Goal: Alexandria communities deserve safety, dignity, recognition, and respect. Working with our allies in the Legal Aid Justice Center (LAJC), Tenants and Workers United (TWU), and the Virginia Coalition for Human Rights (VCHR), Grassroots Alexandria defends human rights through action. We plan actions in consultation with affected communities.
Act today
- Email the Alexandria City Council to request that the dismantling of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board (VIAB) be included in their list of legislative priorities. Here is a sample message: “I am concerned that Virginia is using taxpayer dollars to support human rights violations through the Virginia Israel Advisory Board (VIAB). In your annual legislative package, please prioritize the dismantling of VIAB, which partners with Israeli businesses to obtain American grant monies, much of it for military purposes. No other Virginia advisory board has a taxpayer-funded budget. No other Virginia advisory board supports the business interests of a foreign country. Alexandria has multiple communities affected by humanitarian crises. We should be supporting our families, not VIAB.”
- Please visit our map of documented fascist activity. Please download, save (and maybe print) our flier. Share with friends. When fascists speak up, friends don’t let friends stand by in silence.
- Please write to Alexandria Sheriff Sean Casey (AlexandriaSheriff@alexandriava.gov) with the following message: “To the degree legally possible, please curtail any and all efforts on your part to transfer undocumented Alexandrians to ICE for detention or deportation. These are our friends and neighbors. Please act with kindness to preserve Alexandria families and communities.”
Project: Palestinian Human Rights
Act today: Please email the Alexandria City Council to request that the dismantling of the Virginia Israel Advisory Board (VIAB) be included in their list of legislative priorities.
Sample message: “I am concerned that Virginia is using taxpayer dollars to support human rights violations through the Virginia Israel Advisory Board (VIAB). In your annual legislative package, please prioritize the dismantling of VIAB, which partners with Israeli businesses to obtain American grant monies, much of it for military purposes. No other Virginia advisory board has a taxpayer-funded budget. No other Virginia advisory board supports the business interests of a foreign country. Alexandria has multiple communities affected by humanitarian crises. We should be supporting our families, not VIAB.”
Background: In Alexandria, in 2024, we are working with local Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim community leaders to reduce Alexandria’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine:
- For many years, support for Israel has been the unquestioned policy of Alexandria’s political leaders, with little recognition of Palestinian political, historical, or human rights. (For example, we do not recognize the Nakba each year, the original and deeply traumatic displacement of Palestinians that began in 1948.)
- Here in Virginia, where politics and the military uniquely intersect, the taxpayer-funded Virginia Israel Advisory Board partners Virginia and Israeli businesses to obtain American grant dollars. (To our knowledge, only one other state funds a similar entity.)
- We are concerned that, through the VIAB, our tax dollars are being used to violate human rights. Organizations across Virginia, including our own Human Rights Commission, are demanding change.
Action Plan:
- Engage with the Alexandria City Council and relevant boards and commissions.
- Engage with members of the Alexandria delegation to Richmond to hear their thoughts.
- Ask that the Nakba, in which 800,000 Palestinians were dispossessed of their homes and their land in 1948, be recognized in a manner similar to Alexandria’s recognition of the Holocaust or Indigenous People’s Day.
- Educate the public on the issue of Palestinian human rights.
Project leads: Jonathan Krall, Zeina Azzam
Project Status: In 2023-24, we worked informally with allies, to speak up in opposition to the decision, by City Council, to light City Hall in Israeli flag colors for the first three weeks of the post-October-7 attack on Gaza. Now we are working for long-term change.
Challenges: The Zionist project to displace the people of Palestine in favor of an Israeli state is largely untold in the USA. For example, it is rare to see news outlets such as ABC, CBS, or NBC, show a map of the West Bank as it is today, with Palestinian towns and cities surrounded by and divided by militarized roads and checkpoints. The news media rarely report on the 700,000 Israeli settlers in 279 settlements in the militarily occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, which are illegal under international law and are built on expropriated Palestinian land. In addition, the destruction of and genocide in Gaza have become normalized in the thinking of American political leaders, the media, and society; it is imperative to continue to bring attention to these injustices and catastrophic human rights violations. Providing this political context will be a key task for ourselves and our allies.
A second challenge applies to virtually all of our projects. As in other instances, such as Alexandria’s anti-racist zoning reform and street-renaming projects, this effort to decouple Alexandria from “Our American Israel” has stirred significant emotional responses. As always, we strive to be factual, open minded, and respectful.
Project: Antifascist Response
Act today: Please visit our map of documented fascist activity. Please download, save (and maybe print) our flier. Share with friends. When fascists speak up, friends don’t let friends stand by in silence.
Background: In Alexandria, several pieces of propaganda from Patriot Front have been observed:
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Patriot Front is:
- a white nationalist hate group that broke off from Vanguard America in the aftermath of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, of August 12, 2017;
- an image-obsessed organization that rehabilitated the explicitly fascist agenda of Vanguard America with garish patriotism;
- a vector for theatrical rhetoric and activism that can be easily distributed as propaganda for its chapters across the country.
Action Plan:
- Add to and share our map of documented fascist activity (also linked on our flier [pdf][jpg]).
- Build our team. We monitor, record, and respond to local fascism. When fascist propaganda (posters, stickers, etc.) are found in public, we record it with a close-up photo, report the location, and remove it (take down, deface-and-cover, etc).
- Develop a network of local group leaders that we can call upon, if needed, to rapidly organize counter protests. This depends on the skills of individuals on our team to make friends with, and build credibility with, individual group leaders.
- Raise awareness of fascism in our community. Our primary tools are ourselves (speaking to friends), fliers that we share, and our map of documented fascist activity in our DC-area communities.
Project Leads: Jonathan Krall, Rory Hatfield
Project Status: We have a small team to look for and respond to fascist propaganda in our communities. We are developing tools to better support a rapid response to fascist activity in our communities.
Challenges: Fascism isn’t an ideology; it is a method for gaining and consolidating power. When desperate or deluded people vote for a fake “hero of the people,” democracy can fall. The most dangerous fascist delusion is that people no longer believe in democracy. When fascists appear in public, it is up to all of us to shout them down. We must scream, as if our lives are at stake, to support democracy. Dictatorship kills.
Project: ICE out of Alexandria
Background: Here in Alexandria, local human rights issues might seem less frightening. But families threatened by deportation are aware that the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) deportation machine of the Trump years has not been dismantled.
The immigration system is broken and getting worse by the year. The “dreamers,” a group representing those brought here as children, are now in their twenties–though their status under the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) Act continues to be challenged.
We’ve reached a point where immigration law is such a mess that simply enforcing the law seems immoral. As long as the Alexandria Sheriff continues to go above and beyond what is required by law to collaborate with ICE, we will continue to demand that the Alexandria Sheriff end all forms of voluntary collaboration with ICE.
Action plan: Alexandrians are invited to write to Alexandria Sheriff Sean Casey (AlexandriaSheriff@alexandriava.gov) with the following message: “To the degree legally possible, please curtail any and all efforts on your part to transfer undocumented Alexandrias to ICE for detention or deportation. These are our friends and neighbors. Please act with kindness to preserve Alexandria families and communities.”
Project leads: Jonathan Krall, Zeina Azzam
Project Status: In 2023, we met with the Sheriff’s office to ask that they take three specific actions:
- End “courtesy calls” to ICE. When the Alexandria Sheriff is preparing to release an individual whom they know to be a noncitizen, they will make a “courtesy call” to ICE to advise them of the individual’s release date and time. That way, ICE can be ready to arrest the individual upon release from jail. We note that Arlington and Fairfax have recently ended this practice.
- End transfers to ICE without a judicial warrant. Under the law, the Alexandria Sheriff is only required to transfer custody to another law enforcement agency pursuant to a judicial warrant (signed by a judge). However, the Alexandria Sheriff provides special treatment to ICE, voluntarily transferring custody to ICE on the basis of purely administrative documents known as I-200 warrants and I-247 detainers. These documents are printed in ICE offices and not signed by a judge. A Virginia Attorney General Advisory Opinion states that these documents do not obligate or authorize local law enforcement agencies to detain or arrest individuals for civil immigration enforcement. We note that Arlington and Fairfax have ended this practice.
- Stop holding individuals past their scheduled release times to facilitate transfers to ICE. Under the law, the Alexandria Sheriff cannot hold an individual past their release date in order to facilitate transfers to ICE. However, to facilitate the courtesy-call and detainer transfers described above, the Alexandria Sheriff voluntarily holds individuals for hours after their scheduled release times.
Quite simply, the Sheriff’s office turned us down. In an effort to find common ground, we asked that these cooperative practices be followed only on a case-by-case basis. We were again turned down.
While it is true that as of January 1, 2023, ICE has been removed from the Alexandria Adult Detention Center’s Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA)–meaning that the Alexandria jail will no longer hold immigrants solely on the basis of civil immigration violations–removing ICE from the IGA is not enough.
Challenges: These practices facilitate transfers to ICE detention and speed up the deportations of Alexandria residents. Our immigration system is so broken that we now have a very large population of individuals and families who have been living in the USA for so many years that they are culturally American. Deporting them would be cruel and unusual punishment.
We believe that using our jail to turn formerly-accused or formerly-incarcerated Alexandrians into deportation cases is immoral. This practice is based on the myth of the good/bad binary. Experience shows that, when this myth is put into practice, BIPOC folks are less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt; they are more likely to be labeled “bad.” The myth that we are only deporting “bad” people has been used to justify this cruel practice.
In practice, many sheriffs are hesitant to release a person when told to do so by a court. They (the sheriffs) do not want to read a news story about a recently-freed person committing a crime. However, we believe that when someone is found not guilty or when they are released on bail, they should be released. Everyone, regardless of their immigration status, should be treated the same way.
No one should be deported because they happened to be accused of a crime. Just because our broken immigration system leaves undocumented people vulnerable to detention does not justify locking up any undocumented person who gets caught up in the criminal justice system, either by personal error or just plain bad luck.
To join a project team, please write to one of the project leaders or to grassrootsalexandria@gmail.com.