We Are a Refugee State 4/26/25

Sanctuary city is a very hot topic for a lot of cities because they're trying to basically force the hand of the cities to collaborate with ICE. Lansing, although not particularly called a sanctuary city, does a lot of work behind the scenes to be able to protect our communities. We have two really awesome representatives that represent the north and the southside of Lansing that also you know are very proactive and very receptive to listening and applying to support their constituents because the immigrant community are constituents of this community. They are your neighbors. They are your construction workers.  They are your child caretakers. They are the people that put food on the table so it feels nice that we do have sort of a safety net compared to other areas.

I wish people understood that we're all human. We are no less just because of a piece of paper. Our communities work just as hard if not harder to make a living and keep this country and literally hold this country from falling apart. They built this country for all our communities and if you focus on the state of Michigan, we are a refugee state. 

A lot of our community comes from all over the world from Rwanda, Kenya , Palestine;  from Latin America you know: El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala. Without these immigrants, this state would not function. This country would not function. We want people to see our humanity, but realistically, they only look at the profit that they can make off of people and if they don't see that, then they're gonna find out the hard way by losing people left and right until one day they come and pick up your neighbor and you don't see them again.

Obviously it's super traumatic for our communities because we've lived it. I hear about people being picked up at least once a week. It's getting really close to home now. Family friends are being picked up. It's breaking people apart. It's gonna get really bad really quickly. Especially with the Baldwin detention center opening up in the next couple months, we're gonna see a lot higher up take on rates and just taking people left and right and it's not gonna be good. It's the time to act now.

A lot of the work that needs to be done is supporting our community by helping to push legislation that is gonna support our communities or more so right now is stopping bad legislation that is anti- immigrant that's being pushed in our communities and across the state. Right now there is an anti- immigrant house bills 4338-4342 that are trying to be pushed. It's the local government sanctuary policy, prohibition act, and county law-enforcement protection act. A lot of these would prohibit non-citizens from receiving services or grants, punishes counties for prioritizing privacy and protection of their residence if they enact or enforce laws that prevent local officials from communicating or cooperating with federal officials. They're anti- immigrant not only for latin-Americans but anti-immigrant for Asians, anti-immigrant for the Muslim community and for the Arab community.

I know that this country doesn’t like people learning a second language, but learning a second language will open up so many doors. If English speakers can pick up Spanish or Arabic in the community that would be so great because Arabic is also a very highly spoken language here in Michigan. And they once you engage with them, understand their struggles and listen to their stories you will not see them the way that they have been viewed for so long in this country and I think that's critical also obviously in the Latino community, but definitely in the in the Arabic speaking community, just cause their struggles aren’t only very similar, but just as bad if not worse.

It's hard to stay grounded with daily punches that we keep getting in our community; the daily setbacks that they keep pushing- Like I said, the grant bills and anti-immigrant executive orders at the federal level. It's hard to stay on track of the work that needs to be taken into account when you're trying to put out fires left and right so everything's very heavy but that is why they are succeeding. They benefit from community leaders and community organizations staying in hypervigilance and fight or flight mode and just being constantly exhausted. We always have to remind ourselves that we cannot do it all and that we need to pull people into these actions and to organize more work. We need more people hopping into the organizing roles, and you know volunteer teaching people on how to be organizers and how to support their communities. Because yeah, they wear our people out to the point where we can no longer do work because either we fall ill or we get completely burnt out.

I find a lot of hope in the younger generations in the way that they are evolving and thinking and educating themselves at a very early age. They don't have to be taught to see humanity in other people they just see it and that alone is so much weight off the work that needs to be done. We're very resilient people. Immigrant people have struggled for so long. We've been in this mode of survival for as long as we can remember but it definitely feels very heavy and it definitely feels like it's time for other people to do this heavy lifting for us, especially those of us that suffer at a personal level with these things. It's definitely crushing us. It's so heavy to cope and I think it's definitely time for allies to start taking leads on uncertain things that our most vulnerable communities cannot.