Anticarceral Legal Organizing
We implement massive collaboration to scale anti-detention work.
The US Department of Homeland Security holds tens of thousands of migrants in cages every day. In 2020, advocates and people detained successfully freed many amid the coronavirus pandemic, but in the first half of 2021, the US nearly doubled its incarceration of migrants, locking up over 10,000 more people. DHS has continued shackling many more with surveillance technologies such as ankle monitors and biometrics, and blocking many from even entering the US to seek asylum in the first place.
Against this detention and deportation machine, AcLO (Anticarceral Legal Organizing, formerly known as BorderX), a project of Innovation Law Lab, builds interconnected coalitions focused on getting people out of immigration prisons (#FreeThemAll) and organizing to shut them down.
AcLO trains and coordinates volunteers and affiliates across the US to enable legal services organizations in some of the toughest detention settings to scale their work and impact. Complementing increased case work, we deploy data analysis, community organizing, and movement-rooted litigation to strategically counter the racist carceral violence of DHS and its partners.
Alongside detained migrants, we create pathways to release and wellbeing.