06-03-2025
Know Your Rights: Here's How to Defend Immigrants Against the Most Common ICE Tactics and Unconstitutional Actions
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Knowing your rights, exercising your rights, and informing others about their rights is not a crime. It's a constitutional right.
We are living at a moment when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is threatening not only to arrest and deport immigrants but arrest and prosecute everyday people and leaders simply for educating people about their constitutional rights when approached by ICE agents. Sharing information is more critical than ever. Helping to defend our immigrant communities and neighbors is one clear action that we can all take right now.
To that end, We Have Rights is an animated 'know your rights' short film series in eight languages, co-written by immigrant communities and immigration attorneys on how to defend against the most common ICE tactics and unconstitutional actions.
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The We Have Rights film series was launched by Brooklyn Defender Services in 2018, during Trump's first term in office. Brooklyn Defender Services, where I long worked as a public defender, was one of the few offices in the country with dedicated funding to provide free legal representation to immigrants facing deportation. Unfortunately, there is no right to counsel for anyone in immigration proceedings yet recognized in the United States. Facing overwhelming numbers of cases, our office's immigration attorneys were struggling to find materials to hand out to people and families that they represented who faced the possibility of ICE detention and deportation.
Everything that we found was full of legal jargon, hard to understand, and available in only one or two languages. So, in close partnership with those we represented, production and creative agencies Media Tank and Variant Strategies, and some big names including actors Jesse Williams and Kumail Nanjiani, and singer and activist Fiona Apple, we created our own.
Since Trump's Inauguration, this series has already reached over 75 million new people on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X. The site, which includes information on Emergency Preparedness Plans and includes all films, is being visited between 10,000-20,000 times per day.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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