DEFUND HATE - a call to action
“tell your members of Congress to Defund Hate, not just under emergency circumstances, but permanently.”
This week, the House Appropriations Subcommittee for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed a funding bill for fiscal year 2021 that begins the long-overdue process of defunding our nation’s deadly immigration enforcement system. This bill takes steps to hold Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) accountable for tearing apart thousands of families and causing hundreds of deaths.
For the first time since the inception of these agencies, the spending bill proposes a massive scaling back of enforcement infrastructure by:
reducing funding for detention from 45,000 beds to 22,000 beds, and down to 10,000 during the public health emergency
placing restrictions on prolonged detention, even for people subject to mandatory detention
prohibiting the use of funds for border wall construction and rescinding the money that was allocated for that purpose last fiscal year
stripping these agencies’ authority to transfer funds from other agencies and restricting their authority to reprogram funds within their agencies
Along with other provisions that challenge this country’s enforcement-only approach to migration, this bill is a product of your advocacy and years of work by the Defund Hate campaign. But it is only a starting point.
The full Appropriations Committee in the House will consider this bill next week, after which the Senate will take on their own version. But the road of negotiations is long. Instead of coming to an agreement by the end of the fiscal year, September 30th, Congress is planning to punt the decision until after the election in November. So we need to maintain pressure - this week to ensure that the House moves forward with a bold proposal and throughout the rest of this calendar year to ensure our demands make it to the final bill.
That means we need you to tell your members of Congress to Defund Hate not just under emergency circumstances but permanently. Use the script below as a guide to call or email your representative and senators about what you want to see in next year’s funding bill:
“Hello, I am a constituent in your district/state and I am calling/emailing to urge you to fight for funding that reflects the values of our community. Your spending decisions have the power to help or harm us, so I am urging you to divest from harmful immigration enforcement carried out by ICE and CBP and invest instead in [x] for the people in your district/state. You need to hold these agencies accountable by ensuring that their Fiscal Year 2021 appropriations include dramatic funding cuts, and stand for programs that actually support your constituents.”