i choose the world we make with our living

                                             i choose
the world we make with our living
refusing to be unmade by what surrounds
us                                                                          
-Safia Elhillo | Self-Portrait with No Flag

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I am a citizen of two countries, both of which celebrate their founding this week. Both countries were built on the backs of genocide and continue to commit atrocities in their own names. The country of my birth is actively engaged in an unbearable attempt to close its southern border at the cost of children's lives, parents' lives, and family stability, while the country I've chosen to make my life in continues to willfully ignore the harms it has caused and continues to cause its native people. These things are abhorrent to me, and I sometimes find them so overwhelming that I feel trapped in it. There is good here, but sometimes it's disingenuous to point it out alongside the bad. This summer, the redemption story hasn't been earned, and I'm not going to hand it out for free.
To earn it, we need to fight. We need to listen, and learn, and stand up when we can, especially when we can resist in ways that may be more dangerous for others. We need to keep families together, and out of concentration camps (!!!). We need to pay attention when members of oppressed communities are saying that violence is being done to them, and we need to use whatever power we have to stop it.
Use your voice. Use your money. Use your hope.
For my birthday, I'm raising money for Families Belong Together, a coalition that includes nearly 250 organizations representing Americans from all backgrounds who have joined together to fight family separation and promote dignity, unity, and compassion for all children and families. 
Led by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Women’s Refugee Commission, MomsRising, FWD.us, United We Dream, People’s Action, ACLU, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, MoveOn and others, the coalition has raised millions of dollars for immigrant children and families, mobilized hundreds of thousands of people in all 50 states to take action, and helped to reunite thousands of families. 
Families Belong Together continues its work to permanently end family separation and detention, seek accountability for the harm that’s been done, and immediately reunite all families who remain torn apart. 
Please join me in supporting this hard, important work. Then:

• Learn more about Canada's National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls
• KIND: Kids in Need of Defense -- Provides legal and practical support to children migrating alone.
• RAICES -- Provides free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant families and children in Texas.