Dear Community,
A father doesn't have to be anything other than a father. A three-year-old in Bluey pajamas woke up on a Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine, expecting what every child expects: that her father would be there, that he'd come home again that night. She didn't wake up wondering if he'd earned that.
Her name isn't ours to share. Her father was Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. He was 26. He was working two jobs and was driving to one of them when ICE agents opened fire on his car. He wasn't the person they were looking for. Six days earlier, in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo left his house the way he did most mornings, early, before the sun was all the way up. He expected another ordinary day. Instead, an ICE agent shot him during a stop meant for someone else.
A father doesn't have to have spent thirty-five years in this country, or have all the right documents, or sons who became teachers and engineers. He doesn't have to prove his goodness through work, sacrifice, or love. Parenthood is not a credential to be earned, and life is not a prize the state gets to withhold.
Children should inherit recipes, stories, and traditions not the memory of state violence. A little girl is going to grow up remembering the sound of gunfire outside her home instead of the sound of her father's car pulling into the driveway. There is now an empty porch in Houston where a father should still be sitting.
This country has long decided which families are worthy of protection and which can be torn apart. This violence does not exist in isolation. It is part of a long history of policies rooted in anti-Blackness and white supremacy that have determined whose families are protected and whose families can be surveilled, separated, or destroyed. From the forced separation of enslaved Black families, to the removal of Indigenous children, to today's deportations and ICE raids, family separation has been used as a tool of racial control.
Across race, age, gender, sex & sexualities the violence happening at the hands of the police state is an atrocity.
Mourning the loss of people like us with rightful rage does not make us an enemy. Today's attacks on immigrant families are not an exception to that history. They are another chapter in it.
We say the names of Black fathers this country has already taken from their children. George Floyd, a father, killed by the state in broad daylight. Philando Castile, killed with his own daughter in the back seat. The uniforms are different, the root is the same.
Immigration justice is reproductive justice. The right to have a family, to keep it, to raise it, and to grow old inside it does not come with conditions. The right to hold your child is not a reward. It is not contingent on citizenship. It is not something anyone should have to earn. That vision demands we reject every system rooted in white supremacy that decides some families are disposable. It demands that we defend every family's right to remain whole.
We don't believe these systems can be reformed into safety. ICE cannot be trained into gentleness. These are not systems with a flaw to correct, they are systems doing precisely what they were built to do.
We demand an end to the policies and systems that treat immigrant families as disposable. We demand accountability for the loss of these fathers. And we demand a future where no parent has to fear that a routine morning could be their last.
We imagine a world without ICE. Where liberation is not claimed for one community at a time, but for all of us, together, or it isn't liberation at all.
Por cada padre. Por cada hijx que los espera. Seguimos en la lucha.
In Solidarity, Jocelyn De la Rosa Executive Director California Latinas for Reproductive Justice