#ShowUp4Refugees
Refuge: protection, safety, shelter, a reprieve from danger, from persecution, from injustice.
Refuge is what many of our families, friends, and communities seek in coming to this country, often through long, arduous journeys. And countless communities across this country have a long history of receiving those who seek refuge with compassion and open hearts. This is what showing up for refugees looks like. This is what seeing each other’s humanity looks like. This is what leading with love looks like. All of us today and every day.
Yet expanding on Wednesday’s anti-migrant executive orders, on Friday the new federal administration turned its back on the millions of people for whom becoming refugees is matter of survival. This administration is choosing isolation and fear in suspending granting of visas to people from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
Mobilize the Immigrant Vote — as the only statewide multiracial California civic engagement formation working solely with immigrants and refugees — is clear that we show up for each other and for every single person and community who comes under attack. We show up in solidarity and resistance for all whose race, religion, country of origin, gender identity, or any other marker is used to dehumanize and curtail their freedoms. We hold firm with our alliance partners at the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans and African Communities Together and lift up their leadership.
So today and every single day until we are all free to move, to migrate, to be together with our families, and to live with dignity:
We call for checkpoints that will not say, Where are you from? Go back home. You are not wanted here. That will turn on the lights and call us by name. We call for countries that will look at us with their hearts and refuse to watch us die. That will rescue us from the water and meet us with balm for every wound.
We call for nations that will take roll every morning to remind themselves of how precious we are — of how beautiful, how relevant, how important, and therefore, how they must not fail us. That will tilt unprejudiced hearts to the anthem of our being, lift us higher than flags of victory and fly us into futures the shape of true justice. Because we are here and we are not going anywhere. Because we will call and call and call until we are all free. Because we know there is more than this. Because there will be more than this.
— NoViolet Bulawayo, Until We Are All Free Declaration of Unity
