Kalayaan Summit Unity Statement

June 27, 2026

We, Filipinos across the United States, commit ourselves to the fight for freedom from poverty, exploitation, and oppression; freedom from detention and repression; and freedom from war and occupation. We carry on the legacy of those who came before us, our predecessors who defeated Spanish colonization and Japanese occupation, and bravely fought against US imperialist war and subjugation. We continue their fight today because we recognize that despite our country and our people being named independent in 1946, we have yet to achieve genuine freedom to this day.  

We affirm that the struggles of our diaspora here against labor exploitation, trafficking, abuse, housing and food insecurity, detention and deportation, and militarization are bound to the struggle against forced migration and systems that prioritize profit over the lives of the people—bound to the struggle for land, livelihood, and the right to remain in our motherland, the Philippines.

Our fight for freedom may have different fronts, but it is one fight just the same because we are just one people, the Filipino people.

We will strike deep roots, build genuine connections, and bring together Filipinos wherever we are—in our neighborhoods, work places, schools, churches, and communities—to build a mass movement fighting for:

Freedom from detention and repression. We will organize to free our loved ones from the fear of ICE kidnapping and detention. We will resist the schemes of the Trump administration and any future administration seeking to profit off the suffering of migrants. We will hold accountable the Philippine government for abandoning our loved ones and for corrupting funds meant for the people into their own pockets. We will assert and defend the people's right to organize and stand up for our collective rights in the face of state repression, both in the U.S. and the Philippines. We will not allow another massacre committed by the Philippine state to go by without mass protest, especially those committed in the Philippine countryside where the military is unleashing unspeakable terror on peasant farmers and Indigenous peoples.

Freedom from poverty, exploitation & oppression. We will fight to end overwork and injury, and expose the scams that try to rob us of our wages and silence our resistance. We will work to hold all parties responsible for the forced migration and exploitation of Filipino workers—from employers, to visa sponsor agencies, to recruitment agencies in the Philippines, and most especially the US and Philippine governments themselves who serve as the number one trafficker of the Filipino people. We will build organized worker power and people power in our work places and neighborhoods to fight for a society that ensures livelihood and dignity for our people, and for the right to remain home rather than be exported abroad.

Freedom from war & occupation. We will resist the US' encroachment, intervention, and militarization of the Philippines that is turning our homeland into its military base and factory for its war machine. We will oppose schemes like the Pax Silica and all other unequal deals that allow foreign corporations to plunder the Philippines and completely strip it of resources. We reject military war games that deny farmers and fisherfolk of their lands, oceans, and livelihood, and put them in mortal danger with American bullets and bombs. We will seek diplomatic solutions to territorial disputes with China rather than allowing the US to use our homeland as a staging ground to provoke war against its rivals. We will keep our families safe from predatory US military recruitment that sends our loved ones into unjust wars of aggression.

We will not back down. We will break through the fear that those in power use to suffocate us. We will find strength by realizing that our collective action, ang ating sama-samang pagkilos, can in fact win change. We will build people's organizations that put the interests of everyday people at the forefront. And we will come together with all other exploited peoples in our joint struggle against our common oppressors.

As a diaspora torn apart from our inang bayan, we will link arms with our kababayan in the Philippines, not just in spirit but by going back home and immersing with the most exploited and oppressed among us. As one Filipino people, we will fight for a better future and world for all of us, where genuine freedom is not just aspirational, but rather a reality for every one of us.