LUPE named as Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award laureate
We are honored and humbled to not only be nominated but named as one of the 2019 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award laureates. The award honors those who stand up to oppression at grave personal risk in the nonviolent pursuit of human rights.
In the midst of the family separation crisis, LUPE families welcome new immigrants into the nation while advocating for long-term immigration relief. LUPE helps low-income residents of the South Texas border organize themselves to build power, create opportunities, and win a better quality of life. The prestigious RFK Human Rights Award means that more people will learn about the work of border communities to create a welcoming environment where families can remain together and all can thrive.
LUPE defends family unity through legal defense, community organizing, and community partnerships.
With each asylum seeker we welcome, each warm meal we serve, each family we reunite, border communities are demonstrating what it looks like to respond to humanitarian need with care, concern, and love.
But the president is ignoring our humanitarian responsibilities. He’s using children and other vulnerable people to manufacture a crisis at the southern border. It's a cynical ploy to push for more money and more legal authority to cage families and children, exclude asylum seekers, and build wasteful and damaging border walls.
Support our work by donating to us today and helping us organize a humanitarian response to humanitarian need.
It’s ridiculous that the president wants Congress to increase the funding of the agencies he’s using to create the crisis. We should be getting Border Patrol and the military out of what should be a civilian humanitarian response.
That’s why LUPE members are advocating for a humanitarian response to humanitarian need. If the president’s efforts to stoke fear are successful in securing funding for militarization over a humanitarian response, it won’t just be asylum-seeking families that suffer.
But we need support so we can pay our staff to do this critical work. LUPE staff, members, and supporters are lending a hand at shelters and collecting donations in their neighborhoods. Our membership base and community partnerships mean that we can recruit and coordinate volunteers, drive supplies and donations, and turnout the community to mobilizations like protests and vigils. All the while telling a systemic story about why border communities need a humanitarian response over a militarized response.
With more attention and support, we can multiply our existing work and direct it where it’s needed most. That means more support for all South Texas border organizations responding to the humanitarian crisis.
