PJI Statement on Operation Swamp Sweep
Dear Community,
As the Executive Director of the Promise of Justice Initiative (PJI), an organization in Louisiana that fights for the freedom, dignity, and autonomy of people targeted and touched by the criminal legal system, I want to recognize that as we enter the holidays, we are also undergoing a period of expanded and intense repression.
ICE is mounting its assault on New Orleans at the request of Louisiana’s governor and at the direction of the president – people in cities across the United States are under siege. These powerful entities seek to remove, disappear, and eliminate Black and brown people from our communities – using baseless claims about crime rates and distorted concerns about immigration. State violence is both untethered to law and maximalist in its extremes. The ruse of immigration crackdowns is being used to snatch Black and brown people out of their homes, from work, and public life.
In a time of decreased crime, legislators are passing criminal laws with abandon. Under Louisiana's Governor Landry, the once-decreasing prison population is now bulging again. On the first day of Trump’s presidency, he passed an executive order urging executions in the states. Our governments are killing more people through state executions this year than in over a decade. We are being terrorized. The policy is cruelty. The ideology is white supremacy.
At PJI, we fight for the world we believe in, the world we all deserve. And we, especially in these times, stand with our friends and neighbors here in New Orleans, in Louisiana, in the South, and across the country and the world, who are surviving crisis brought on by our governments.
Let us be partners, collaborators, colleagues, friends, and family in this fight. We know repression seeks to put down the power that we have as a collective and that each of us has innately. We are bigger than these actors. We are better than these oppressors. And together with all of you, we will build a world that no longer warehouses human beings in prisons - a world where justice means a legal system that recognizes freedom and dignity as universal rights, where no human being is illegal, and embodies an ethos of transformation and safety, where we value community, family, dreams, and joy as part of all life.
A better world is possible. Stand up. Stand together.
In solidarity,
Samantha Kennedy
Executive Director
Promise of Justice Initiative