Disability justice teaches us that dependence is not weakness.
Longtime disability justice organizer and writer Alice Wong spent her life building a language for interdependence, for the simple and radical truth that none of us survives alone. Our lives are stitched together by care, by trust, and by the quiet labor of people who show up for one another every day.
As images of ICE raids and family separations flood our feeds, we are forced to widen our understanding of whom immigration policy touches and whose lives are considered disposable. Behind the spectacle of enforcement is a quieter crisis unfolding in homes across the country: disabled people losing the caregivers they depend on to survive.
For decades, immigrant workers have made care possible in the United States. They bathe elders, administer medication, prepare meals, and support millions of disabled people in living full and self-determined lives. Many are domestic workers whose labor has long been excluded from basic protections and political recognition.
When a caregiver is detained or deported, the consequences are immediate. Disabled children lose stability. Aging parents lose the person who knows their routines. Chronically ill people lose access to the care that keeps them alive. People die, not because their disabilities are inherently fatal, but because the relationships that sustain them have been severed.
- Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective
- California Domestic Workers Coalition
- Canary Resistance
- Hand in Hand
Disabled people are not on the margins of our politics. Their lives reveal what our systems value and whom they abandon.
This Disability Pride Month, we must tell the truth about care: immigrant caregivers are not separate from our communities. They are part of the web of relationships that allow millions of people to live with dignity. Any movement for justice that fails to defend the people who care for us, and the people who depend on that care, has misunderstood what solidarity requires.
And beyond this month: we hope you’ll join us. The Disability & Philanthropy Forum and Disability Inclusion Fund are hosting California Disability Community Town Halls – October 6th in the Bay Area, October 8th in Los Angeles – bringing funders together with frontline organizers and advocates to hear the movement’s advocacy pillars and priorities firsthand. We hope to see you there.