Abraham Paulous Challenges the Immigration to Incarceration Pipeline
Abraham Paulous, Executive Director of Families for Freedom, tracks the concepts of “citizenship,” “documentation,” and the changing face of immigration throughout American history. He shares his own experience as an Eritrean refugee and his time at Rikers as evidence of the inextricable link between the immigration and criminal justice systems, and to challenge the laws and policies that criminalize color and poverty.
This PhilTalk opened “Is Immigration Detention the New Incarceration Boom?”- the second program in Philanthropy New York’s four-part “Ending the Criminalization of Poverty” series. The program challenged grantmakers to see justice reform and immigration as part of the same equation, and explored the laws and policies that force approximately 40,000 immigrants -undocumented and documented alike- to sleep in county jails, and federal and privately run prison facilities every night. Central to the conversation were the current and expected changes under a federal administration unwelcoming of a pro-justice reform and immigration agenda- including the increasingly frequent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, the recent executive orders, and threats to sanctuary city funding.