I have so much to say about the news coming out that ICE has been performing forced sterilizations on detainees. 1. Activists have been begging us, especially our anti-violence movements, to pay attention to sexual and reproductive violence faced by women, trans and cis and queer

folks in detention for years. Now is the time to be making to connections between patriarchal violence and all forms of imprisonment. we have to abolish ICE and abolish prisons or we will never end sexual and reproductive violence. 2. Black immigrants of all nationalities are

more likely detained, imprisoned and deported. immigration and reproductive justice and the connections between are Black issues, and racial justice issues. 3. stop saying this isn't who we are as a country- y'all did this with the crisis around family separation and it is an act

of erasure and an act of violence. this a a country founded on attempted genocide, anti-blackness and sexual/repro violence, from slavery, to boarding schools, to Japanese-american internment, to foster care, mass incarceration and cash money bail. 4. as a Black Puerto Rican with

roots also in the US South, y'all will not call this kind of reproductive violence unprecedented. Our ancestors were bred like cattle, experimented on, raped, maimed, sterilized. One-third of the female population of Puerto Rico was sterilized by the US government. so, 5.

Yes, what we are witnessing is a horror, and we have to fight, but many have been fighting on the front lines - listen to them. And please don't erase the experiences of Black and Indigenous folks in the US by treating this like a new phenomenon.