Woods Fund Grantee Spotlight: Organized Communities Against Deportations
Antonio Gutierrez, who oversees Strategic Development & Operations for OCAD, sat down with the Woods Fund to discuss the organization's work, how that work has been impacted by COVID, and working in solidarity with Black-led organizations.
* This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Q: Tell me about the work Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) does.
A: Our focus is on supporting undocumented immigrants facing deportation. We do public campaigns around the case itself, and how that person was detained by ICE. Many times, we select campaigns or cases that show a violation of the individual's rights – such as entering without a warrant into the property or the home. We also focus on policing tools that are used by federal agencies such as ICE and local law enforcement, such as CPD [Chicago Police Department] – the information that is shared with ICE by CPD, such as the gang database, facial recognition software, license plate readers… the list goes on and on.
I think we're very unique in our approach around the penalization of undocumented immigrants. It’s very important within our core values – we believe that all undocumented immigrants should have an opportunity to thrive in the United States, that we need to have broader discussions about how we've been criminalized for centuries now, and that we need to approach it from not an angle of who's a good versus bad immigrant, or who should be deported or is considered deportable.
Q: How has that work shifted during the pandemic. What kind of new dimensions has it taken on during the crisis? Has the work contracted or expanded?
A: We actually expanded. We added a new position we were not anticipating – a digital organizer – which of course, I'm sure many grantees from the Woods Fund actually did the same. And we started a Mutual Aid Fund in the beginning of COVID, our members – who are the leaders of the organization which are fighting or have fought and have won their deportation case – were already letting us know that they were they were getting laid off, that the kids we're not going to school, and because they don't have childcare, then they have to stay home. Many concerns were just about safety and information that was being provided to them. And even access to sanitary items were needed in the beginning, such as cleaning supplies and sanitizer, that were very much in need, and that they didn't have the resources to go and buy all those products on top of course a shortage that was happening in the beginning of the pandemic. Another effect within our work due to the pandemic was the need to go digital. We have shifted from in-person events/workshops to doing webinars, diversify our interactions and engagement strategies on social media and other platforms.
Before COVID, people considered us a grassroots organization. we would have community events to do workshops and have political discussions with our members to integrate undocumented families or individuals into the organization. And with COVID all of that kind of shifted, it had to change.
And so we have now moved to a digital platform to diffuse information to the public. Members or individuals that are facing deportation can still find a space digitally [through our channels] to discuss how they're feeling, what's going on in their cases, and receive the support they need. Our goal is to create collective mutual support.
That is one of our values as an organization, “We are what we need,” we don't need saviors or allies to come and tell undocumented individuals – how they should be stopping their own deportations. We can do that on our own.
The Mutual Fund has provided over $80,000 to undocumented families in the Chicagoland area. And we also started working more around detention facilities concerns during the pandemic and supporting individuals in detention, as part of the Free Them All campaign, which is a national campaign led by the Detention Watch Network. OCAD is on the campaign’s steering committee at the national level while our organizing focuses on Illinois facilities and adjacent states. Even before COVID19 OCAD was highlighting conditions and we filed litigation against McHenry Detention Center due to its treatment of one of our members, Wilmer Catalan. There have always been alternatives to detention, such as ankle bracelets, in-person and home checkins that individuals had to do with immigration.
We believe this pandemic should be a moment to take advantage of some of those alternatives and to use this moment to shift the narrative of the need of even having detention centers to begin with.
Those are the major kinds of things that have changed in our work. And currently, we have a high profile public campaign, Beto – who was released in the beginning of the year in February, after organizing and legal work that was done around his case. Unfortunately in June, in the middle of the pandemic, he was called for a check-in, he then was detained at that check-in and ICE expedited his deportation within 36 hours. This is not the end, we're still waiting out legal litigation and building a public campaign to hopefully bring Beto home, deportation is not the end of our work, it is a mere moment to continue to resist ICE attacks on our community.
We’ve actually been able to get five individuals released from detention using COVID-19 as leverage. And we hope in the next couple months to amplify that into a much more systematic way of getting individuals released and hopefully getting as many individuals released as possible at least in the state of Illinois.
Q: Let’s turn to the racial justice framework. Your team often works in solidarity with Black-led organizations and has been involved in many of the direct actions that have been taking place since Memorial Day. Tell me about that work and those collaborations?
A: The relationship between OCAD and Black-led organizations comes from our mutual understanding of criminalization of brown and Black communities, back in 2017 and 2018, when we started doing collective work on the Chicago Police Department gang database. When we publicized what the gang database was, we created a coalition with other organizations, many of them Black-led, such as BYP100 and Assattas Daughter’s. Research found that 96% of the people that were in CPD’s Gang database are people of color. So we saw this as racial profiling tool. We saw the connections – how criminalization affects people of color overall. We started publicizing the gang database, becoming a topic of discussion for the mayoral candidates during the last election and doing direct action. Currently, we're still working with that coalition to eliminate the gang database. And now we're starting to look at other various tools that are used to further criminalize our communities. We have identified this connection between law enforcement agencies, local law enforcement like the Chicago Police Department, and ICE.
As the Black Lives Matter movement gained a lot of momentum – and has been gaining momentum for years now – but now with COVID, with the murder of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, there was a moment where all of our members were questioning what exactly what was happening and the connection to looting attacks businesses were receiving.
We took this as an opportunity to approach the anti-Blackness sentiment that exists in the brown and immigrant community. There is some animosity, or some misunderstandings and stereotypes that have been so embedded in – not only in our Latin American culture, but also just as well as an immigrant in the United States those stereotypes are presented to you as well. And so we've been approaching those conversations in our digital assemblies on zoom and social media engagement showing our support for the Black Lives Matter Movement. Especially when all the riots were happening it required a lot of conversations where we were acknowledging that that anti-Blackness still exists in our OCAD space.
And we're gaining resources and creating curriculum for political education and conversations around how we hope to also shape our membership’s understanding of Black Lives Matter and the importance of our role in supporting that movement in order to achieve collective liberation.
As a result, we've been focusing a lot of our political discussions over our digital assemblies around this concept, and how we unify with other movements. Just in the assembly, yesterday, we actually had a conversation around Zionism and the liberation of Palestine. We want to better understand broader social justice issues outside our own specific movement, to be able to thrive together, but also to understand how our oppression and the one from others relate to white supremacy and racism.
We have gained material wins out of these collaborations. Partnerships that have been going on for years. We’ve created momentum within a movement, with brown and Black unity, around criminalization and our understanding of how mass incarceration is working in the United States…