“What do we want?” “VISION Act!” “When do we want it?” “NOW!”
After orientation week, I was looking forward to my first week interning at Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Los Angeles (AAAJ-LA), but I had no idea that it would become one of the most impactful weeks of my life. My week started with a 7:30am flight from Burbank Airport to Sacramento. Getting off the plane and stepping into that warm Sacramento morning, we rushed to the hotel to drop off our luggage and headed off to a rally in support of the VISION Act (AB-937). The VISION Act is a bill that passed through our state Assembly and that is currently waiting on the Senate Floor, 3 votes shy of being passed. If passed, it would ensure that persons who have been deemed eligible for release from local jails or the state prison system would be prevented from being transferred to immigration detention. As it stands, the status quo is that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation collaborates with ICE to have undocumented people who have served their time sent to immigration detention centers, punished yet another time. In short, the bill attempts to remedy one of the more egregious instances of oversight within our carceral system. At the rally, we heard from the assemblymembers championing this bill, as well as other organizers, but I found it most valuable to hear from the people who had themselves been impacted by the existing policies. We heard from one woman, incarcerated after defending herself from her abusive husband, talk about her experience being held in a detention center and her fight to make sure no one else goes through that experience again.
Protesting near the new Legislative Office Building
After we marched to the new Legislative Office Building and back, we decided to go back to the offices with a few of the activists, including one individual who had been directly transferred to an immigration detention facility after his release from prison. We wanted to speak with a few of the Senate members whose votes on this bill could literally work to create a more humane system of immigration. We visited the offices of 3 Senators - Umberg, Min and Newman, and I had the opportunity to see one of the ways that elected officials become receptive to the will of their constituents: lobbying. At each office, the other activists explained our cause to the staffers and though we left with no strong assurances, I left with a deeper appreciation for the power of solidarity and unity amongst a coalition of invested people. There’s power when people come together, rally, and become difficult to ignore.
The Advancing Justice team and myself at the 10th anniversary event
If my first day on the job was a lesson in AAAJ-LA’s current efforts at advocacy, my second day was a lesson in appreciating the history of hard work carried out by non-profit advocates - it was the 10th anniversary of AAAJ-California. We were hosting an event celebrating the past decade spent advocating for the rights of AAPI immigrants and other marginalized peoples. I got to meet a few assemblymembers and senators, their staffers, non-profit advocates, and other interns like myself. Meeting all these people, I got the sense that though everyone was prioritizing their own policy areas of interest, there are also broader areas of commonality that can bring people together to celebrate the advocacy of an organization like AAAJ-California in issues largely impacting the AAPI community.
This past week was another chronicle in my journey to move from the abstraction of philosophy to the concrete ways that our values can manifest in our policies and system of governance. Learning directly from the life experiences and perspectives of those harmed by our carceral and immigration system, I became even more aware of my own privilege. My parents were lucky enough to become documented after immigrating to the United States in 1990s, and I was fortunate to be born into this citizenship, because our system can be deeply unforgiving to undocumented persons when things go wrong in their lives. I am so grateful to have been witness to this changemaking process, and I hope to be an active part of many more such instances to come.