December 8th, 2022

WHEN: Thursday, December 8, 6:00-9:00PM  WHERE: Acción Latina, 2958 24th Street, San Francisco (close to 24th Street BART) RSVP: camilo@nlgsf.org

We write to seek your support for the work of the SF Bay Area chapter of the National Lawyers’ Guild, at a critical moment for progressive movements in the U.S as well as globally. The Supreme Court and federal courts in general, have become more adverse than ever to our claims for rights. They are intensely active in the ideological war to reverse previous historic gains in reproductive rights, racial justice, voting rights, and labor, immigrant, indigenous, and LGBTQ rights throughout the country. Defense of these rights, and their expansion, is at the core of our mission and history as the NLG locally and nationally.

This overall commitment includes our work each day in defense of the right to shelter- like at the Wood Street encampment, at People’s Park, at the Parker School, and in San Francisco’s historic Mission district. We have consistently worked in defense of the rights of the incarcerated and for abolition and reparations, through initiatives such as the Santa Rita Jail hotline.

We are committed meanwhile to deepen our internationalist work in solidarity with struggles for liberation and in defense of human rights and peace in contexts such as Cuba, Haiti, the Philippines, Palestine, Iran, Mexico, Central America, and Colombia. This is more crucial than ever amid the intensified dangers of nuclear war and other conflicts stoked by inter-imperialist rivalries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, together with explosive inequalities inherent in persistent economic crises, and the still unfolding impacts of climate change and the COVID 19 pandemic.

This is why we affirm and reaffirm today that nothing is purely local, especially under today’s rapacious, ecocidal conditions of globalized capitalist, neo-imperial, and patriarchal domination. Legal systems are immersed in all of these forms of structural violence, and in all of the ways they are deeply intertwined and reproduced.

We also are committed to connect our work in the Bay Area and in collaboration with the LA chapter of the NLG to human rights work at the border. 

We do more than support movements or monitor or provide them with specialized legal assistance- we help build them. We nourish and seek to emulate and embody their visions and their demands. And we help train and generate new legal resources. This is what we, as the NLG, have always done. This is who we are.

All of this makes our work both more critical and more challenging than ever. This is why we need your generous support, and all of your passion, commitment, imagination, support, and participation. This is why we need each other.

We are the NLG: this is our mission, this is our vision. This is what we are doing and can do together. Venceremos!

In struggle and solidarity,

Camilo Pérez-Bustillo

Executive Director

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