CIPR Resource Guide
Hotlines for Immediate Support
RMIAN Hotline for Detained Individuals: (303) 866-9308
CORRN Rapid Response Hotline: 1-844-864-8341
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Recurring Volunteer Opportunities & Workshops
Casa de Paz: Casa de Paz offers a safe, temporary space for those being released from the detention center in Aurora, CO and works to facilitate their next steps towards unification with their loved ones. Their various programs, such as the Welcome Team, Visitation Program and Cartas de Paz are seeking volunteers on an ongoing basis. To learn how to get involved, click here.
Colorado Asylum Center: The Colorado Asylum Center hosts bi-weekly asylum workshops and is regularly seeking bilingual English/Spanish speakers as well as volunteer attorneys and general volunteers. To sign up for a workshop, click here.
City of Denver: The City of Denver hosts recurring Work Authorization workshops on Mondays and Tuesdays for eligible newcomers. They seek bilingual, non-attorney volunteers, Non-Spanish Speaking Volunteers, and Immigration Attorney volunteers. To find out more about the volunteer categories and sign up, click here.
CIRC: The Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition accepts volunteers on a rolling basis for roles and functions such as Legal Observer, Documenter, Grassroots Fundraising, Legal Services, Communications and Translation. To learn more about the volunteer roles and indicate your interest, click here.
Servicios de la Raza: Servicios de la Raza is a local non-profit focused on providing essential services and mental health supports to Colorado’s Latinx communities. Their food bank often seeks volunteers and they offer various practicum experiences for graduate students pursuing a career in mental health supports. To volunteer, email jennys@serviciosdelaraza.org. To learn more about practicum opportunities, click here,
International Rescue Committee: The International Rescue Committee offers various volunteer opportunities throughout their programs, including tutoring high-school age children, airport pickups and setting up new arrival housing
AFSC: AFSC Colorado has two immigrant and ally groups: The Not1More (N1M) Deportation Tables are comprised of 41 immigrants in Metro Denver and Fort Morgan fighting their own or their family members’ deportation. Coloradans for Immigrant Rights (CFIR) is a group of 1550 allies led by 16 core members who coordinate a statewide rapid response network to support community members during ICE actions.
Justice and Mercy Legal Aid Center: JMLAC offers a variety of volunteer opportunities for local attorneys and non-attorney support volunteers. They also offer multiple legal clinics throughout the state for volunteer attorneys to meet 1:1 with clients.
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Static Resources & Recurring Coalition Meetings (Know Your Rights, Family Preparedness Etc.)
Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network (RMIAN): Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network keeps an evergreen list of Know Your Rights Resources, a Know Your Rights Spreadsheet, Family Preparedness Packets, a directory of low-cost immigration services and Colorado-Specific Protections
CIRC: Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition keeps an evergreen list of Know Your Rights Resources, Family Preparedness Packets, and Colorado-Specific Protections
Centro de los Trabajadores Colorado Resource Directory: Centro presents a directory of resources that is organized in eight sections to reflect a holistic approach to wellness for the care of the immigrant worker.
Adaptable Emergency Preparedness Packets: This short document is designed to orient us as a community in light of recent arrests, detentions, and deportations of international students, affiliates, staff, and faculty of other universities. We hope none of it will be necessary, but believe it is better to be prepared.
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Accounts to Follow
Advocacy Organizations
Abolish ICE Denver: Instagram
Sanctuary Campus Network: Instagram
Colorado People’s Alliance: Instagram
Convivir Colorado: Instagram
Movimiento Poder: Instagram
Direct Service Nonprofits/Mutual Aid
Juntos Community US: Instagram
Casa De Paz: Instagram
Rocky Mountain Immigrant Action Network: Instagram
Sanctuary4All CO: Instagram
Substack/instagram Follow Experts
Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez: Instagram
Nicolette Glazer: Instagram, X/Twitter,
Camilo Montoya-Galvez: Instagram
Andrew Selee (Migration Policy Institute): X
Daniel M. Kowalski: X,
Caitlyn Yates: X
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: X
Dara Lind: X
David Bier: X
Kathleen Bush-Joseph: X
Stephanie Leutert: X
Yael Schacher: X
The Border Chronicle: Substack
Think Tanks
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Blogs & Books to Read
Threshold by Ieva Jusionyte (2018): Ieva Jusionyte’s firsthand experience as an emergency responder provides the background for her gripping examination of the politics of injury and rescue in the militarized region surrounding the US-Mexico border.
Illegal Traveler by Sharam Khosravi (2011): Based on fieldwork among undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers Illegal Traveller offers a narrative of the polysemic nature of borders, border politics, and rituals and performances of border-crossing.
Empire of Borders by Todd Miller (2019): Empire of Borders is a tremendous work of narrative investigative journalism that traces the rise of this border regime. It delves into the practices of “extreme vetting,” which raise the possibility of “ideological” tests and cyber-policing for migrants and visitors, a level of scrutiny that threatens fundamental freedoms and allows, once again, for America’s security concerns to infringe upon the sovereign rights of other nations.
Dear America—Notes of an Undocumented Citizen by Jose Antonio Vargas (2018): This book––at its core––is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigrants like myself find ourselves in.
Everyone Who is Here is Gone by Jonathan Blitzer (2024): As Jonathan Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, this crisis is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture of this vast and unremitting conflict.
Solito by Javier Zamora (2022): A memoir of a boy’s journey through Guatemala, Mexico and the US border to reunite with his family
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (2020):
Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. So she wrote her immigration lawyer’s phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants—and to find the hidden key to her own.White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall by Reece Jones (2021): How did we get here? In what readers call a “chilling and revelatory” account, Reece Jones reveals the painful answer: although the US is often mythologized as a nation of immigrants, it has a long history of immigration restrictions that are rooted in the racist fear of the “great replacement” of whites with non-white newcomer
Against the Wall by Jenn Budd (2022): critical and reflective memoir of a former CBP agent
We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire by Ian Sanjay Patel (2021): What are the origins of the hostile environment against immigrants in the UK? Patel retells Britain's recent history in an often shocking account of state racism that still resonates today.
Immigration Realities by Ernesto Castañeda and Carina Cione (2024): This timely book is a practical, evidence-based primer on immigrants and immigration. Each chapter debunks a frequently encountered claim and answers common questions.
Border Games by Peter Andreas (2022): In this third edition of Border Games, Peter Andreas charts the rise and transformation in policing the flow of drugs and migrants across the US-Mexico border.
The Land of Open Graves by Jason de León (2015): The Land of Open Graves reveals the suffering and deaths that occur daily in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona as thousands of undocumented migrants attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States.
Outsourcing Control by Katherine Tennis (Korbel faculty) (2020): Katherine Tennis traces the emergence of extraterritorial migration agreements in the Americas, Europe, and Southeast Asia.
Laboring for Justice by Rebecca Galemba (Korbel faculty) (2023): Laboring for Justice highlights the experiences of day laborers and advocates in the struggle against wage theft in Denver, Colorado.
Reluctant Reception: Refugees, Migration, and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa by Kelsey Norman (former Korbel postdoctoral fellow) (2021): Seeking to understand why host states treat migrants and refugees inclusively, exclusively, or without any direct engagement, Kelsey P. Norman offers this original, comparative analysis of the politics of asylum seeking and migration in the Middle East and North Africa.
How Migration Really Works by Hein de Haas (2024): Drawing on three decades of research, migration expert Hein de Haas destroys the myths that politicians, interest groups, and media spread about immigration.
Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential by Heba Gowayed (2022): Refuge follows Syrians who fled a brutal war in their homeland as they attempt to rebuild in countries of resettlement and asylum. Their experiences reveal that these destination countries are not saviors; they can deny newcomers’ potential by failing to recognize their abilities and invest in the tools they need to prosper.
They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields: Illness, Injury, and Illegality among US Farmworkers by Sarah Horton (2016): They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields takes the reader on an ethnographic tour of the melon and corn harvesting fields of California’s Central Valley to understand why farmworkers suffer heatstroke and chronic illness at rates higher than workers in any other industry.
Border & Rule (2021) by Harsha Walia: Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change generating mass dispossession worldwide.
Suspended Lives: Navigating Everyday Violence in the US Asylum System by Bridget Haas (2023): Suspended Lives explores the experiences of asylum seekers in the midwestern United States in vivid detail. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Cameroonian and other African asylum seekers, Bridget M. Haas traces the emotional and social effects of being embedded in the US asylum regime.
Separated: Family and Community in the Wake of an Immigration Raid by Wiliam Lopez (2019): William D. Lopez details the incredible strain that immigration raids place on Latino communities—and the families and friends who must recover from their aftermath.(read this one alongside/or instead of the one by the journalist with the same “Separated” title that was made into a documentary!)
Suspended Lives by Bridget Haas (2024): Suspended Lives explores the experiences of asylum seekers in the midwestern United States in vivid detail.
Court of Injustice by JC Salyer (2020): Court of Injustice reveals how immigration lawyers work to achieve just results for their clients in a system that has long denigrated the rights of those they serve.
The Slow Violence of Immigration Court by Maya Pagni Barak (2023): The Slow Violence of Immigration Court sheds light on the experiences of migrants from the “Northern Triangle” (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) as they navigate legal processes, deportation proceedings, immigration court, and the immigration system writ large.
Pathogenic Policing: Immigration and Enforcement in the US South by Nolan Kline (2019): Nolan Kline focuses on the hidden, health-related impacts of immigrant policing to examine the role of policy in shaping health inequality in the U.S., and responds to fundamental questions regarding biopolitics, especially how policy can reinforce ‘race’ as a vehicle of social division
Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across Borders by Leisy Abrego (2014): Sacrificing Families offers a first-hand look at Salvadoran transnational families, how the parents fare in the United States, and the experiences of the children back home.
The Succeeders: How Immigrant Youth are Transforming That it Means to Belong in America by Andrea Flores (2021): This book challenges dominant representations of the so-called American Dream, those “patriotic” narratives that focus on personal achievement as the way to become an American.
Banished Men: How Migrants Endure the Violence of Deportation by Abigail Andrews (2023): From 2009 to 2020, the U.S. deported more than five million people—over 90 percent of them men. In Banished Men, Abigail Andrews and her students tell 186 of their stories. How, they ask, does expulsion shape men's lives and sense of themselves? T
Discrimination and Delegation: Explaining State Responses to Refugees by Lamis Abdelaaty (2021)
Deported by Tanya Golash-Boza (2015): Tanya Golash-Boza uses the stories of 147 of these deportees to explore the racialized and gendered dimensions of mass deportation in the United States, showing how this crisis is embedded in economic restructuring, neoliberal reforms, and the disproportionate criminalization of black and Latino men.
Smugglers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason de Leon (2024)-National Non-fiction award winning book: In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, internationally recognized anthropologist and expert Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years.
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Campus-Specific Resources for DU Students & Faculty
Immigration Rights, Preparedness, and Legal Resources
Student Resources for DACA Recipients, DREAMERS, & other undocumented students
10 Practices to Safeguard Undocumented Student Data in Higher Education
Know Your Rights Spreadsheet shared by RMIAN
Directory of free/low-cost immigration services (RMIAN)
State policies, constitutional ,rights, and protections: https://coloradoimmigrant.org/our-work/know-your-rights/
DU Law Enforcement Request Guidance
DU Resources
The Cultural Center and student affinity groups
IDP Program at GSPP (mental health supports)
For students who want to repress directory information (beyond FERPA protections), See Registrar’s form here
DU Offices to Support Students
Niki Latino (niki.latino@du.edu), Dean of Students
Jim Bailey (James.E.Bailey@du.edu), Learning Effectiveness Program
Stephanie Potthoff (Stephanie.Potthoff@du.edu), Student Outreach & Support
Angie VanDijk (Angela.VanDijk@du.edu), First@DU
Racheal Aragon (Racheal.Aragon@du.edu) and Eric Duran (Eric.Duran@du.edu), The Cultural Center,
BIPOC Success, Gender & Sexuality Success
Health & Counseling Center – Alice Franks (Alice.Franks@du.edu)
Office of Teaching and Learning – Jasmine Yap (Jasmine.Yap@du.edu)
Division of DEI – Lauren Hammond (Lauren.W.Hammond@du.edu)
What can DU Faculty Do?
Join AAUP, Campus Sanctuary Network for resources, Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration (for leadership).
Know DU’s FERPA policies.
Be mindful about how to talk about immigration and noncitizens in classroom and with colleagues and students. Think about how to designate offices and classrooms as private spaces without attracting unwelcome attention.
Consider alternatives for students who are unable/fearful to travel to campus or for internships; be mindful of heightened anxiety and familial responsibilities. Don’t ask to disclose personal information!
Print red cards and make them accessible (or get on campus: library, CIPR, etc.)
Support commitments for students, staff, and faculty regardless of citizenship or immigration status