Learning Session: Immigration & Juvenile Justice Intersections

AFF’s learning sessions are an opportunity to highlight the work of our grantees and other leaders in the field, as well as a chance to help convene funders and practitioners to continue learning. Through these sessions, we seek to create a learning community that can help advance effective practices in service of all young people.
This learning session focuses on the intersection between immigrant detention, juvenile justice and mass incarceration. We are joined by the following organizers, policy advocates and direct service providers:
  • Natalia Aristizabal from Make The Road, NY explores how MRNY organizes youth to end the school-to-prison and deportation pipeline by addressing school discipline codes eliminating school pushout to jails and detention/deportation systems as well as exposing the corporate backers of privately owned immigrant detention facilities.
  • Angie Junck from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center explores the ways justice involved youth are impacted by recent immigration changes.
  • Rich Leimseider from the Safe Passage Project, which provides free lawyers to 700 immigrant children in the NYC-area who face deportation despite their strong legal claims to stay in the U.S.
  • Silky Shah from the Detention Watch Network, a national coalition of organizations and individuals working to expose and challenge the injustices of the U.S. immigration detention and deportation system.

Out Of The Margins: Protecting Immigrant Children in New York

At least 35,000 children immigrate to the United States every year as unaccompanied minors. Many of those children end up in New York state.

In this episode, we’re joined by Javier Valdes from Make the Road NY and Rich Leimsider of Safe Passage Project. They speak to us about their organizations’ unique approaches to helping the most vulnerable immigrant population—children.