Asylum

Since our founding, MUA has always worked to support the dignity and justice of people fleeing gender-based violence. In the early 2000s, MUA members shared testimonies with the U.S. Department of Justice to support the inclusion of immigration visas for survivors of violence and the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in 2003. Since then, tens of thousands of survivors have qualified for such visas and MUA has helped hundreds of women navigate the visa process.

The most recent iteration of our work around this issue is Welcome with Dignity, a national campaign founded in 2021 that includes more than 50 organizations across the country. MUA joined this campaign as a result of the work we have been doing since 2017, when caravans of asylum seekers began arriving at the US-Mexico border, and many of those asylum seekers ended up in detention centers. After traumatic experiences in detention, and usually after being released with a painful ankle monitor and owing thousands of dollars in bonds, many asylum seekers ended up in the Bay Area and many came to MUA for support.

To respond to the growing needs of asylum seekers, MUA founded our Defenders program, a leadership development and trauma healing group for women whose lives have been affected by detention and deportation, and all too often by the industry of immigration detention, which generates millions of dollars in profiting from US contracts to detain asylum seekers and other immigrants in deplorable conditions.

Defenders members began sharing their stories with each other and, in many cases, supporting each other during the asylum process. From there, they began to organize to change the asylum policy. The result of this was a collaboration with the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies (CGRS) and together, CGRS and MUA worked to pressure the Biden administration to reverse Trump-era policies that denied survivors of gender-based and gang violence the right to seek asylum.

MUA members of the Defensoras group bravely testified before the Department of Justice about their harrowing experiences and argued for the need for asylum for survivors of violence. In June 2021, after many months of lobbying, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the reversal of the Trump-era policy. This victory saved the lives of thousands of people seeking asylum, including many MUA members, who now have the opportunity to avoid deportation in the face of violent threats that await them at home.

Not long after this victory, MUA members voted to join Welcome with Dignity, which continues and expands this campaign. Welcome with Dignity seeks to reimagine our asylum system and defend the rights of those seeking protection to welcome families, children and adults languishing at our doorstep, advocate for the restoration of asylum rights in the United States, and create a fairer, more humane environment and a dignified approach to protecting migrants fleeing danger.