It is with much gratitude and appreciation for your continued support that 1Love Movement has kept our fight to end deportation and reunite families for the past seven years. When we hosted our 6th Year Anniversary Celebration last October we were able to highlight our collective community power, awarding our fellow grassroots partners for their powerful organizing across the country and internationally, such as Cambodia Town Philadelphia, Family Unity Network of Lowell, Release Minnesota 8 Campaign, 1Love National, 1Love Cambodia, Philadelphia Family Unity Network, Southeast Asian Freedom Network, Grassroots Crim-Imm Collective, and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Beyond Bars. In addition, we introduced our new 1Love Board Members, passionate individuals who have been dedicated to issues in our local Southeast Asian communities. Earlier this year, our Board Members, and local partners, filed an Urgent Appeal to the United Nations to end US deportations and reunite Cambodian refugee families. This followed a Human Rights Tribunal held in Philadelphia several months before.
In the months following, we took a step back to breathe as a collective of volunteers to reflect on our next steps as 1Love Movement going forward. During this time, the Board went through a Leadership Retreat to discuss how we as an organization will continue to support our local, national, and international partners, and our goals as 1Love Movement. We are happy to share that we will continue to take a supportive role in local, national, and international fight towards ending unjust deportation and reuniting families through advocacy and fund development for campaigns and initiatives that resonates with our mission and vision.We look forward to reconnecting with our partners in our continued fight to end deportation and reunite families. Thank you for your patience, hope, and love.
This movement is full of love and we are, 1Love Movement.
Please watch our 2nd installment of the SEAFN Campaign Video Series below. Video 2: Our Resettlement continues our Southeast Asian American story from Video 1, looking deeper at our resettlement process in the US. As our communities tried to take root in the US, we faced violence in new and unexpected ways – both external and internal to our communities. SEAFN Campaign Series: VIDEO 2 Our Resettlement focuses on our refugee resettlement experience in the US, and our community’s experience of trauma and resilience in systems of criminalization, incarceration, and deportation.
VIDEO 2 CALL TO ACTION!
HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW!
DONATE to support the SEAFN Campaign trip to Southeast Asia to build movement beyond borders with our deported community.
SEND us to Southeast Asia with a message of love and support to our deported sisters, brothers, family and community in Southeast Asia
And finally, in response to the Call To Action released with SEAFN Campaign Series: VIDEO 1 Our Survival on November 21st 2015, we launched our SEAFN CAMPAIGN SOLIDARITY LETTER to get support from organizations, groups, businesses and affiliations. Within just 1 month, the SEAFN Campaign was endorsed by almost 200 groups across the US and Southeast Asia. This show of support is incredible! SIGN ON HERE!
Good Morning. Our names are Mia-lia and Nancy, and we work with 1Love Movement, a Cambodian and Southeast Asian organization that addresses incarceration and deportation issues in our community. We stand with our Philadelphia Family Unity Network partners, and all of our allies and networks around the City and across the country as we say that we stand against the Mayor’s plans to undo the groundbreaking Executive Order he signed in 2014 to end the use of ICE detainers and any City communication with ICE through our jails. The national hate rhetoric and scapegoating has infiltrated our City, and has our City leadership back on a message that labels our community members “criminal aliens” deserving of double jeopardy, double punishment, and the life sentence of permanent deportation. This is deeply disturbing because the Philadelphia community holds a community-based vision of safety, healing, and justice. We are called by a shared belief that our community’s healing comes from addressing the root causes of violence, that we need to end the criminalization of our communities and that all people, regardless of immigration status or criminal conviction should remain with their chosen communities. While we hold people accountable to their actions and crimes, we recognize that violence stems from trauma, from poverty caused by devastating economic policies, war, forced migration, systematically segregated and underfunded communities, racist immigration policies, and a criminal justice system that separates and destroys families and communities.
As we find ourselves back here again today, demanding our human dignity, values of family togetherness, second chances, transformative justice, community accountability, and healing – we are reminded that we won this before against all odds and we will win this again. Philadelphia sparked a fire in communities across the country, and we won’t let that fire die out now in the 11th hour. In a City that established a Mayor’s Office on Re-Entry, a City that Banned the Box, a City that is committing to decreasing the number of community members in the prison system by at least 40%, we know that the incentive for rolling back this just policy isn’t coming from us – it’s coming from outside our City. We need to stand strong for our policies that reflect our values as a society, that honor our community’s dignity, that respects the diversity of our lives, and are grounded in the belief of redemption.
Who: The Philadelphia Family Unity Network, The Shut Down Berks Coalition, Immigrant leaders, Advocates, Community Organizations, Lawyers and Religious Leaders What: Press Conference When: Monday, November 16th, 11am Where: North side of City Hall, Philadelphia
SEAFN National Campaign Launch Day: October 24th, 2015
On October 24th, 2015 the Southeast Asian Freedom Network (SEAFN) successfully launched our campaign to end deportation and displacement, and reunite families. Southeast Asian American communities organized gatherings in 14 cities across the country, and in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to view the new campaign launch video and strategize our next steps forward!
WHERE WE’VE BEEN
Our SEAFN organizations, along with many community and advocacy groups, have been relentlessly fighting deportation for over a decade through community storytelling and media, policy advocacy, leadership and political education, and coalition building. Although we have all made impact at the federal, state and local levels, our community continues to be targeted for deportation and family separation. But the most powerful result of our collective work over the years has been the building of a national network of Southeast Asian American leadership grounded in the humility of learning from our past, and inspired by love and belief in what is possible if we stand together today. We are trained through our own lived experience and community movement, we’re ready, we throw down for each other, and we will not give up.
WHERE WE ARE NOW
After all these years of building, strengthening, advocating and organizing, we are at a watershed moment for the Southeast Asian American community. 2015 marks 40 years since Southeast Asian refugees began being resettled in the US. This year,SEAFN launches a new strategy and a collective campaign that calls our attention and organizing to the Repatriation Agreements between the US and our home countries – Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. It is in this year that SEAFN calls for us to UNITE as a Southeast Asian American community to demand an end to further displacement of our people by deportation.
WHERE WE’RE GOING
As SEAFN, we stand united as passionate, loving, and committed organizations in our communities. We hold a vision bigger than all of us: A vision of our communities organized for justice and love to protect our human rights and live together with dignity for generations to come. As we enter this turning point for our communities, we believe with our whole hearts that we have a responsibility to our ancestors, an obligation to our elders, a pact to those lost in the streets and in the system, and a promise to our young people, to end our community’s intergenerational battle with displacement in all its forms.
HOW WE GET THERE
As the member organization of SEAFN focused on deportation, 1Love shares these principles we’ve learned along the way to guide us in this campaign:
We HONOR the sacrifice & movement history of those who came before us
We BELIEVE in the power of our community & grassroots organizing
We RESPECT the struggle & leadership of most impacted communities
We STRIVE to lead & act with love, vision, humility, understanding, & possibility
We COMMIT to doing the hard & continuous work of challenging ourselves to unite towards a common goal
We UNDERSTAND that our struggles are connected to the struggles of other communities, & we commit to stand in solidarity
If you’re with all this, then lets move! WE ARE READY! Are you?!
HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW!
WATCH and share the new campaign launch video below
Southeast Asian Freedom Network (SEAFN) is a national collective of grassroots organizations working towards radical and transformational change led by those most impacted by systemic injustice. Member Organizations: 1Love Movement, Freedom Inc, Mekong NYC, Providence Youth Student Movement, VAYLA New Orleans, ManForward.
The Gang of 8 are voting on amendments to their Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill this week, and the politicians we need to target are representatives of your states! Two major pieces that will affect so many of our families are:
1) “Grassley #43” – This amendment will make it possible to deport someone on the basis of “suspected” gang membership, and broadens thedefinition of a criminal street gang. We know that racial profiling and discrimination puts many people into these categories, and with this amendment, will threaten them with deportation.
2) “Grassley #53 – Right now ICE is only allowed to hold ppl in custody for 180 days before releasing them. This amendment will make it possible for ICE to hold ppl in custody INDEFINITELY.
Call your elected officials all afternoon and and tomorrow morning. Text, call, go drop in on your parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, friends, and neighbors, and ask them to make the call too!
Call and say this, if you are directed to voicemail, leave this in a message:
“I am calling to ask Senator _________ to oppose the Grassley Amendments #43 and #53 to the Comprehensive Immigration Reform bill. Amendment #43 is nothing more than guilt by association, and will lead to racial profiling and more targeting of youth in immigrant and refugee communities due to suspected gang membership. Amendment #53 will lock up thousands of people indefinitely in immigration detention, separated from their families and communities. Please stand against both these amendments, and for the basic human rights of immigrant and refugee communities.”
Here’s how it goes:
Tell them you oppose these amendments with every bone in your body and with every bit of power you have to tell your whole communities not to vote for them if they don’t oppose these unjust pieces of legislation!
1Love Movement 