 Congress, thank you for joining us tonight. This is an exciting show, Immigration Justice. What would it look like? And we have fabulous guests tonight. Matt Nelson and Arturo Viscara and Adrian Pine will all join us and they will speak each for six minutes. And then we'll have a robust Q&A. Looking forward to that. Following that, we'll have our capital calling party. We've got two bills that we will be asking our members of Congress to co-sponsor. And they are H. Rez 64 by Jaya Paul. She is the lead author there and HR 536 Garcia. So it's a roadmap to freedom and a new way forward. One of them dealing with paths to citizenship, among other things, and the other to end private for-profit detention centers and mandatory detention, very important bills. Right now we will go to Medea for an update on the Iran deal. The cameras on this is right here. Yeah, who's ever talking, if you could meet yourself, that'd be great. Very excited about tonight. We're, the update on Iran is that the talks began in Vienna today. Yay. Oh, by the way, you can all introduce yourselves and let our speakers see that you're from all over the country and all over the world. So say hi in the chat box. So the talk started in Vienna today. A good sign is that they're going to continue probably until the end of the week. They say there's not gonna be any quick through, but the fact that they're talking now, they're not talking together. They're talking in different rooms. So through the European Union as intermediary, but at least they're talking and that's positive thing. So we're very excited about that. We also came off this weekend from a wonderful protest we did with some folks from New Jersey at the home of Bob Menendez because he is head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and he does not want the US to go back into the nuclear deal and is a very powerful person. So it's important to keep up the pressure on him. Thank you. Absolutely. Yes, I've written to the Biden White House saying, I never voted for Bob Menendez to be president. Why is he dictating foreign policy? In addition to that rally that Medea just mentioned, we also have a couple of hundred New Jersey Code Pink activists sign a letter saying, they want a chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who is going to be for peace, not war. And that was tweeted out today. If you're on Twitter, please free tweet us. Get that message out. All right, a couple of other quick announcements. The 1033 program, we will be looking at that on May 18th Today there was a report, Stephen Semler had a report out that the transfer of military equipment has increased a lot under Biden. I'm not quite sure why, but we will be working on that issue as well coming up. All right, Mary, maybe while we're waiting for more people to come on, I know others will be joining us. You could just take a look at what we're, oh, there you are, put it in the chat. So there's the agenda and the capital calling party script as well. We have a website, you know, Code Pink Congress. You can Google it and find it easily. And there's a toolkit there where we list the bills that we'll be talking about and we'll be mobilizing cosponsors for. So always, you know, check it out if you want to see what bills we're following. Okay, so why don't we get started? Our first speaker will be Matt Nelson. You're with us? Yes, Matt Nelson, there you go. Okay, so Matt Nelson is the executive director of Presente.org. That is the nation's largest online Latinx organizing group. Before that, Matt was the organizing director for Color of Change and he co-founded several worker owned cooperatives in the Midwest. He is a seasoned campaign strategist who has won dozens of local and national campaigns and a community organizer who has trained thousands of activists. Matt Nelson was recently featured in the first major book on the Ferguson uprising entitled, Ferguson is America, Roots of Rebellion. He also contributed to the book, Welcome to the Revolution, Universalizing Resistance for Social Justice and Democracy in Paralysis Times. Matt Nelson, you've got six minutes. Tell us what's on your mind. Right on, and thank you so much for the invitation. And indeed, 2021 has to be a year of incredible healing and rebuilding. And in order to do that, we do that through solidarity and connection and really trying to address some of the big questions like the topic of today. What is our vision for justice, for dignity in terms of immigration? Yes, as introduced, Matt Nelson, I was born in Columbia and grew up in Minnesota, which makes me a proud Minna-Lumbian. And yeah, I helped launch Presente about 11 years ago and has been the ED for about the last five years, the executive director. Yeah, really honored to be here. Presente has been in solidarity with Code Pink and we have a lot of friends around the room. So it's nice to be among friends. And in short, our commitment is to build power, change culture and how we like to say it, stay Presente. And we build power through organizing and yeah. So I thought about this question about, you know, what would it look like or what could it look like or what do we want to shape immigration justice to be? And in the time I want to cover like three main things, one is temporary protected status. Like that is a cornerstone of a just immigration policy because temporary protected status of course understands that human mobility is a fundamental human right. And that it is our duty to have policy that makes sure we're one welcoming people as people who are entitled to dignity and human rights. And that we're also addressing the root causes and conditions of the reasons why people seek to migrate and why people seek protection and asylum. And temporary protected status is one of those places that allows people to come to the United States and be protected from criminalization and prosecution because they are having to leave places that are related to these root causes, like violence, like climate change. As of now, I believe about a quarter of people seeking asylum to the United States are doing so because of climate catastrophe. And we have an obligation to address these issues, to address root causes and also address another root cause of migration is militarism. And of course, as Code Pink folks know is that the U.S. has been one of the worst actors related to militarism and Central American violence that has impacted communities in Central American across the world. So temporary protected status is one of the ways that we need to expand it for countries like Haiti. We need to expand it for Central American countries that recently endured Hurricane Cain's Iota and Eta. And that's one easy thing that the Biden administration can do very quickly that the Congress can do to expand some of these protections. The other piece that I think is really important is that there's been four decades, not just the last five years, but for the last five presidents, the paradigm of immigration policy has been restriction, exclusion, militarism and punishment. And it's time that we change that paradigm to defending human rights and mobility, intervening on this fundamental causes and the fundamental assumption that people who cross the border are criminals. That's something that we have to get out of the minds of even the current Biden-Harris administration, State Department and officials, they're still holding on to this doctrine of we have to punish people who cross the border. And that has just got to go away. Like we can't have immigration justice without taking away that those assumptions, those hard doctrines that have informed the immigration policy again for the last five presidents. And then the other piece that I think is really important to talk about is privatization and is privatized incarceration. And because in addition to those elements of the doctrine, there's also been something unique about US immigration policies that it's been at its worst, it's been at the intersection of white supremacy and corporate domination. And now people who followed this issue a while remember under George W. Bush, there was sort of this fight, which would win out, would we have a immigration policy based on white supremacy like Representative Sensenbrenner wanted or we would have one that just gives the entire ability for corporations to exploit people, which is what George W. Bush wanted. And George W. Bush went out, we had a policy that was really based in giving corporations all the power to exploit migrants. And now under Trump, it sort of swung the other way. It was definitely the like white nationalist, supremacist immigration policy. And now we have an opportunity in the student administration to actually crack that frame all together. And one of the ways to do it is to address privatizing incarceration because private prisons, private prisons that detain about 80% of migrants is that truly that nexus. And I think we're actually like on a path, not just the Biden administration's partial announcement to not renew contracts, which we've asked him to go much further and include the Department of Homeland Security, include ICE detention facilities and not just say that they're not gonna renew them, but actively cancel them. We have to go at them in terms of the state expansion and present a co-led an effort to get banks to pull their financing out of private prisons a couple of years ago. And to date we've gotten nine banks and about 2.5 billion in financing pulled out of the industry. I think this is one way that really we could end private prisons and that would get us on the road toward immigration justice. I guess the last thing I'll say before I pass the mic to the other amazing panelists is like these issues need deeper solidarity amongst our partners in liberation across the border in Mexico and Central American and other places like there are active civil society groups that we should be partnering with and these issues are fundamentally intersectional. You can't talk about immigration without talking about climate. You can't talk about immigration without talking about criminal justice. And we have an opportunity to really understand these issues in a way that allows us to really build this transformative change that we need to address because with the impending economic crisis there's gonna be more pressure to have more projects that are fossil fuel-based and more projects and more of our economy based on fossil fuels and based on prisons and based on private prisons. And those are things that I see coming now. And so it relates to the infrastructure bill and conversation that we'll need to have in the coming weeks. And that is how I think we can get at a lot of these issues. So I'll pass the mic to whoever's next and thank you so much. Thank you, Matt. Excellent points. And we'll be talking more about the, you know the divestiture from private pension funds and public pension funds that invest in these detention centers, these private detention centers. All right, we're gonna go to our next guest. Medea will introduce our next guest. Thank you so much, Matt. Yes, wonderful. And remember, put your greetings in the chat box and you can also start putting questions in it there if you'd like or comments. Our next speaker is somebody who is one of those rare combinations of a attorney and an activist and puts his lawyering skills to use for those who are the most oppressed in our society. And that is Arturo Viscara. I know Arturo from his work at School of the Americas where he was doing just what Matt was talking about which is addressing the militarism of Latin America and the U.S. trainings, some of the worst dictators and human rights abusers in the region. And Arturo was trying to put a stop to that, then went to work at the Central America Resource Center. And now he's with the LA-based group, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights known as CHIRLA, working from the Mexican side of the border. And so I'm very anxious to hear what you have to say, Arturo. Great, yeah. Well, thank you so much for having me. Good to see you, Nadea Ann. Well, I mean virtually. And I want to also say hi very quickly to Ann and Paqui, it's been a bit and nice to see you on here as well. Well, I also wanna thank Matt for his introductory part. I definitely wanna build on some of those points and it took away some of my talking points there, Matt, but that's a good thing, I think. Really quickly, what I'm seeing, I'm based in Tapachula Chiapas now, which is near the border between Guatemala and Mexico, for various reasons we came down here, but it's very apparent what's happened now is that, the Biden administration has basically made a deal with the Mexican government to stop my, they actually are basically traded 2.5, the US government's gonna land 2.5 million vaccines, COVID vaccines to the Mexican government in order for them to, again, clamp down further on migration. Everybody calls it a regular migration or legal migration, but let's be very clear, these people are fleeing violence, whether that be political, economic, social, or whatever that may be. Fleeing economic violence is just as legitimate as any of the others, but anyway, they're trying to stop that. So that's the kind of deals that they're making. They're also now stopping the caravans, there was a caravan last week, I'm not, did anybody know that there was a caravan last week that are left under us? Because they're basically just stopping them from even leaving under us through legal measures, through, and these are US policies, right? This is imperialism in action because whether it be with the stick or the carrot, they're getting these policies. Other governments do the dirty work for them, whether it be the vaccines, or whether it be for what Trump did, more vulgarly is threatened to put tariffs on everything. So that's what's happening. And what are we seeing here on the ground? Increased militarization in real time, a deportation of families from Mexico back to Central America, a deportation of unaccompanied minors, given that that's like the big scandal in the US and whatnot that the racists started being able to have their talking points paired even by the liberal media. And of course, the Democrats, the vast majority of them are either too unimaginative or too scared to counter the narrative. I would say that with a little note, when we see like the pictures of them being, kids being held in detention centers, I don't criticize the Biden assertion too much for that. I don't have a lot of time, but I don't think they have much of a choice at this point because they have to accept the kids in. There was a prior regime where it was expelling every single person, including the kids. And the fact that they're letting them in is at least a small, it's the only change basically, besides a little bit of changes with the MPP policy, migrant protection protocols, if anybody knows about that. But besides letting some of those people in from MPP and letting the kids in, those are really the only things that have changed with Biden. So it continues to be the Trump policies. I mean, asylum is cut off for the vast majority of people continues to be. So that's the situation we're seeing in real time and the suffering is immense. People are continuing to leave because of the desperation, because of the violence, whether that be political or political, which would in my mind would be, would also include failure by the governments to account for the natural disasters, including the hurricanes that devastated her under us in November. But at the end of the day, I think the whole asylum, also thanks to one of the other speakers here, Adrian, she's helped me understand with her book, Asylum for Sale, that, you know, asylum, we have to remember, you know, there's always focus on asylum, but asylum, all migration is legitimate. I'll just leave it that we can't be focused on asylum because once that's a racist, racist institution, the real sense, it's not that people get in for asylum and they have a good chance, especially against Central Americans, Mexicans, Africans and other poor black and brown countries, it's a racist institution. And it's set up to deny them in all sorts of different ways and I'll let Adrian comment more about that. All migration is economic. I mean, okay, right now, the policy is basically being like, there are people just die, go die somewhere, whether it be in your home country, whether it be in Mexico, whether it be wherever, go drown yourself in the sea, whatever it may be, we don't care. And that's obviously a non-sustainable situation. People are need, they're gonna look to continue to survive and that's what makes them so. And the fact that they continue to survive in the face of all of these obstacles, in the face of worldwide fascism is inspirational. And we need to match their desperation. And there's a lot more I could say. I know that I'm at or almost out of time. I would just say that this situation, I agree with Matt about how this is intersectional, but I'm supposed to say that this is also very, besides what he mentioned of those other intersections, this is also a racial justice issue. And I feel we should, we need to frame it as a racial justice issue, given all these other movements in the moment that's happening now, besides the climate issue, besides it being some of these other issues. I'm sorry, I don't remember right now. I was just trying to tell the truth and I know a lot of you know the truth. I know that we talk about it. The root cause is the militarization that the U.S. economic policies, the neoliberal economic policies that the U.S. has imposed in all of these countries. It's like clockwork, Haiti, Central America. Like these are the biggest countries that are sending people and these, the U.S. dictated their economic policies. So there shouldn't be a surprise, like we should point that out and we have to do this in a way that's factual and it's just like, this is the way that it is. You can't, and we need, and the framing should be about that. And it shouldn't be about, it should be about reparations. It's not about aid and all thank you, Biden and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's about take responsibility for what you've done. We can't talk about police reform without talking about the history of racism in this country. We can't talk about immigration without talking about the history of imperialism and exploitation and economic exploitation. So even that, thank you. Thank you so much, Arturo. Some of your words will stay with me for a long time. I know like all migration is legal, asylum is a racist institution. Think of all migrants as asylum seekers, right? I mean, it's a new way to frame it and I appreciate you sharing that. Great, our next speaker, Hania, Jodad Barantz, another co-host is going to introduce her. Yeah, thank you. And kind of to your point, Marci, and thank you, Matt and Arturo, for taking us through this vivid journey and experience that immigrants have to go through to get to the land of the free and home of the brave. But I always say that no one really wants to leave their home unless they have to. And so kind of to add to what you said, we have to match their desperation and the urgency. And with that, I will go into introducing this Shiro, who I'm so honored to welcome to the floor. Adrienne Pine is an associate professor of anthropology at American University. She is the author of the book, Working Hard, Drinking Hard, on Violence and Survival in Honduras, and co-editor of the book, Asylum for Sale, Profit and Protest in the Migration Industry. Adrienne Pine is a medical anthropologist who has worked in Honduras, Mexico, Korea, and United States, Egypt, and Cuba. She has conducted extensive research on the impact of corporate healthcare and healthcare technologies on labor practices in the United States. It is my absolute honor and pleasure to welcome you. Please take the floor. Thank you, Hanya. Thank you also to Marci and Medea and Code Pink for hosting this. And what an honor to share this forum, this space with Matt and Arturo as fellow speakers. I admire you both so much. And it's also great to see so many friends here on the Zoom call. Hello, everybody. So as Arturo was just alluding to, there's a lot of talk about root causes right now, but the root causes, we know what the root causes are. They're capitalism and imperialism. The US is the root cause of the migration crisis, US foreign policy. But the talk about root causes serves a really important purpose for the Biden administration, which is basically to justify policies that ultimately we now are going to exacerbate those root causes, just as they did when Biden developed them in 2014 in response to the unaccompanied minor crisis, what was called the unaccompanied minor crisis at that time. So he developed what was called the Biden plan, the Biden plan for Central America, which basically gives massive amounts of money, of development and security aid to the Northern Triangle countries of Central America. And of course that's development aid that is going to further expel people from their countries because we're talking about massive development projects, not development projects that are going to enrich communities or allow them to remain in place, but rather the kinds that expel them. And security, again, of course, what that means is militarized security, the kind of security that actually produces insecurity is tremendously Orwellian. And this, the Biden plan itself is really sort of rebamping of Reagan's Caribbean Basin Initiative of the 1980s. And the intent of it is again, a foreign policy objective to push China and Russia out of the sphere of influence of Central America, which was of course, what the Caribbean Basin Initiative was doing in the 1980s trying to isolate Nicaragua and starve it out in sort of, in addition to what they were doing with the illegal contra war against the revolutionary government of Nicaragua. So there's this whole, like incredible violence being enacted in terms of foreign policy using immigration justice language as an excuse. And I think it's tremendously dangerous. Another thing I wanted to mention, and it's kind of lazy and lucky of me to go last because I get to respond to these fantastic talks myself, but I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the issues that both of the preceding speakers brought up. Matt was talking about the criminalization of human mobility. I think one of the things that we face in sort of, in criminalization is first the history of Biden's history as vice president of really building up the infrastructure that Trump then seized upon to jail and criminalize migrants at the border. The kids in cages, that started with Obama Biden. Of course, they've changed the name now to overflow facilities, but it's still happening. Biden of course has deported a tremendous number of immigrants using this public health excuse leftover from last year, the COVID excuse, which in fact itself has been one of the primary factors last year, all of these deportations in spreading COVID throughout the Northern Triangle of Central America and throughout Latin America was the US infecting people with COVID in its private prison systems and then deporting them through ICE Air, again, private contractors where there's this tremendous amount of profit and spreading COVID, which also then of course created hostility against deportees and who are already vulnerable to violence when they return to their home countries. I think talking about all of these factors, these, the real root causes, if we wanna call them as opposed to the root causes that serve to justify further foreign policy violence and violence against migrants here in the United States. So whether we're talking about climate change or militarism, really what we're looking at here is the violence of capitalism. Capitalism is what's causing climate change. It's our unfettered resource extraction and the profit motive that is creating the kind of climate destruction, the global warming that we're seeing as well as toxic pollution that's driving people out of Central America with mining projects and other sort of massive development projects that themselves are pushed by things like the Biden plan. So we've got, they all come back to this violence of US imperialist capitalism. And I think in order to, while I absolutely agree that TPS is an incredibly important tool, I think that at the same time, and I know that you both agree with me, that at the same time that we're fighting for these policy measures, we need to have this bigger analysis in mind that we need to be fighting against the profit motive in every aspect of the migration process and foreign policy because that is what is creating this tragedy. And also that these same tools that can be very useful in protecting migrants and are necessary are also incredibly political intrinsically. So the United States has this history of allowing Cuban migrants to come as the wet foot, dry foot policy, similarly granting full TPS to Venezuelans and yet not granting TPS to Hondurans, for example, who as Matt mentioned have suffered through Ayota and Eta two category five storms when they entered the country and who are living, suffering under a narco dictatorship. The president's brother was just sentenced to life plus 30 years for major drug trafficking in the Southern District Court of New York and the president himself as a co-conspirator in that case and four other major drug trafficking cases and he's appointed, basically appointed, he did not win the elections by the U.S. after a U.S. supported coup in 2009. So I think we need to, yeah. I mean, just keep in mind the horrific nature of U.S. foreign policy, the fact that we need to advocate for policies right now that will save people's lives. And we also need to be fighting tooth and nail as Matt said, and Arturo is doing as well in solidarity across borders, not just for migration justice, but to stop these root causes. So I'll leave it there. Thank you. Thank you, Adrienne. So eloquently stated, we are looking forward now to a Q&A session. If we can, Mary, thank you so much, Mary Miller with Code Pink. She's helping us with the tech. We can have all three of our speakers in gallery view. We can take some questions and I haven't answered them. So we have Adrienne, Matt and Arturo. Just there we go, fantastic. All right, Medea, you wanna start us off? Questions? Sure, I'll throw out a couple and you can answer what you want. Matt, you talked about TPS. Should it be given to everybody forever? I mean, isn't that kind of a temporary solution? How long does that go on? As Adrienne said, it's used so politically. And none of you talked about the dreamers. So is there something there you can mention? What, why don't we see migration en masse from Nicaragua and Costa Rica? So whatever ones of those start with. Three big questions. If you can keep your responses to under a minute and a half then everybody will have a chance. Okay, go for it. So why don't we start with you, Matt? Sure, you know, I do think that the question about dreamers is important and it's an aspect that we haven't really covered and it's around the changing of culture. You know, and if people remember like the dreamers went from being seen as criminals to being seen as heroes in a span of about 10 years. And it was incredible to see. I'm sorry to interrupt. Maybe some people don't know who the dreamers are. So maybe we should just say that first. Sure, what about 11 years ago, there was a epic 2,500 mile walk from or whatever, 1,500 mile walk from Florida to Washington DC. And it was undocumented young people who really were coming to the Capitol to demand protections and demand a path to citizenship. And it was a really a key moment in I think the immigrant rights space to have, to visualize that particular aspect of it. You know, like we could spend the next hour of course, like critiquing the bill and how it didn't become a bill and how it's still being introduced and has been introduced for the last 20 years, I think. But it is significant. And I think it's also culturally significant in terms of how the dreamers were able to really transform the narrative. And that matters, like narrative change and culture change really matters if we're ever gonna see the systemic policy change that we need. And I think the, you know, focusing on some of the like core issues that people brought up. And one of the things that I think is often not talked about when you talk about TPS is how could we leverage this to actually build the power of organized migrants across the Americas to be in solidarity with this transnational justice agenda that we want. And of course, and you know, I agree with our drill it is about reparations. Like we have to have some kind of Marshall plan beyond what we're seeing in, you know, a lot of what we're seeing from the Biden-Harris administration is layups in oatmeal. It's just not fulfilling and it's sort of the easy things they can do. I had oatmeal this morning, so no dig on oatmeal. But I think it's, you know, that, like we have to move beyond that. So I covered a couple of them and others can probably handle the rest. So Artur, do you want to go? Sure. I'll leave the dreamers question to the side. I would say that there's the dream and promise act that at least TPS folks with existing TPS they've gotten themselves on the agenda to also be included with the dreamers. So TPS goes, it's a very complicated thing because it's then used as a tool for imperialism. We're going to take away the TPS if you don't succumb to our economic dictates. I mean, they've been doing that for a long time with El Salvador. I wrote my thesis about it in 2005. I'm going to age myself there. But I do believe, but I don't, I'm not against it. I also think, yeah, TPS for everyone, that's actually feasible. You could make it or DED, which is a very similar thing which is directly by the president. I mean, those are types of things. I do think that there's ability to use those things for everybody or also specifically for some of these other bigger migrant groups to then put more pressure going forward. I actually, instead of TPS just for Central Americans, I kind of liked the idea more of TPS for everybody, all of the migrants. I also want to just bring up, although there's all this focus on the border and what's happening, we need to continue also to focus. We shouldn't necessarily, the public and the media have done this very good job of linking the two things. And yes, they're linked of like border, quote unquote, security of this national security perspective, which is totally bogus and bullshit. But either way, they don't necessarily have to be linked. It's this advantageous to us or we're going to have to turn it into an advantage. And that would be to talk about the root causes of why people are coming and why people can't. So I think those are kind of the two choices, either to delink them or to turn the linkage into something that's advantageous to us and the social justice movement and TPS for everybody. Let's do it and then see how that works out. Just trying to be quick, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, I would say it's obvious. The short answer is that Costa Rica made a deal with the US to be neutral during the whole Cold War and they were left alone and they've developed a much better and robust economy and educational system as a result. Nicaragua had a revolution and has not had because of their lack of connection to the US at least for those 20, well then there was a period where they had a US kind of candidate but it's very clear that even if they're as poor they're not as violent as countries and therefore the migration isn't as pronounced and that has to do with the Nicaraguan revolution and the breaking of relations, especially military relations with the US for that time. Thank you, Adrienne, you wanna add something? I mean, I don't wanna take up more time. I think just borders themselves are incredibly violent and we need to get rid of them, that's all. I think Kanya, you have a question. I do, and this is a really interesting one regarding the Farm Workforce Modernization Act and the question is a controversial issue is the Farm Workforce Modernization Act having mandatory E-verify that will expand the use of the H2A guest worker program which the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the close to slavery. Would Senator Alex Pidea's essential worker proposal that includes farm workers along with the broad range of other undocumented workers be a more acceptable alternative? We support Pidea's initiative for sure. And as like, again, a really important step, I think we're seeing, I think that's, it is a question that we need to address. And I'd like the other speakers to address it because as a constant, I think challenge and point of attention is that when we applaud the things that are happening like Pidea's bill or the things happening with Dream of Promise or all the other bills, I think there's been about six or seven bills that we've had to say, yes, these are better or these are a seven in the right direction. And at the same time, we can't have our social movements being pulled to the right as we're applauding the new administration. That's not like, that's not the like mob boss, white supremacists in your face stab you in the chest, fascist situation we had a little bit ago, but at the same time, it's the duty of social movements to continue to push and not be dragged to the right just because we have now a new administration. Furthermore, it has to be seen as like Trump was not a neoliberalist. If anything, he like challenged some of the, he shook and challenged some of the fundamental neoliberal policy that other presidents were able to do. Biden-Harris are clearly neoliberalists and hopefully they'll be more Keynesian than others have been, but I think that's a real challenge. We have to see a lot of these essential worker initiatives through that lens of going back to a neoliberalism that we all around the table here knows was such a dramatic, violent, brutal failure. So that's one thing. The other thing I wanted to, I'll actually say the other thing for later. I wanna say something about family separation, but maybe that's another question. Why don't you go for it while you got the mic? Oh, just that one of the core civic, they used to be the biggest private prison company on the planet is now I think the second biggest because of what I'm gonna talk about today. They sued some groups and partners and friends who were like saying publicly that they aided family separation. And a judge basically asked them, said, oh, do you incarcerate parents? And they said yes. And they're like, oh, when you incarcerate parents, do you separate them from their families? Like, can they still be their families? And they said, oh, no, they can't because they're locked up in our facilities. So the judge was like, that's family separation. And I think it's this understanding of like mass incarceration, criminalization. It is family separation. And now you're gonna see a report coming out this week from the state department saying, oh, the people crossing the border, they're not children, they're like men and they look a little scary. And it's still under this same paradigm of a brutal family separation. Even though, like Adrian said, it's not like the same cages. They're looking for like nicer cages, but it's still a similar brutal situation that we have to actively work toward this progress while not be quite frankly pulled into the Obama-Biden era of death and destruction that was their immigration policy. So Arturo, Adrian, do you wanna respond to that? Farmworker or any of these ones popping up in the chat that I think you're responding to, Arturo, about the international right to asylum? I think, okay. I would say one thing is that above all else, everybody solidarity to me is the understanding. And I'm sure a lot of us, a lot of you all agree with me, is the understanding that our futures, that our freedom is linked, right? But there is also what you're not being directly impacted by some of these things, like it's, besides only kind of like a moral level or a tax level level or whatever, tax money level, people are being in a different way. I'm Salvadoran, right? And I just also wanna just remind folks that there are Central Americans out there. There are people that are speaking, but their voices are not heard. So always keep that in mind when we're doing the work, the lobby work and whatever it may be. Everybody has their own reasons, speak your truths, speak about your friends, speak about your experiences, but look to also, we're out there, we're speaking about this, we've been writing about this for a very long time, from a progressive point of view, because the right wing Central Americans and whoever made that, no, screw them, don't pay that just enough. So it's not just an identity thing, right? So I would just say that besides that, I think that there's, I wanna say about farm worker bills, everybody needs to be legalized, of course, but I think that we should rethink guest worker programs in the sense that if there were the possibility of having people be able to migrate back and forth from their home countries, get paid in American dollars and take advantage of the unequal economic system. This isn't a long-term fix, but I'm just talking about a short-term fix. I do think that it's possible to discuss them. People are very turned off because the Bracero program to even discuss it, but I believe that there's people don't really wanna, and that's just because people don't really wanna leave their home countries, especially go to an increasingly fascist country in the US. So we do have to think outside of the box. I'm not turning forward a proposal, I'm just saying we do, I think there's different ways to do things that aren't necessarily repetition of the past, that would allow people to make money, save it, and keep it and go live in their home countries. The problem is the security situation is so bad. Also how would they stop extortion? Again, that would be demilitarization getting the US out and their puppets and having a real kind of social healing. But let's be on the scope of this conversation, just as a nugget of like to think about, I do believe that that's possible. Thank you. I'm gonna ask you each to maybe wrap up 30 seconds or less, anything you wanna leave our participants with because we're gonna soon move to our capital emailing, calling party and mobilize support for some of the better pieces of legislation that address immigration. So 30 seconds or less. Well, Adrian didn't have time to respond to the last, so we should give her a little bit more time, but great. Okay, Adrian, you get a minute. Okay, very briefly. I agree with both Matt and Arturo, of course, on all of these topics. And I think we need to be pushing for legislation like the Pavia Bill and supporting it, but at the same time never losing sight of the bigger issues. So there's the temporary and the long-term thing and absolutely wanna just once again, emphasize what Arturo said, that migrants themselves have more to say and more powerfully and a better analysis than any of us who are not going through that experience. And I think in particular the migrant caravans that Arturo has worked with for years now, coming from Honduras and El Salvador and Guatemala and joining together in Tapatula, joining together throughout the process have been just ferocious in their critiques of, brilliantly ferocious, I mean, in their critiques of the entire system that is forcing them to leave. And we need to be not just again supporting bills like Pavia's Bill, but taking cues from the people who are most directly affected and standing in solidarity with them and following their lead. I, one more thing, I work, I get, I've worked on probably a hundred asylum cases doing affidavits and doing testimony in court and just wanna highlight that while things are just changing the tiniest bit, now at the border, as Matt was just talking about and we previously noted the sort of changing the names of the prison of the cells that people are, the cages people are being put into, there are, I don't even have any idea how many tons of thousands of people currently in migration detention around the country, maybe people who have been living here for decades and get caught on a minor infraction and are sent to these jails and are going through asylum processes, I work with a lot of them. And that is part of that whole private detention network. It's not just recently arrived people and this is part of, of course, the broader prison industrial complex and tremendous violence that connects US foreign policy to the violence against brown and black people here in the United States while in that. Anything else, final words? You wanna go to Arturo? Arturo? Since she didn't do it, I just wanna plug Adrian, the book, again, that Adrian co-edited, it's a great book. I was at the privilege of moderating a talk on it on the book launch last week. It's called Silent for Sale, again, I know what it was talking about, but it really just in preparation for that and reading it, because I'd gotten it a couple of months ago. You know, it's really changed my mind. It's really impacted me a lot and it's really made me speak out internally with my own organization and other coalitions just in this last week. I really highly recommend it. And I would also just say that, you know, I would just underline that this is also a racial justice issue and that it's the truth. I think we're ready for a conversation about the root causes of migration. And if we're not quite there, we need to hasten that conversation because the situation is untenable, it's unsustainable. Thank you. Thank you. Any words, Matt, you wanna leave us with? Just that I think we have to deepen our transnational consciousness and our transnational heart in the practice that we do. And, you know, recently, actually present day our half a million digital membership has recently combined forces with 55 migrant and refugee led organizations across the country that make up the Alianza of Medica's organizations. And that's been, so now we have, we never meet or do anything without people from El Salvador in the room who are from Puerto Rico, from Mexico, from across the region because that's how we operate. And we also don't operate unless we have black and indigenous voices, black and indigenous migrants because it's a shift, it's a conscious shift that we've made. And I think that it's actually been part of understanding that we actually are partners in liberation here and we can't do anything without that type of consciousness. And that takes a level of reckoning. You know, we are at a period this world is at a period of reckoning. And I think that has to impact our daily work as well and how we interact with each other. And I think as we hopefully get to a point of regathering we can regather with this transnational heart this commitment to addressing racial justice and intersectionality and, you know, smashing white supremacy in the corporate scum that get in our way. Right on. All right, at this point, we're gonna unmute and... Marcia, can we recognize that Mary Jean said we're also departing large numbers of Southeast Asians to Cambodia and Vietnam. So thank you for that idea. Thank you. So we're gonna unmute and thank our guests, Adrienne Klein, Matt Nelson, Arturo Viscara for their fabulous presentations, the Q and A. Thank you. Thank you so much for the hard work. Thank you. Great job. Wonderful. Thank you. Great. Thank you. For this PhD level. Great. Thank you so much. You're welcome. And now we're gonna move on to our action portion of the Zoom. We ask all of our participants to stay with us. We're gonna get on the phone and Mary is going to post both on the screen and in the chat, the action alert. It involves support for two bills. Now, another bill was mentioned tonight. I was looking up, trying to find the number for Alex Padilla's bill and I was not able to find it. So I don't know if they decided a number yet, but we do have these two other bills that definitely have numbers. And we are gonna be talking about HREZ 64, which is the roadmap to freedom. The principal author is Pramila Jayapal, the chair of Congressional Progressive Caucus and that has about 50 co-sponsors. And we're also going to push our representatives to co-sponsor HR 536, that's by Chui Garcia and it's called A New Way Forward. A New Way Forward deals with ending for-profit detention centers and ending mandatory detention. Pramila Jayapal's bill deals with, it's aspirational in many respects, but it talks about the importance of family reunification. I'm not dividing families. Talks about giving everybody a roadmap to citizenship in the United States and not criminalizing those who are migrating here.