June 12, 2012
Dear friends,

After months of struggle, plans to build a new immigrant prison in Crete were defeated. There will be NO immigrant prison in Crete IL. We are amazed and inspired by the grass roots organizing that made this possible – from workshops that focused on education, to street actions that turned outrage into defiance.

• The Concerned Citizens of Crete mobilized to raise hell in their community
• MDC, Undocumented families from Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission and anti-prison organizers joined forces on a three day protest march, supported by Chicago Action Medical
• We staged a massive sit-in at ICE headquarters in Chicago – supported by Occupy Chicago and hundreds of anti-NATO advocates

Through all these actions, we showed that we are powerful! With no resources and no staff, hundreds of people came together to confront two giants – ICE and Corrections Corporation of America – and we won!

How do we celebrate this victory?

We hope to organize a public celebration next month, and that you will join us to reflect, share food and dance!! But right now, Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission is in the 10th day of a hunger strike to demand healthcare for undocumented immigrants in critical condition. Right now, we celebrate by showing solidarity with people who are fighting for their lives. Wednesday, June 13 is a march from the Mission (at 10:30AM) arriving at University of Illinois Medical Center (Taylor St and Paulina Ave), and on Friday, June 15th a caravan from the Mission (10:30AM) to several Chicago Hospitals.

To celebrate is to fight. To celebrate is to rise up in defiance, to live with dignity and to accept nothing else. To celebrate is to fight for a world with no cages, no borders, and no profit from the bodies and labor of human beings. We are building this world, we are not begging for it.

We learned in this struggle that we can only win as a sum of efforts, that it takes different communities, each fighting in their own way. Our differences come from unequal power positions – we cannot ignore these differences, we fight to overcome them. We also learned about people power, which comes from our bodies, our lives, our analysis, our voices – with no promise of gain, of political capital, or of organizational self-promotion. We celebrate with renewed commitment, with rage and great joy. The struggle continues!

In Solidarity,

Moratorium on Deportations Campaign (MDC)
No Name Collective
http://www.MoratoriumOnDeportations.org