We’re mobilizing because fear is spreading throughout the U.S. and being used as a tool to promote white supremacy, terrorize communities and break apart families. We believe that defiant protest, coupled with acts of mutual aid, trust, and understanding across communities, are vital to combating fear, repelling Trump’s attacks on our freedoms and families, and building a lasting civic offensive to defend immigrants and defeat the evil plans of the Trump Administration.
Since Trump took power, millions have marched, blocked airports to defend immigrants and refugees, and gathered in public to speak – and shout – truth to power. But the job of fighting fascism is just getting started.
The Caravan Against Fear gives people a way to join and support a highly visible and direct action in defense of basic civil and human rights.
The Caravan is sponsored by a coalition of labor, community, human rights, religious, civic, environmental, and other organizations in both the U.S. and Mexico that are working with Global Exchange to build this timely action. They include the Southern Border Communities Coalition, SEIU (United Service Workers West), National Day Labor Organizing Network, Rompeviento Television, as well as dozens of others joined together in a diverse and growing coalition of resistance.
We start in California, a state with leaders who’ve been clear about the need to defend the fabric, families, and workers of California’s communities. The Caravan will celebrate human rights defenders in the legislature and help them solidify state measures to protect immigrant students and residents.
The Caravan begins in Northern California on April 10 and will visit cities in the Bay Area and Central Valley before arriving in Los Angeles and Southern California in time to celebrate Easter with parishioners in local churches and in big public ceremony International Friendship Park –where the border wall between San Diego, CA and Tijuana, Mexico stretches out into the waves of the Pacific Ocean.
The Caravan will seek to highlight and counter all manner of threats to immigrant families, including threats that come from less well-known sources, including the large corporations that are profiting off the border wall and the mass deportation of millions of our friends, neighbors, co-workers, teachers, students, and other members of our community.
After Easter, the Caravan Against Fear will head east along the border – through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas – to the Gulf of Mexico. The Caravan will join with resistance struggles in big border cities like San Diego and El Paso; as well as those in small towns and indigenous communities. We will traverse the diversity and vast open spaces in what the ACLU has called the “Constitution Free Zone” along our 1954-mile border with Mexico.
Throughout the journey, we will meet with border communities and learn firsthand about the vibrancy and unique challenges facing the southern border region. We will put pressure on legislators to pass expansive sanctuary policies, refuse to cooperate with ICE, withhold funding for deportations or border wall construction, and restore constitutional protections to people living along the border. We will document the effects of the repressive Trump agenda on families and communities, and denounce corporations that are complicit with Trump’s wall and deportation machine. We will build momentum for the May 1 National Strike — a moratorium on all business as usual to resist Trump. And at every stop we’ll stage actions to say No Deportations, No Ban, No Wall, Sanctuary for All.