This is the year.

Three years ago, as we came together with family and in celebration over the holidays, the stark image of a young Syrian boy’s dead body floating ashore in a desperate attempt to escape to safety captured the world’s attention and urgently demanded action. The complicity of governments’ in this young boy’s death reflected the grave costs of global inaction to humanitarian crisis. This year again, as we enter the new year, a crisis is building at the U.S.-Mexico border as politicians play politics with human lives. I spent the last 9 days in Barretal , the Mexican government run refugee camp where individuals and families who traveled with the Refugee Caravan are being forcibly held. I worked with a local organization to help provide legal advice around the asylum process and help people prepare for their asylum interviews. Barretal is the U.S. and Mexican government’s response to years of failed immigration, economic, and foreign policies. It is also the stark illustration of an an...

The caravan has turned a collective protection strategy into a political crisis. This show of immigrant power is incredibly important. * Published on Conversation X: http://www.conversationx.com/2018/11/28/why-caravan/  Nearly 5000 humans — children, parents, young and old, and mostly people from Central America — are currently stuck in limbo in a hastily built refugee camp on the United States’ southern border in Tijuana, Mexico. They have “chosen” to journey to the U.S. and to do so through a collective caravan for a combination of personal and political reasons that can only be understood through the context of the U.S. immigration and economic systems. They are largely people escaping violence or poverty back home. Some are coming to rejoin families already established in the United States, and some are coming for better opportunities — a choice many more privileged immigrants like myself are welcomed to make every year. This idea of “choice” (be it about the choice to c...

Some may know St. Louis for the militarized police that rolled down Ferguson’s neighborhood streets - violently demonstrating the state’s willingness to use repressive tools against its own citizens. For those of us working in St. Louis’s legal institutions, we know how the violent policing is reflective of a broader legal design that keep poor and black communities criminalized, physically segregated, and under-resourced. But St. Louis also holds an important place for many of us as a critical site of resistance as we saw and were a part of the Ferguson uprising that called out the guilt of the entire system. Today in St. Louis - a new movement is building from inside and outside of the cages of the Workhouse. Created in the 1800s as a debtors’ prison, the Workhouse jail remains at the heart of the brutal criminalization system in St. Louis. To call the jail hellish, inhumane, and discriminatory only attempts to capture the urgency with which people are willing to do anything to escap...