oppressive ankle-monitoring technology and puts their customers in debt by charging $880 upfront, 20% of the bond amount, and an additional $420/month. This pushes families into poverty, creates emotional strain for parents and children, and makes it extremely difficult for families to afford legal representation. It's past time for a humane solution that allows families to stay together and lets individuals focus their efforts on winning their immigration cases. 

FFI is dedicated to building a world in which all can move freely and thrive

The profit-driven immigration incarceration industry thrives under the assumption that incarcerating immigrants is necessary. But the real reason people are being locked up for months or even years is because it is profitable. It’s profitable for private prison companies and other private interests, who have entrenched rural communities in dependency on carceral economies and carceral employment markets. There is another way.

What are alternatives to detention? 

Since immigration detention has existed, communities have organized to free their loved ones, and advocates have offered refuge to newly arriving immigrants. In this way, alternatives to detention, in the form of post-release support initiatives, have existed as long as immigration detention. In response to community organizing efforts, the private prison industry co-opted the term "alternatives to detention" to describe cruel, unethical, and nefarious government programs, such as the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP), that actually function as alternative forms of detention. 

This is why Freedom for Immigrants no longer uses the term “alternatives to detention” to define our work. Instead, we define our vision for a world without immigration detention as a community investment strategy.

Previous community investment programs 

Since 2010, Freedom for Immigrants has piloted various forms of community investment programming, starting with our Post Release Accompaniment Project (PRAP). We then expanded the scope of this Bay Area-based demonstration model into national programs: the National Immigration Detention Bond Fund to post bond and free people from detention and reunite families; the National Sponsorship Network to help ensure anyone coming to the U.S. is met with hospitality in the comfort of sponsor homes; and the Post-Release Accompaniment & Mental Health Program to provide connections to volunteers in or around recently released individual’s local areas to provide mental health resources and opportunities for therapy. And through our policy advocacy, we convened a Working Group on “alternatives to detention” in Washington, D.C. alongside the Women’s Refugee Commission to help successfully pass into law an FY21 budget bill that included $5 million dollars for community-based programming. 

About the Migrant Freedom Home 

In recent years, detention across the state of Louisiana has skyrocketed. More people are now detained in Louisiana than any other state, except for Texas. 

Freedom for Immigrants owned and operated a safe house for immigrants released from immigration detention in Louisiana. Opened in September 2019 in Jena, Louisiana, the Migrant Freedom Home offered temporary and safe sanctuary to people released from immigration detention, including warm meals, clothing and care packages, and transportation. This home was particularly critical during the COVID-19 pandemic as it provided a space of respite for people before they continued their journey to their next destination. 

How it worked

People in immigration detention contacted Freedom for Immigrants through ourNational Immigration Detention Hotline or through our network of visitation programs in Louisiana.  

Freedom for Immigrants then worked with local advocates and lawyers to secure their release through our National Immigration Detention Bond Fund or other means. Our volunteer house manager coordinated the release and welcomed individuals into the Migrant Freedom Home.  

Our dedicated volunteers ensured each person had transportation to their long-term home, and in some cases, Freedom for Immigrants provided long-term housing through our ecosystem of sponsors and sponsorship groups.

Throughout the span of the initiative, we supported the safe release of over 100 people from immigration detention in Louisiana and welcomed them into the Migrant Freedom Home! The program also modeled what a country without immigration detention will look like. The cost to support one person cost us about $15 per day, far less than the $165 per person per day it costs taxpayers to detain someone in an abusive immigration detention center.

Abolishing immigration detention is a global movement

Freedom for Immigrants launched its international organizing work 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 multinational prison corporations do not want immigrant rights advocates working in international solidarity with one another — this work across borders threatens the stability and growth of the rapidly expanding immigration detention industry. 

In addition, many countries have “ safe 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.” 

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.

International law has enshrined the right to visitation during immigration detention and FFI has worked to defend this right with the following 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 called 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 set 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 called for an investigation into U.S. involvement in expanding India’s camps for Muslims. 

• Sharing Lessons Across Borders: Freedom for Immigrants partnered 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.