Meet the 20-Year-Old Queer Latina Fighting to Abolish ICE

Lizbeth Oquita was only 4 years old when her family moved from Cananea, Mexico — a town 40 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border — to South Tucson, Arizona. Ever since, her undocumented status has not stopped her from advocating for immigration justice and fighting to defund and eventually abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Oquita, who is now a college junior, was invited to join a gifted and talented education program on the east side of Tucson when she was in middle school. There she witnessed firsthand the inequalities between South and East Tucson, Latinx and white children, and poor and wealthy families. “I was the only person in my class whose parents were not college-educated. I remember feeling embarrassed that my mom cleaned houses and my dad was a welder, while my friends’ parents were teachers, engineers, doctors, and scientists,” she told the FBomb.

These experiences catalyzed Oquita to create change in her community, and she started organizing in her underfunded South Tucson public high school school. She re-started an inactive LGBTQ club, mobilized her classmates to protest the school’s sexist dress code, and organized a schoolwide protest against the unfair firing of her school principal, an educator who had spent years trying to implement Mexican American studies into the curriculum. Oquita became the first person in her family to graduate from high school, and was the only student from her high school to enroll at an out-of-state private liberal arts college. She applied early and was accepted to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she has continued organizing.

In her first year of college, Oquita learned that Smith had hired a chief of police who was openly anti-immigrant and pro-wall. Undocumented students “felt very much unseen and threatened,” she said, adding “The last thing you want to hear is that the person who has access to all of your information, like your home address where your undocumented parents live, is someone who wants you out of this country.” Oquita, along with other undocumented student organizers, mobilized the school to join them in demanding the administration to fire the police chief. Hundreds of students showed up to the protest, and soon after the college terminated his contract.

The following year, Oquita joined the Trans Asylum Seeker Support Network (TASSN), a grassroots collective based in Western Massachusetts which aims to abolish ICE and the police. Oquita describes TASSN as “different, something I had never seen before,” adding, “These ideas were fairly new to me. The thought of abolition had never crossed my mind because we are conditioned to think that there is nothing beyond police and ICE. But there is, and that is very clear to me now.”

Through TASSN, Oquita now supports trans asylum seekers — who the group calls “compas,” a term that derives from the Spanish compañera/o/x, or comrades — by providing community and financial and legal resources. The network also supports those who are living in immigrant detention by writing them letters and connecting them with free legal services.

Oquita loves that TASSN is all volunteer-run. “There is no hierarchy. We believe that we are all leaders. We call it a ‘do-acracy’: if you can do it, you do it, you lead, and that’s it. We work a lot. It’s practically a full-time job that we don’t get paid for. We do it because we are passionate about seeing a world without borders. A world where people can roam free and don’t have to be suppressed by violent mechanisms of power and control.”

As a result of COVID-19, Oquita has started her junior year back in Arizona. While home, she learned of two trans women who were detained in the state and in need of support, and in response started the first chapter of TASSN in the West.

Oquita is also working to “create transnational solidarity between LGBTQ people” all over the world. She is currently supporting a trans woman in El Salvador by fundraising for a new organization to support local LGBTQ people.

“I’m very proud of myself for being able to continue doing this work, despite the fact that I’m also affected by this system. It can be kind of triggering, for example, to have to call an ICE agent to check in on our compas. You know, just being involved in work that you’re heavily affected by can sometimes take a toll on you, but I’m proud that I’m able to, instead of letting my experience drown me and keep me caged in.”

When asked what is ahead of her, Oquita does not hesitate: “I want to get more involved in direct actions to close down ICE detention centers.” People often ask her if she is scared. And to that, she answers: “I’d rather die doing something that I know is the right thing to do than to live in silence.”