“A favorable immigration ruling in Chicago was overturned. The growth of our bond fund was not.”
– @olivalejandra.bsky.social
www.christiancentury.org/voices/irrev...
ahhhh <3 <3 <3 <3
“We were getting tens of thousands of dollars each day—a tidal wave of people opening their wallets because there was a chance it would help undo the harms that had been done to Chicago over the course of a brutal occupation by federal agents.”
– @olivalejandra.bsky.social
Extremely back on my "wake up babe, new @olivalejandra.bsky.social just dropped"!!
David Foster Wallace talks about the "this is water" of living a life made up of days. This really spoke to me about the process of making those days and ideals meet in reality.
open.substack.com/pub/ojosdesa...
“I want to live already in the future of all my beautiful things—the yarn in the crates transformed into the sweater I have planned for them, . . . books with my name on them ranged up on the shelf, my city calm and quiet.”
– @olivalejandra.bsky.social
www.christiancentury.org/voices/pract...
The Midwest Immigration Bond Fund:
You may have seen that 600+ detainees are eligible for release, which is amazing! BUT: you may not know that immigration detainees still have to pay for their freedom-- $1500 bond per person! The Midwest Immigration Bond Fund is raising money to help people get free, please donate: www.mibfc.org
I am personally matching donations up to $500 made to the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund by Friday at 5pm. Send me a screenshot & I'll post my match by EOD Friday. They've got a larger $20k match on the table. Courts are finally stepping in some so let's get these folks home. www.mibfc.org
I'll second this call. ICIRR, the main organization doing work to help the abducted immigrants in Chicago, is endorsing this organization & this link as the primary way to help pay the bonds to release those still held by ICE. Help them get home for Thanksgiving.
www.instagram.com/mw_bondfund/...
The Midwest Immigration Bond Fund launched in 2020 to provide bond assistance to people navigating the complex immigration legal system. That mission has become more difficult under the second Trump administration, the group said. blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/17/b... via @blockclubchi.bsky.social
tinyurl.com/MidwayToFreedom
615 of the estimated 3,000+ detained immigrants who were kidnapped in Chicagoland during Midway Blitz are expected to be eligible for bond this week. The Midwest Immigration Bond Fund shows up for people in detention who need bond, but it costs, at minimum, $1,500 per person. Pls help them.
mandy you are speaking directly to all my special interests here
“The work I do in front of the stove, the daily care I take with meals—this isn’t just about sustenance or being healthy. It is an expression of my morals and concerns, reminding me that the smallest of my actions is performed in a web of mutuality and care.”
– @olivalejandra.bsky.social
new newsletter on the 100th anniversary of mrs. dalloway and reading it from a less-than-generous lens born of my own frustrations
open.substack.com/pub/ojosdesa...
thank you so much! that’s so kind
Appropriate, because one of the worker survivors of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire was then deported as part of the first Red Scare.
"It has become clear to me in the past few months that the immigration legal system has dropped even the slightest pretense of its orientation toward justice."
@olivalejandra.bsky.social: 'A Way in the Wilderness'
www.commonwealmagazine.org/lent-reflect...
This is an endemic problem, by the way. Geo Group and CoreCivic regularly deny folks in detention their meds. I witnessed this practiced systematically at Krome for the 5 years I used to visit and communicate with guys there
For the Injustice Report today, my colleague @olivalejandra.bsky.social wrote a jaw-dropping, must-read post: "Yes, the El Salvador 'Deportations' Are Really Bad'
open.substack.com/pub/injustic...
This post has gotten so much traction & I’d just urge everyone to check out Pitzer’s history of concentration camps: we want these things to shout out their evil, to glow red w malign intent, but they begin as seemingly pragmatic, almost ordinary answers to mass containment & transport/transfer.
if you find yourself reluctant to support the guy at Columbia because you find some of the politics he espoused distasteful or even abhorrent, you should know that this is exactly the reaction that they hoped for in choosing him as a target for unlawful detention based on political speech.
Since Obama administration, at least, leftists/radicals repeatedly warned that Dems pouring cash into ICE and militarized police was not just evil in its own right, but laying the groundwork for open fascism.
We were dismissed, with various degrees of vitriol, for pointing this obvious fact out.
I think the more horrifying thing to sit with is this: the every-day operations of the jail, prison, and immigration detention systems are and have been dehumanizing, and we built them, and they lend themselves seamlessly to the fascist business of stealing and caging even more people
This is why we must fight for everyone. Whether they’ve been incarcerated or have had contact with the criminal legal system or are merely undocumented. When you accept that some people are deserving of detention and deportation the scope of who is eligible is always under threat of expanding.
every time i sit down to write a letter to a new pen pal in ICE detention, im struck mute. what could i possibly say to someone in such a place? here’s a reminder to myself, and an invitation to you.
open.substack.com/pub/ojosdesa...
i wrote about the remnant prairie behind the artist residency where i work
www.christiancentury.org/article/call...
“The biodiversity of the prairie, its changing face across the seasons: this ecosystem is a community, living and breathing and renewing itself, older than the houses and the trees around it.”
– @olivalejandra.bsky.social
www.christiancentury.org/article/call...
this is not to make the facile metaphor but rather to say that it feels like a lot of different networks of coexistence have been in a state of erosion and weakening of connections, and it’s all slow and unnoticeable until it isn’t
the other thing i was thinking a lot about while writing this piece was Laura Marris’ book THE AGE OF LONELINESS and this idea that entire species are just becoming rarer and rarer without anyone noticing, our neighborhoods quieter of birdsong, and no real sense of the loss in our day to day
