By Darien Cole
Volunteers decorating their cards. (Payton Cordova/Radio 1190)
On Monday, Feb. 10, a coalition of CU Boulder student activist groups hosted the second annual “Revolutionary Love Night”. Groups present included the Palestinian Student Association (PalSA), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Climatique, The Feminist Underground, and UMAS Y MECHA. The participants got together to write supportive letters to immigrants being held in a detention center in Aurora.
The event comes amid a recent increase in raids by Immigration Customs Enforcement targeting immigrant communities across Colorado. “Over the past, honestly, two weeks, there’s been a huge heightened ICE presence in Colorado. So I feel like it’s more important now than ever that our detained comrades know that we are fighting for them,” Abee Brown, an organizer who is affiliated with the Feminist Underground and the SDS, said.
The migrant detention center where the cards will be sent is run by a company called The GEO Group that took over the facility in 1986 as part of a contract with ICE. The event was centered on spreading positivity to the detainees and also fostering community between the people who attended. “I think there’s a lot of power when organizing, when your political aspirations come not from a place of anger or injustice, but a place of love,” Aya, another organizer of the event and member of SJP who was uncomfortable sharing their last name said.
Attendees mirrored Aya’s hopeful message about the event. “I really appreciate this event as a way to be in solidarity with immigrants and undocumented people,” said Sarah Finascalo, an activist working with Climatique. “Even if we acknowledge that we can’t necessarily stop every ICE raid, we can still do what we can to be in support, and I think that’s really beautiful to just remember that we aren’t totally helpless, even if we aren’t yet totally powerful either.”