Launch of #DefendersBeyondWalls Campaign
Front Line Defenders, PRAMI and the RedTDT Network announce the launch of #DefendersBeyondWalls Campaign
Human rights defenders (HRDs) protecting migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers along the migrant route attacked, arrested, and defamed for human rights defense work
[3 July 2019] Front Line Defenders, Programa de Asuntos Migratorios (PRAMI) de la Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA) and Red Nacional de Organismos Civiles de Derechos Humanos Todos los Derechos Para Todos (RED TDT) have launched a campaign to visibilize the powerful work of activists, organisations, collectives and shelters ahead of an upcoming investigative report (August 2019) calling for an end to attacks on migrant rights defenders along all migrations routes to the United States (US).
Featured in the campaign are defenders who walk alongside the caravans, organisations, collectives and shelters along the migrant route providing humanitarian aid and working for the defense of human rights in a context in which human mobility is criminalised. The faces of the campaign are journalists and researchers documenting the gendered impacts of displacement and anti-migrant violence; humanitarians dropping water and food for families traveling through the deadliest corridors of the Sonora desert; queer activists creating community and physical space for trans and gender-queer undocumented communities; and lawyers offering pro bono legal aid and asylum support; among many others who struggle in solidarity in support of migrants fleeing extreme violence and poverty.
In the campaign videos, migrant rights defenders tell their stories of resistance in the face of criminalization, physical assault, arrest, deportation, interrogation, surveillance, defamation, and rampant state violence. The increasing crackdown on migrant rights work is especially dangerous for, and disproportionately affects, HRDs who are migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers themselves (particularly those accompanying others in Mexico or operating shelters at the Mexico-US border), undocumented HRDs in the US, women, and queer-identifying migrant rights defenders across the region.
The campaign #DefendersBeyondWalls is an invitation to learn from and stand in solidarity with HRDs whose life-saving work quite literally transcends borders. The militarization of deserts, broken immigration policies, and construction of walls has not stopped the powerful resistance of migrant rights defenders anymore than it has ebbed the flow of people fleeing violence and persecution.
Join Front Line Defenders, PRAMI, and RED TDT: Demand an end to attacks on human rights defenders resisting state-sponsored attacks on migrant lives.
Partner Organisations:
Front Line Defenders
Migratory Affairs Program (PRAMI) of the Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA) , Mexico City & Tijuana
Red TdT - National Network of Human Rights Civil Organizations
Contact:
Adam Shapiro
adam@frontlinedefenders.org
Quetzalcoatl g. Fontanot
comunicacion@redtdt.org.mx
Programa de Asuntos Migratorios
pam@ibero.mx
