This guide offers critical Know Your Rights (KYR) information and a guiding framework for grassroots groups, fiscally sponsored projects, and fiscal sponsors working on mutual aid, bail funds, and Palestine solidarity initiatives. This guide offers key recommendations on managing targeting, risk, and government scrutiny. It offers a framework groups can use to address infrastructure development, map potential oppositional threat targets, develop plans, crisis response, and financial record-keeping.

The guide is divided into three sections:

• An overview of organizational infrastructure, with guiding questions and checklists.

• Threat mapping and resilience planning for movement infrastructure.

• KYR resources specific to mutual aid and donation management.

This guide draws on the expertise of organizers and lawyers with direct experience in executing large-scale mutual aid and bail fund projects within Muslim communities. Please note this document is not legal advice or exhaustive and does not replace consulting with an attorney.

Given the formidable threat posed by Project 2025, Muslims for Just Futures developed this brief with contributions from the Detention Watch Network and the Armenian-American Action Network. It provides an overview of Project 2025, emphasizing the proposed policies within the expansion of militarism, immigration enforcement, prisons, and jails. It analyzes the potential impact on BAMEMSA and SWANA communities and offers recommendations for community groups on effectively countering Project 2025 and building long-term power. The recommendations and analysis covered in this brief apply to BAMEMSA and SWANA community groups and broader movements building toward a radical democracy.

Building Community Power Requires Strong Defense

Our rights are only as powerful as our knowledge of them. That's why Muslims for Just Futures is launching a series of "Know Your Rights" (KYR) resources tailored for community members and organizers. Our first resource focuses on general rights awareness in Chicago, especially in light of the upcoming DNC. We strongly encourage groups to download and share the full KYR guide. This resource covers: 1) Agencies that can bring criminal charges against you in Chicago; 2) What to do if you're arrested. 3) Pretrial detention procedures. 4) How to protect your privacy during searches.

This community memorandum offers input from organizations working with impacted BAMEMSA and SWANA communities on key initial recommendations, as a starting point, for federal government agencies in implementing a comprehensive White House Islamophobia strategy. This memorandum also offers concerns with the existing process for developing the White House Islamophobia strategy, provides a community-rooted framework of structural and gendered Islamophobia and contains key agency recommendations. While these recommendations are wide-ranging, we note that they are not exhaustive. This community memorandum was developed by Muslims for Just Futures with consultation from our working-class community members and Palestine Legal, Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, HEART, DREAM of Detroit, Muslim Women For, American Muslim Bar Association (AMBA), Center for Constitutional Rights, and Savage Daughters. Overall, 95 community-based organizations, national networks, and coalitions working across communities have endorsed the recommendations and joined this memorandum

According to disturbing reporting from Wired, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner pointed to ceasefire protesters outside Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's house as a basis for keeping open the backdoor search loophole within Section 702 of FISA; (slides from his presentation). Instead of reining in intelligence agencies for rampant, warrantless spying on people nationwide, Chairman Turner is falsely scapegoating protestors to push through 702 reauthorization, undermine reform, and further entrench mass surveillance.

We strongly reject the use of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism by congressional members to justify keeping the backdoor-search loophole in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). We reject the continued use of mass surveillance, which utilizes racist and Islamophobic logics against all of our collective communities.

Chicago becomes the largest city in the U.S. to endorse a ceasefire in Gaza after historic City Council Vote

Today, Chicago became the largest city to endorse a ceasefire, supported by the work of a multi-racial, multi-faith coalition of 165 community organizations and over 100 Chicago City Council staffers. This vote comes 116 days after the start of Israel’s most recent onslaught in Gaza. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed more than 26,400 Palestinians, mainly women and children, and injured over 64,400. The vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are displaced and face starvation and disease as Israel blocks humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, including water, food, and critical medicine. 

100 Days of Building Power and Solidarity: Observations and Recommendations about Immediate and Long-Term Infrastructure Needs for Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab Groups in the U.S. This report highlights the emerging needs of organizations working closely with Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, South Asian, and Black communities in the United States as the genocide in Gaza passes the 100 day mark in January 2024. The observations and recommendations in this report synthesize conversations around needs and recommendations for infrastructure and solidarity to address the current crisis and plan for the long-term.

Over 100 grassroots, advocacy, and movement organizations calling upon broader movements, civil rights organizations, and anti-hate groups to firmly reject the government’s attempts to manipulate hate violence, antisemitism, and Islamophobia to further expand state criminalization. We reject the state’s attempts to use this increased violence to expand hate crime laws. These initiatives do not address community safety. Instead, they simply expand state power and criminalization while ignoring the fact that the state itself has laid the groundwork for this violence.

MJF's Muslim Women's Powerbuilding Institute met during the summer and discussed building power in Chicago. Here is a report back of narrative themes and movement-building themes.

At MJF, we send our love and solidarity to our AAPI siblings who are reeling from the impact of these massacres and our firm commitment to the abolition of White Supremacy, Gendered Violence, and Anti-AAPI violence which are all interconnected systems of violence.

The Muslim Abolitionist Futures (MAF) Network developed this tool to support organizations, collectives, groups, and community members committed to moving with abolitionist values in their policy advocacy efforts.