OUR BEGINNING

Freedom for Immigrants was co-founded by Christina Fialho and Christina Mansfield with the goal of exposing and abolishing U.S. immigration detention. In 2010, Fialho and Mansfield co-created the first detention visitation group in California at the West County Detention Facility. 

After the successful formation of the visitation group at West County — a detention facility which had one of the most restrictive visitation policies in the U.S. before the visitation program — Fialho and Mansfeild then joined forces with four other visitation groups around the country and established the National Visitation Network. 

In 2012, Fialho and Mansfield formed this network into a non-partisan, non-profit organization called Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC).

Between 2012 and 2017, CIVIC grew the National Visitation Network to include visitation to more than 60 immigration detention centers, and launched the largest national toll-free and secure hotline for people in immigration detention.

THE STORY OF OUR NAME

In 2018, Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC) changed its name to Freedom for Immigrants after a private prison company began using a confusingly similar name to our original name, CIVIC. 

In October 2016, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the oldest private prison corporation in the world, changed its name to CoreCivic. Rather than spending years fighting in the courts, we took the opportunity to choose a new name that better reflected our vision of collective liberation. 

We chose the word “freedom” with the understanding that freedom has never been a fixed concept in U.S. history.

While “liberty” is listed among our inalienable rights in the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. government has deprived millions of us from true freedom for centuries. From Indigenous people subject to genocide, to Africans kidnapped and enslaved for profit, to Japanese Americans detained in internment camps, to Black Americans targeted by the mass incarceration system, the notion of "freedom" has functioned to codify white supremacy in our rights, institutions, and public life. 

Now, on any given day, tens of thousands of immigrants are deprived of their freedom in the abusive and secretive immigration detention system, the origins of which can be traced back to this legacy of racism throughout U.S. history.

FFI AT 10 YEARS

In 2023, Freedom for Immigrants celebrated its 10th Anniversary, and later that year named Laura Hernández, visionary immigrant rights leader and prison abolitionist, its new Executive Director. Under Laura’s leadership, the organization embarked on an organizational transformation process to assess its impact and envision its future. During this time, the FFI team reimagined its mission statement, theory of change, and strategic plan to abolish immigrant detention nationwide.  

FFI’s renewed vision is centered on the freedom that exists within each of us, embodied and practiced through our joy, resilience, and resistance. Drawing on the thinking of Black abolitionists who have paved the way before us, our vision of abolition is informed by the rich tradition of struggle for Black liberation in the U.S. and other movements for justice for the global majority.