A Survey of 'Know Your Rights' Resources for Immigrants and Their Families

'Know your rights' resources help communities prepare for escalating immigration enforcement activity. I reviewed dozens of these resources and identified 7 common themes.

Jan 25, 2025

One of the deepest and unresolved contradictions in the United States is that the various federal, state, and local agencies we refer to collectively as “law enforcement” do not always follow the law. Waves of real and imagined institutional reforms have not resolved this contradiction. Periods of resurgent belief in policing as a solution to deeper systemic problems (the lack of immigration reform, for example) risk exacerbating abuses of police power.

In such moments, it is worth revisiting an essential gift that our forbearers in the long fight for representative democracy have given us and that many lawyers still strive to realize today: our basic rights. Although I don’t think we should conflate our individual civil and criminal rights with true collective justice, I have also come to believe that the work of informing people of their rights and giving them the courage to exercise those rights in the face of powerful law enforcement officers is a more radical act than we typically realize.

As an academic who studies the law from a critical perspective, I tend to view the idea that law is a check on state power rather skeptically. I tend to agree with critiques that view so-called legal activism as doing more to lend legitimacy to legal institutions and benefits for people with the means to take advantage of the law while yielding few meaningful benefits for more marginalized groups.

After years of studying how immigration policing works, however, my views have evolved. I still hold on to a rigorous critique of the law and legal institutions. But I have also seen in practice how the difficult work that lawyers do when translating complex systems of rights to the rest of us non-lawyers should not be taken for granted. Knowing and exercising our legal rights may not seem like a radical act—until you are forced to decide between compliance and assertiveness.

Indeed, if the work of teaching people their rights wasn’t a challenge to powerful institutions, there wouldn’t have been a reason for the Trump administration to suddenly terminate the Legal Orientation Program this week. The Legal Orientation Program ensures that immigrants in civil detention, including children, understand their rights and their options when facing deportation. Trump also suspended the program in 2018.

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Renewed Urgency to Know Your Rights

ICE stepped up enforcement across the country this week. This included verified reports of raids in Newark, New Jersey just yesterday (1/24/2025) where ICE entered a restaurant called Ocean Food Depot and began asking people for identification. Current reports say that ICE questioned one man, a Puerto Rican (Puerto Ricans are US citizens), for his ID. When the man showed him his military ID as a veteran, ICE questioned its legitimacy. (Reports appear to confirm that the man is a military veteran.)

This incident highlights the importance of understanding our rights. And this isn’t just about immigrants, either. As this situation shows, whether you were born in the United States, received your citizenship through naturalization, are in the US lawfully or unlawfully, are the family member of someone undocumented, or whether you simply end up being a bystander in an immigration enforcement action, we should all revisit our rights to make sure we know them.

But what are our rights?

7 Common Themes of KYR Resources

I was curious to review what know your rights (KYR) resources say. And there are a lot of them right now. My inbox and social media feeds have been flooded with know your rights documents—far too many to review comprehensively.

Instead, I created a collection of KYR resources for the most common themes. I found a lot of variation specifically based on where you live and, of course, your own identity, legal status, and so on. There is no one-size-fits-all, that’s why talking to an attorney is essential if you do get yourself into a legal situation. Even so, I found seven themes that were emphasized across the KYR documents I looked at. And I want to share them with you here alongside links to source materials for your own reference. I will link to English and Spanish versions when I can below, but many of these organizations have versions in many more languages.

Disclaimer: I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice. This is an analytical summary of themes in KYR documents that other people have produced and are in the public domain. If you have legal questions, you should talk to an attorney. If you want to learn more, get in touch with a civil rights or immigrant rights organization in your area.

#1: The right to remain silent.

One of the most common themes across KYR resources is an emphasis on your right to remain silent when being questioned by law enforcement or immigration enforcement.

For example, CASA’s KYR flyer titled “Know Your Rights! Protect Yourself And Your Family During Immigration Raids” encourages people to remain silent in the event of a workplace raid and ask to speak with an attorney (see point #3 below). Click here to obtain a Spanish version.

The Immigration Legal Resource Center (ILRC) provides more specific guidance in their document title “What Immigrant Families Can Do Now”. They say:

“You have the right to remain silent. You can refuse to speak to an ICE agent. Do not answer any questions, especially about your birth place, immigration status or how you entered the United States. Say that you want to remain silent until you speak with a lawyer.”

From my own research, I have talked to immigrants and non-immigrants alike who were too afraid to refuse to answer an officer’s questions or who thought that being extra helpful and conciliator would pay off for them. I understand the sentiment. But if there’s one thing I hear most often from attorneys, it’s that it is rarely in your own interest to answer law enforcement officer’s questions without an attorney present—especially if you could face deportation.

The one exception to this rule, stated in many of the documents, was in states with a “stop and identify” law that requires everyone to give their name. Here’s a map of those states.

Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE) in Ohio produced among the most thorough documents in the corpus titled “Preparing Your Family for Immigration Enforcement - Know Your Rights.” In that document, they provide guidance on how to respond to law enforcement in Ohio, which has a stop-and-identify law:

“There is one exception in Ohio to your right to remain silent. If the police reasonably suspect that you have committed a crime, or are about to commit a crime, you must disclose your name, address, and date of birth. After you give the police officer this information you do not have to answer any other questions.”

A final note on this section: all of the KYR resources emphasize, repeatedly, that no one should lie or provide false documents to law enforcement. This is a way to make things worse. Probably a good lesson for all of us all the time, not just when we are talking to cops: if you don’t know what to say, better to say nothing at all.

#2: Don’t sign anything without a lawyer.

Following from the first point about not saying anything, the second point emphasizes not signing anything, either. The KYR resources from the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA) emphasize the importance of not signing any documents without a lawyer present.

The National Immigration Law Center (NILC) mentioned above adds that immigration enforcement may share incorrect information about what documents say or what signing them really means, and they may try to get people to sign documents that would require them to leave the United States, stop applying for legal status, or waive their right to see a lawyer or judge.

I can’t help but interject a more theoretical observation here taken, in part, from Ben Kafka’s delightful book The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork. In it, Kafka (I know right?) makes the point that the power of documents in the modern administrative state derives in part from their ability to depersonalize state violence in ways that people in a modern democracies are more likely to concede to—even when the actual consequences are extremely dire. The deportation system is built as much out of paper as it is out of detention centers and border walls.

#3: Everyone has the right to a lawyer.

This is a basic tenet of the American legal system and one that most people will recognize from the Miranda warning. Immigration lawyers are essential to understanding the options that are available to non-citizens facing deportation.

The data bears this out clearly. One study I did recently showed that the percent of unrepresented asylum cases in immigration court that were denied was above 80% most years, and above 90% during the first Trump administration. Compare that to asylum cases in court that did have an attorney: around 65% of those were denied, a different of 25 percentage points.

Under the Migrant Protection Protocols, which are coming back under the Trump administration (learn more here), attorneys made an even bigger difference—although almost no one even got an attorney in the first place under that program.

The best time to get an attorney is before a run in with ICE. In their “Deportation Defense Manual“, Make the Road New York encourages families who have just learned that a loved one was arrested by ICE to reach out to an attorney right away to determine if there are options:

By the way, since Make the Road New York has brought up the concept, let me add that this concept of “deportation defense” or “removal defense” is a general term that refers to the various legal efforts and sometimes grassroots campaigns to prevent certain people from being deported. I wrote specifically about deportation defense campaigns with my colleague Angela Stuesse in a paper that you might find interesting titled “Undocumented Activism and Minor Politics: Inside the Cramped Political Spaces of Deportation Defense Campaigns.“

#4: Law enforcement cannot enter a home without the proper warrant.

ICE has detained information on the names and addresses of millions of immigrants across the country, which means that if they want to increase deportations one first step is simply to go knocking on doors. But the world is complicated. Immigrants often live in what are called “mixed-status households”, where one spouse is a lawful migrants and the other is not, or where the children may be citizens but the parents are not.

Often times, there are people without papers who haven’t been identified by ICE yet who live with someone who is facing deportation. ICE may knock on doors to try to arrest others, not even the primary person they claim to want to talk to. (ICE refers to the arrest of those individuals as “collateral arrests”.)

Regardless of the circumstances, our laws provide extra protection to us in our own homes. Many of the KYR sheets emphasize this as a core principle of adequate prepartion.

The National Immigration Law Center’s (NILC) webpage titled “Know Your Rights: What to Do if You Are Arrested or Detained by Immigration” recommends that if officers knock on your door, you should stay inside and do not let them inside. The NILC says that you should ask to see the warrant, and the officers can slip it under the door or hold it up to a window for you to see.

They recommend checking that the warrant actually has your name or address on it, as well as a judge’s signature, because officers sometimes try to get permission to enter homes without a signed warrant by showing what looks like an official document, but isn’t. If they do not have a warrant or if the warrant is not signed by a judge, you can say “I don’t want to talk” and stop answering any additional questions. They might say they just want to “take a look around” or “talk a little bit,” but if they don’t have a warrant, you do not need to let them in for any reason.

Note that the NILC’s webpage is helpfully available in multiple languages: Arabic, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Haitian Creole, Korean, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Spanish.

The Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition’s KYR document (English, Spanish) connects this right to the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unlawful search and seizure.

#5: Detained immigrants have the right to ask to be released on a bond.

Even once someone is arrested and detained by ICE, there are options for that person to be released from detention while their case (if they have one) proceeds through court or on other grounds if they already have a deportation order.

One form of release is on an immigration bond. Be aware that the Laken Riley Act and other Trump administration policies are all designed to create barriers for release from detention, so this part of KYR resources are likely to evolve in response to the fast-changing policy changes.

Also be aware that if a detained person is able to get a bond hearing with an immigration judge, it will ultimately be up to the judge, not ICE, to decide if a bond is granted and how much it will cost. Judges still face political influence because they are part of the Department of Justice rather than a truly independent court—but judges are still generally more inclined to take the law seriously than ICE.

Remember: ICE does not have the capacity to hold every person in detention indefinitely (never has, never will). They are going to have to release people from detention just as they did during the first Trump administration (don’t let Trump’s mass deportation rhetoric fool you).

Therefore, many of the materials I reviewed include sections that explain the importance of asking for a bond hearing with an immigration judge. An attorney can help with this but since attorneys are likely to also be overwhelmed, the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project has a useful description of how to request a bond even if you don’t have an attorney. See their document “Cómo obtener una fianza.”

#6: Collect and copy important documents.

The final two are not “rights” exactly, but they are strategies that all of the KYR resources emphasized as key to being able to exercise one’s rights—especially when it comes to immigration enforcement.

As I mentioned above, the immigration system is a system of documents. Having multiple copies of all essential documents available to you and people you trust will not only help provide evidence of your immigration status (if you have it) or help an attorney quickly and accurately determine your eligibility for any forms of relief.

Side note: I once spent the better part of a year studying the interactions between attorneys and immigrant clients. One of the most common barriers I witnessed to attorneys being able to help people was the lack of documents to even assess basic facts that are essential to crucial forms of deportation relief.

The ILRC’s “Immigration Preparedness Toolkit” emphasizes going over all of the documents that you have and knowing which ones you should (and should not) carry on you.

CASA recommends collecting and making copies of all important documents, including records of any immigration status changes, any prior filings with immigration, birth certificates, marriage certificates, passports, other important papers like house deeds or lease agreements, and lawyer names and contact information (including any lawyers who represented the family in the past and any who may help in immigration court).

#7: Prepare Together

Many of the KYR resources I found were not created in isolation simply as legal explainers, but were produced as part of broader resources that help individuals and families think through the contingencies of being targeted for deportation.

In addition to KYR resources, the nonprofit organization American Families United supports couples and families with loved ones facing deportation. If that’s you, the easiest way to get connected with real people who know what you’re going through is to reach out to your local contact person and introduce yourself. You can find that information on their website here.

The Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition provides a detailed “Family Preparation Packet” that helps families think through the various contingencies as well as many additional resources and numbers to call if someone is arrested. The workbook contains various worksheets, important questions for families to answer together, and additional resources for more information.

A few years ago, the Education Justice Project created a thorough “A New Path: A Guide to the Challenges & Opportunities After Deportation” (English PDF, Spanish PDF) that provides information about how to navigate life after deportation, if the worst happens. I’ve met the people behind this project and they are passionate and knowledgeable about this difficult work.

All of the resources here are focused on keeping families together however legally possible. The truth is, many people will be deported. And as I Iearned from Ana Lekas Miller’s book on couples separated by borders, just because someone is deported does not mean that relationships end. In fact, there is unfortunately a large and meaningful network of families separated by deportation that stretch from the United States into countries around the world.

I sincerely hope this was helpful. There are many more resources out there, and the most important thing you can do is stay tuned to information from your local civil rights and immigrant rights organizations. Please include any other information or resources in the comments that you want to share with the community.

This newsletter (including detailed posts like this one that take extra research) is only possible because of your support. If you believe in keeping this work un-paywalled and freely open to the public, consider becoming a paid subscriber. You can read more about the mission and focus of this newsletter and learn why, after three years, I finally decided to offer a paid option.

What can you do now?

This post is primarily intended to be a mini research project to highlight some key themes among KYR resources being shared online right now. However, if you are looking for next steps, consider sharing these resources with people you know and getting them plugged into reliable sources of information about immigration (including this newsletter, hopefully).

Looking for something more concrete to share? The ILRC provides an easy way for people to keep essential information about their rights on them at all times, what they call a Red Card, available on their updated Know Your Rights Toolkit. Due to high demand, they no longer provide those physical cards for free, but they have an option for you to print out the paper needed to make your own or provide copies to your local civic centers, places of worship, and schools. This might be the easiest summary of KYR resources for most people, regardless of whether you or someone you know is the one who could be at risk of an ICE arrest.

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For more information

If you’re interested in learning more about the historical tension between immigration enforcement and the immigrant rights movement, I recommend the following books.

Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants: Race, Gender, and Immigration Policy Post-9/11 by Anna Sampaio weaves together critical views on race, gender, and national security with immigration enforcement policy changes.
Against the Deportation Terror: Organizing for Immigrant Rights in the Twentieth Century by Rachel Ida Buff takes a rich historical view of the many periods of intensified immigration enforcement throughout the 20th century. Uur present moment is, I’m sorry to say, not unprecidented.
Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History by Dan Kanstroom remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the long history of immigration law from the founding of our country up until our present day.
Court of Injustice: Law Without Recognition in U.S. Immigration by J.C. Salyer is the best book I’ve read on precisely how immigration attorneys navigate the immigration courts while representing their clients who are facing deportation.

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