06/19/2026
A Juneteenth Message
Juneteenth is one of America’s newest federal holidays, yet it marks the long-delayed reckoning with America’s oldest original sin: slavery.
On June 19, 1865, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and brought word that enslaved people were free. But freedom was not sudden. Freedom was hard fought and long won. It came gradually, unevenly, and only through struggle.
In some places, slavery was abolished earlier. Vermont moved against slavery in 1777. New York began a gradual process of emancipation in 1799, but slavery did not fully end in the state until 1827. Even then, freedom on paper did not mean freedom in practice.
Juneteenth is a time of celebration. It is a time to remember ancestors who endured, resisted, prayed, organized, escaped, fought, and survived. But it is also a time to remember this truth: none of us are free until all of us are free.
And we are not all free.
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, except as punishment for a crime. That exception has haunted this nation ever since. Michelle Alexander’s seminal work, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, gave language to what many communities already knew: that the carceral system has continued to control, exploit, and profit from Black bodies, disproportionately imprisoning African American men and women while benefiting from their labor.
Much like the gradual spread of freedom, oppression is also slow to cede power. Systems of oppression do not disappear; they adapt.
While mass incarceration has devastated African American communities, many of the same structures of detention, surveillance, punishment, and profit have been replicated in our immigration system today. The construction and operation of immigration detention centers are heavily driven by private-sector profit incentives. Guaranteed-minimum contracts, often called “bed guarantees” or “lockup quotas,” allow companies to receive taxpayer dollars whether beds are filled or not. This creates a dangerous incentive for long-term detention, expanded capacity, and policies that value profit over people.
Companies such as The GEO Group and CoreCivic have long profited from incarceration in the United States. Today, they also play a major role in immigration detention. These companies are not new actors. They have operated for years as private prison corporations. What is new is the broader public attention they are receiving because of their expanding role in immigration enforcement.
This brings me back to the meaning of Juneteenth.
None of us are free until all of us are free.
Too often in social justice spaces, our issues are pitted against one another instead of being understood as deeply connected. Climate and Immigration justice should not be pitted against housing, racial or criminal justice. These are not competing causes. They are part of the same struggle for human dignity. We are all crying out for justice.
In an era of performative allyship and transactional leadership, the deep roots of justice work are too often left by the wayside. We see those who are well-heeled speak easily about taking time for rest, while those most impacted by injustice have no choice but to keep working, pushing, building, surviving, and organizing.
Let those who want to rest do so. The work continues.
Juneteenth is a day of celebration, but it is not a day to take our eyes off freedom. Not partial freedom. Not symbolic freedom. Not freedom anesthetized by ceremonies, slogans, and statements. We must keep our eyes on comprehensive freedom: freedom from cages, freedom from poverty, freedom from displacement, freedom from environmental harm, freedom from deportation, freedom from racial terror, and freedom from systems that profit from human suffering.
We can organize in silos. We can retreat into ivory towers and granite cathedrals. We can pit housing justice against climate justice, immigration justice against racial justice, regional justice against economic justice. But in the end, we are just hurting all of us.
Or we can organize with each other.
We can build walls, or we can build bridges.
This is not a time to rest. It is a time to build.
Juneteenth is a holiday. But no, we do not get off.
There is much work to be done.
