Christina Fialho

Christina is Co-Founder & Honorary Member of Freedom for Immigrants

Christina co-founded Freedom for Immigrants, formerly Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), with Christina Mansfield to abolish immigration detention.  As the co-founder/executive director of Freedom for Immigrants (2010 – 2021), she built and fostered a lasting national visitation movement that has helped bring immigration detention into the public light and helped to secure landmark detention abolition laws.  For her innovation, Christina has been recognized with the 2020 John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award, the 2018 James Irvine Leadership Award, the 2016 Ashoka Fellowship, and the 2012 Echoing Green Fellowship, among other awards.  Under Christina’s leadership, Freedom for Immigrants grew from an idea into a thriving national organization that has moved thousands of advocates to join us as volunteers and staff.

You can reach Christina Fialho on LinkedIn and Twitter.

CHRISTINA MANSFIELD

Christina is Co-Founder & Honorary Member of Freedom for Immigrants

Christina co-founded Freedom for Immigrants, formerly Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC), with Christina Fiahlo.  As the co-founder/executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, Christina helped to build programming and technical infrastructure to track, record, and expose human rights abuses occurring in immigration detention - creating an archive of the present.  She also led the Freedom for Immigrants’ Bond Fund, which pays ransom to the federal government in exchange for people’s freedom. She continues her research and writing on the history of immigration bonds and the connections between the history of slavery and the movement for abolition today.