This was a speech written by SONG member China Medel for a rally in opposition to anti-immigrant House Bill 318 in North Carolina.

My name is China Medel, I’m a member of Southerners on New Ground who has made North Carolina my home for eight years.

I am the grandchild of Mexican immigrants, who came to this country looking for a better life, who worked in the sugar beet fields, the silver mines, and the railroad yards of the American West. I know that my nana would be out on the streets today to fight for me if she had to.

While I have benefited from all the privileges of US citizenship and upward mobility, I stand here today with immigrant communities, workers, poor folks, youth, brown, and black folks, and all of those who are trying to carve out lives for themselves and their families in North Carolina and who now are under attack with this hateful and racist law. I stand here today with ALL OF US who want to live in a North Carolina with dignity for everyone.

HB 318 does not protect workers, as [Governor] McCrory says!
It does not make our communities safer!

This law aims to criminalize, disenfranchise, and create a climate of fear for immigrant folks in our state. It aims to turn North Carolina into a place where immigrant labor can be exploited to its fullest, to create a captive labor force of folks living under the threat of arrest, deportation, and separation from their families and communities.

Dismantling Sanctuary Cities undoes years of important work meant to make our communities safer for EVERYONE. These policies came out of the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s when folks of conscience made room in their churches for immigrants fleeing political violence in their home countries in Central America. To be a Sanctuary City is to say: we will not expose immigrants to yet more violence and more displacement.

 

Does detention, incarceration, and deportation make our communities safer? No! But it does separate families! It does put folks in jail and detention centers for the crime of making a new life! And it exposes more and more people to the violence and trauma of state violence!

Does living in fear make our communities safer? No! How can we take care of each other when we’re afraid to leave our houses? As queer folks we understand what it’s like to live in fear. We know that the same colonial legacies of social exile shape the experiences of fear that immigrant communities, communities of color, and LGBTQ communities face every day. While our realities are different, we know that being in fear and hiding is no way live.

We stand here today and each day with our immigrant kin and our kin of color and demand an end to the criminalization of our people! We demand a life for ALL OF US that is free from fear.