Urs’s Girls

by Victoria Huynh, Anti-Deportation Organizer

It was my best friend Havannah who first began writing to Ursula, back in 2021. Havannah had heard through an incarcerated pen pal about a woman in a California prison who wanted to fight her ICE hold.

Back when we both still lived in Oakland, Havannah would come over to my shoebox apartment and tell me about her friend Urs, who was unbelievably funny, whip-smart, San Pedro girl through and through. As a teen, Urs had been groomed by a man 10 years her senior, blamed by the courts for her abuser’s actions and sentenced to life in prison at age 19.¹ Even after winning a sentencing appeal, Urs was a noncitizen, and thus would be deported to Mexico after her release.²

But Urs knew that there were incarcerated people who had organized to prevent their deportations and won.³ She wrote to Havannah: if they can do it, then why can’t we?
Urs’s lion-hearted resolve would propel Havannah, myself, and a team of crimmigration organizers, legal workers, students, and formerly incarcerated women across California into the next four years of her participatory defense campaign.⁴

Urs, with a voice clear and bright enough to resound through GTL’s spotty phone lines, and a mind agile enough to dream of life beyond a cage. Alongside her, we couldn’t help but feel more capable and daring, more willing to try the impossible. We harbored no illusions about what we were up against, the bureaucratic maze of the criminal legal system and the unrelenting cruelty of ICE, which only grew worse as the years went on. But she was our sister, our girl. And Urs was the first of us to look at any path through the systems designed to trap her, and say, “Guys, why don’t we just try?”⁵

As ICE intensified in its reach, stopping Urs’s deportation began to take on a symbolic heft for us as organizers. If we could get her resentenced or pardoned, if we could stop her transfer, or just get her released from detention, then maybe it would alleviate the immense grief of all that Urs had lost to the system. We wanted to prove to ourselves that organizing could still even work, that we could still wrest from this unforgiving world a bit of hope.

This past summer, when Urs began to broach the topic of accepting her deportation, it felt like a door clanging irreversibly shut. She told us that she couldn’t endure the abuse of detention any longer, nor could she imagine being released during a federal immigration crackdown, as her community in LA was being kidnapped in droves. We tried to convince her otherwise. We couldn’t believe that there was nothing left for us to fight. In the weeks before Urs’s deportation, we kept making desperate mental calculations to convince her to stay.⁶

But whatever we were grieving, Urs had already grieved. As an organizer, she had assessed her conditions and decided which costs she was willing to bear. Havannah told me that months prior, Urs had read the autobiography of Assata Shakur, the Black revolutionary who escaped a New Jersey prison and sought political exile in Cuba in the 1980s. The book ends at the airport in Havana, as Shakur’s daughter, mother, and aunt descend from the plane and run into her arms. Shakur writes, “there was no doubt about it, our people would one day be free.”⁷ If Assata Shakur could find freedom in exile, if her dislocation didn’t sever her from her people, then why couldn’t Urs do the same?

So Urs chose to be free. On September 21st, 2025, ICE dropped her off in Mexico, and now her life is finally hers. Urs has since graduated from Fresno State with her B.A. and continues to keep in touch with her friends and activist networks in California.

Originally published on Substack.

1.  Urs is one of many survivors of gender-based violence who are incarcerated because they attempted to protect themselves from their abusers or were blamed for their abusers’ actions. ↩︎
2.  Urs was subject to an ICE transfer, a practice in which the California Department of Corrections (and rehabilitation, but who really believes they do that) collaborates with ICE to transfer noncitizens to detention after they parole. CDCr is not mandated to collaborate with ICE, and many are organizing against this collusion of federal and state power. ↩︎
3.  Urs was first inspired by the documentary “Breathin: The Eddy Zeng Story,” which she watched on PBS during AAPI Heritage month. To paraphrase Havannah, it really is so California/SoCal/LA that a bunch of Asian girls could throw down so hard for our Mexican sister and vice versa.
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4.  Participatory defense is an organizing model popularized by Silicon Valley Debug, though you could trace defense campaigns to the movements around Black political prisoners of the 60s-70s, i.e. the Free Joan Little Campaign or the Free Angela Davis campaign. ↩︎
5.  I love that Urs loves Kendrick because he reminds her that she’s a fighter. I love that she’s just a girl like us, and I still want to send her some Korean skincare and bag charms and Smiskis (we have exchanged many photos of Smiskis hiding around the house). I’ve been texting friends who’ve supported Urs over the years to say, you would just love her, I can’t wait for you to finally meet. ↩︎
6.  Urs’s choice was mediated by the horrific conditions of ICE detention and the recent Supreme Court ruling which allows racial profiling during immigration raids and sweeps. ↩︎
7.  See Assata – An Autobiography (1988). ↩︎