Sign the petition: Remove Julie from the Blacklist!
Tell the Philippine Bureau of Immigration (BI) & the Philippine Ambassador to the United States: Remove human rights defender Julie Jamora from the BI blacklist!
The petition to Commissioner Joel Anthony M. Viad of the Philippine Bureau of Immigration and Philippine Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez, and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. reads:
“Stop suppressing and censoring human rights advocates, including ending the Republic of the Philippines’ status quo policy of blacklisting foreign-based human rights defenders. Remove long-time Philippine human rights advocate Julie Jamora from the BI blacklist.”
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On November 17, Filipino-American human rights advocate Julie Jamora was detained at Manila International Airport and barred from entering the Philippines.
The Marcos administration claims that his government respects Filipinos’ human rights. Yet under his watch, police violently arrested 200+ people, including 97 children, who were protesting his government’s corruption in September of this year. More than 1,000 Filipinos have been extrajudicially killed in the government’s continuation of Duterte's drug war. Aerial bombings by the military have terrorized civilian communities in Abra, Kalinga, and others. As of November 2025, there are nearly 700 political prisoners, and since he assumed office more than 14 people have been forcibly disappeared.
Now, President Bongbong Marcos continues his dictator father’s policy of banning human rights advocates who are calling attention to all the above from entering the Philippines. As of this writing, there have been at least 5 cases of blacklisting of human rights defenders since Marcos Jr. took office.
Jamora is the national Secretary General of the Malaya Movement, an organization of U.S.-based Filipinos advocating for genuine democracy, human rights, and sovereignty for the Philippines. She has been an activist and leader in the Filipino American community for over two decades, organizing around issues of immigrant and migrant rights, women’s rights and gender oppression, and human rights in the Philippines.
Jamora is involved with the Philippine Human Rights Act coalition, which works to end U.S. security support for human rights violations and war crimes under Marcos and Duterte. She is a member of Tanggol Migrante, through which she has been organizing to defend Filipino seafarers and migrants from ICE detention and deportation, as well as advocating to get the Marcos government to stand up for Filipino nationals to the Trump administration. In 2022, Jamora exercised her democratic right to speech and protest, participating in a civil disobedience to protest the Marcos family’s legacy of dictatorship and theft.
The Philippines cannot continue to be a faux democracy. The Marcos government’s continuing policy of silencing advocates must be challenged. Remove Julie from the BI blacklist!
