The Bring Human Rights Home campaign is a collaborative and long-term advocacy effort led by VietRISE, National Day Laborer Organizing Network, and the Harbor Institute for Immigrant and Economic Justice.

Our mission is to advance systems change advocacy and foster cross-cultural and multiracial solidarity among Vietnamese, Mexican, and Central American communities in Orange County.

History of Bring Human Rights Home

Politicians and candidates have used the same cheap tactics over and over again to exploit the trauma of Vietnamese people for decades. We see this time and time again: both Republican and Democratic elected officials center their policymaking in their advocacy for the Vietnamese community on these unhelpful symbolic gestures about human rights while ignoring the actual needs and issues impacting Vietnamese immigrants and refugees. While these politicians consider these grandiose displays of false solidarity as meaningful policymaking that serves the Vietnamese community, Vietnamese immigrants and refugees are confronted with rising rates of ICE transfers, incarceration, ICE detention, and deportation. They consistently fail to address the human rights violations that Vietnamese immigrants, as well as countless other immigrant communities, including those from Mexican and Central American backgrounds, continue to face at the hands of ICE and local law enforcement agencies within the United States.

It is for these reasons that we say stop the hypocrisy and Bring Human Rights Home to Orange County.

In 2019, VietRISE was part of a broad coalition of communities that came together to defend sanctuary and defeat the infamous “hate circus” that agitated against sanctuary cities and immigrant communities across Orange County. In that context, the first “Bring Human Rights Home” festival was a beautiful celebration of community and belonging– and an open defiance of the nativist message of Trumpism and the rightwing hate circus.