Rosi Carrasco
Rosi Carrasco of OCAD
Working with Organized Communities Against Deportations, based in Chicago, Rosi Carrasco is helping build a new "sanctuary city," connecting policing in black communities to ICE in immigrant communities. She and others have big plans for May Day. Take a listen!
Outtakes
OCAD was formed at the end of 2012 as a way to organize with our community because of the impact of deportations of the Obama administration. ... What we do is we organize public positions, we organize rallies, we organize with families, make phone calls. That is what we were doing. We made phone calls to the ICE officers to appeal to the fact that families are living here and working here and making contributions to this society. ... We know that the situation has changed because in the past, at least we could appeal to the federal government and say, “Look what the ICE officers are doing here. They are violating the rights of people. They are not respecting us.”
The federal government has been, I would say, encouraging officers to be more violent, to be less respectful.The way the president is talking when he talks about undocumented immigrants, he is creating this offices of immigrants that have committed crimes, when crimes are happening in this country for a long time, right? And instead of looking for a realsolution, they are closing programs for the youth... Trump is targeting not only the immigrant community when he talks about sending the National Guard here to stop violence. I think that is a message against poor communities, in general, Black and Latino and Arab and Muslim and other communities.
Now we are collaborating. ...we are all working together to make sure we have a huge march on May Day calling to stop the criminalization of our communities. For me, this is a little bit different than it has been in the past because in that past we have said, “Legalization for all” or we have said, “Workers’ rights for all.” This time we are saying, “Resist racism in the community.” We are saying, “We are going to march because we want to stop criminalization, criminal rights, and create truly safe and healthy communities.”
To learn more visit, Organized Communities Against Deportations on Facebook, or their webpage. Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes.