Project ANAR Stands Unwaveringly with the Palestinian People. There is no immigrant justice without Palestinian liberation.

October 14, 2023

As an Afghan community immigrant justice organization, we feel a moral obligation to name that there is no justice for immigrant communities without freedom for Palestinians. ANAR stands unequivocally with the Palestinian people as the Israeli government ethnically cleanses Palestine by ordering the displacement of 1.1 million from Gaza, an open-air prison where 50% of people are children and many are already refugees.

Our work is firmly rooted in a vision of a world where people are free to move and the systems that displace all people are abolished. This must include the freedom of the Palestinian people, whose movement and existence are restricted under Israel’s settler colonialism.

For 75 years, Palestinians have been forcibly removed from their homes, blockaded, and deprived of liberties. Israel has used occupied Palestine as the testing ground for technologies deployed by ICE, CBP, and police against our communities in the U.S., particularly immigrant, indigenous, Black, and Muslim communities. The U.S. and Israel train one another on border violence and police brutality.

As attorneys and organizers in the U.S., we use the tools available to us to seek justice. We advocate alongside community members, mostly Afghan and Muslim, subject to immigration, deportation, and detention systems rooted in anti-Muslim racism. We understand these systems of oppression are linked on a global scale.

We must join calls led by Palestinian and Jewish Americans to demand that the U.S. cease sending weapons to Israel, and demand an end to the ongoing violence against Palestinians.

We are devastated. We say no more to the U.S. profiting off of our communities’ suffering and sending its resources into further destroying our communities here and abroad. We will not be bystanders to the genocide of our Palestinian brothers and sisters. Our solidarity with an occupied people who have suffered generations of displacement and border violence, much like our own community, is unconditional.

We have hope that we will all see a free Palestine. We ask you to join us in listening to and uplifting the voices of impacted people and supporting their cause.

###

Project ANAR (“Afghan Network for Advocacy and Resources”) is a national Afghan grassroots community immigration justice organization based primarily in San Francisco, California and in Virginia.   Project ANAR offers legal services, community outreach and education, and engagement. Project ANAR envisions a world in which all people can move freely, without the barriers imposed on them by the systems that displace them. We seek an end to systems of oppression, including the deportation and detention systems. Project ANAR is fiscally sponsored by Pangea Legal Services, a 501(c)(3) immigrant defense organization based in San Francisco, California. Project ANAR is founded and led by Afghan, Afghan American and other Asian American and Muslim women lawyers and organizers.