The upEND Podcast

Family separations have been used as a colonization and genocidal tactic since before the founding of America and these practices continue today. Native children are currently removed from their homes at 2–3 times the rate of white children. They are often taken away from relatives and their communities, even when those options are available.

In this episode, we’ll talk about the legacy of boarding schools and what Indigenous organizers are doing to preserve their culture and support their communities. 

About Our Guest: 

Marcella Gilbert is a member of the Oceti Sakowin-7 Council Fires known as the Great Sioux Nation.  Currently living on the Cheyenne River Indian reservation in north central South Dakota, Marcella is involved with the Standing Strong grandmothers group whose main focus is to create local action in regards to child rescue efforts. Marcella is a lifelong member and student of the American Indian Movement and We Will Remember Survival Group, a water protector, wife, and grandmother. Marcella also holds a Master's Degree in Nutrition.

Episode Notes: 

Welcome to the upEND 2024 Convening! This episode was recorded live in Houston, TX on October 10, 2024. 

Our liberation movements are intertwined. What are our strengths and opportunities in working together to achieve our collective goals? Guest host Corey Best moderates a conversation with activists working against prisons, immigrant detention, family policing, and more.

Episode Guests:  

Corey B. Best is a Black father, community organizer, activist, and leader. Originally from Washington, DC, Corey now resides in Florida. Corey has attached himself to “justice doing” — a movement and never-ending journey of being guided by the principled struggle to advance racial justice within this nation’s child welfare and human service delivery systems.  This work puts Corey in front of more than 10,000 professionals annually and has afforded him with the fundamental knowledge about the importance of connecting to something bigger than himself–allowing perspective, pain, truth, joy, and vulnerability to surface in search of meaningful, collective impact.  In all his endeavors, Corey brings a deepened historical and contemporary analysis of the invention of race, racism, systems of oppression and how those systems interconnect to produce white advantage gaps.

Tanisha Long (she/her) is the Allegheny County community organizer for ALC. She holds a BA in English writing and a minor in legal studies from the University of Pittsburgh. Before her work with ALC, Tanisha organized the Black Lives Matter Pittsburgh and Southwest PA organization working to fight systemic racial injustice. Since 2008, Tanisha has organized rallies and direct actions centered around climate change, voting rights, and mass incarceration. She is also the founder of RE Visions, a nonprofit committed to creating a more equitable learning environment for students of color. Tanisha believes there is a power at the intersection of art & activism; she hopes to use her passion for storytelling to both center and better the lives of those impacted by our inequitable justice systems.

Tarek Ismail is Associate Professor at CUNY Law School, where co-directs the Family Law Practice Clinic and Family Defense Practicum, and is counsel to CUNY Law’s Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project.

Jennefer Canales-Pelaez joined the ILRC in 2022. Jennefer has advocated for immigrant rights from the age of 11 when she advocated for her father’s immigration status to the President at the time, George W. Bush. Although her father was ultimately deported, Jennefer dedicated her life and career to ensuring that no one else experiences the trauma she felt at the age of 11. She graduated from Occidental College with a B.A. in Sociology in 2012 and earned her Juris Doctor from Southwestern Law School in 2016. Jennefer is a member of the State Bar of Texas and California. She is also admitted in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Jennefer has been involved with ICE out of LA, Southwestern Immigration Law Clinic, National Immigration Law Center (NILC), Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project, Immigrant Defenders Law Center (IMMDEF), Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA) and worked with the Los Angeles Immigration Court. Jennefer is a former board member and co-president of the National Lawyers Guild-LA Chapter, and former Apen Ideas Scholar. After moving back to her hometown, Houston, Texas in 2019, she represented survivors of gender-based violence at Tahirih Justice Center prior to joining the ILRC. Jennefer was nominated as one of Houston’s Unsung Heros in 2020. 

Episode Notes: 

The call to end modern-day slavery and the prison industrial complex is gaining momentum because of organizers committed to realize the dream of abolition. At upEND, we understand that the demand to end incarceration is deeply linked to the movement to end family policing. 

Nearly half of the people in state prisons are parents to children under 18, which pushes thousands of kids into the foster system while also destroying their support systems. 

Then, one in three families dealing with incarceration goes into debt trying to stay in touch with their loved ones due to predatory systems profiting from imprisonment. Our episode guest works to end this cruel practice and keep families connected. 

Episode Guest: 

Bianca Tylek is one of the nation’s leading experts on the prison industry and the Founder and Executive Director of Worth Rises, a national organization working to end the financial incentives for incarceration.  Bianca is a leader in the national movement to make prison and jail communication free, which has saved families more than $400 million and generated two billion additional minutes of call time to date. She also leads the #EndTheException campaign to end prison slavery. 

Episode Notes:

Credits: 

In the first episode of Season 2, we discuss how the movement to abolish family policing is intrinsically linked to struggles for freedom in Palestine and Sudan. Solidarity unites us and makes our movements stronger. 

Harm is exported and imported around the world. Tactics of family separation in the U.S. through the child welfare system mirror state violence in other countries. Our guests make these connections and invite us all to become internationalists. 

Episode Guests:

Nadia Ben-Youssef is the granddaughter of artists, refugees, and revolutionaries. A human rights lawyer by training, Nadia currently serves as the Advocacy Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a radical legal and advocacy organization working with social movements to dismantle racism, cisheteropatriarchy, economic oppression and abusive state practices. Central to Nadia's lifework is a commitment to the liberation of Palestine, and she is a proud co-founder of the Adalah Justice Project. 

Tarek Ismail is an Associate Professor at CUNY Law School, where he co-directs the Family Law Practice Clinic and Family Defense Practicum. He is also counsel to CUNY Law's Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project.

Episode Notes:

Credits: 

In the first season of the upEND Podcast, we explored the past and present of the family policing system, commonly misidentified as the child welfare system. 

Now, we’re widening our scope. 

How does family policing intersect with reproductive justice and Black maternal health? Are borders and deportations a tactic of family policing? What can we learn from international freedom movements in the work ahead? 

Season Two of the upEND Podcast will draw connections between movements to deepen our political education, build solidarity between organizers and activists, and bring new people to the fight for our collective liberation. As Maya Angelou said, “The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.” 

The upEND team recaps season one and shares their visions for a future without family policing.

We break down recurring myths about “child welfare,” discuss the abolitionist communities growing from spaces such as book clubs, and reflect on topics like the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA).

About Our Guests: 

Maya Pendleton has been a part of the upEND movement since its inception. She currently works as a researcher and writer for the upEND movement, focusing on how we abolish the family policing system, the harms of the current system to children, families and communities, and the world we will build post family policing. 

Alan Dettlaff is a professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, where he also served as Dean from 2015 to 2022. Alan began his career as a social worker in the family policing system, where he worked as an investigative caseworker and administrator. Today his work focuses on ending the harm that results from this system. In 2020, he helped to create and launch the upEND Movement, a collaborative effort dedicated to abolishing the family policing system and building alternatives that focus on healing and liberation.

Episode Notes:

After looking closely at how the family policing system operates, we zoom out to discuss how family policing is an extension of other carceral systems and how abolition is the solution. We just need to stretch our imagination. 

About Our Guest: 

Maya Schenwar is the director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism, and the board president of Truthout. She is the co-author (with Victoria Law) of "Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms," and the author of "Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better." Her next book, a co-edited anthology entitled "Parenting Toward Abolition" (a collaboration with Kim Wilson), will be released in 2024.

Episode Notes: 

Why keep advocating for solutions that don’t work? 

In this episode, we'll discuss reforms in the family policing system and how these reforms don't actually help to end the harms perpetuated against Black children, families, and communities. We'll also be discussing the differences between reformist reforms and abolitionist steps.

About Our Guests: 

Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California-Riverside since 2001. Since the late-1990s, Dylan has participated as a founding member of organizations like Critical Resistance and Abolition Collective. He is the author of three books, most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide. 

Maya Pendleton has been a part of the upEND movement since its inception. She currently works as a researcher and writer for the upEND movement, focusing on how we abolish the family policing system, the harms of the current system to children, families and communities, and the world we will build post family policing. 

Episode Notes:

The trauma of family separations and foster care are well documented, so why is this harm ignored? 

In episode 5, we discuss the harms of family separation and the outcomes of family policing involvement for children and parents. 

Joyce also shares more about her advocacy for Family Miranda Rights and her personal experiences as a mother impacted by the system. 

About Our Guests: 

Joyce McMillan is a thought leader, advocate, activist, community organizer, educator, and the Founder and Executive Director of JMACforFamilies (Just Making a Change). Joyce’s ultimate goal is to abolish systems of harm – especially the family policing/regulation/destruction system while creating concrete community resources. 

Shanta Trivedi is an assistant professor of law and faculty director of the Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for families, Children and the Courts at the University of Baltimore School of Law. Prior to joining academia, Trivedi was a staff attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services’ Family Defense Practice, representing parents embroiled in the family policing system. Trivedi is a widely published legal scholar and policy advocate in popular media, with a focus on promoting approaches to reduce family separation by the family policing and other legal systems.

Episode Notes:

“Families I work with tell me it’s like being on pins and needles every day of their life. It really impacts their mental health, their physical well-being, as well as their housing and job prospects. These families can’t mess up at all. It’s not a way to live.”

In previous episodes of the podcast, we've covered the history of family separation and family policing from the era of chattel slavery through the late 1900s. Now we're going to get into the current iteration of this system and how it functions to surveil, regulate and punish families, specifically Black and Indigenous families.

In this episode, Victoria’s written responses are voiced by our mutual friend Maya Pendleton.  

About Our Guests: 

Brianna Harvey is a scholar, practitioner, and researcher that engages in community-rooted inquiry. Through her work, she utilizes liberatory praxis that strives to combat the carceral conditions inflicted upon oppressed communities. Brianna received her PhD in Education from UCLA, and her MSW from USC. 

Victoria Copeland is a Black and Filipinx researcher, organizer, and spoonie, with training in social welfare and social policy. They are currently a Senior Policy Analyst at Upturn where their work focuses on the use of data and technology in the criminal legal and family policing systems. Their research is centralized around black study and surveillance studies, and is primarily done in collaboration with local abolitionist organizers. Victoria is dedicated to learning more about how we can sustain community power and care from the intersections between racial, economic, & disability justice movements.

Episode Notes: