Immigrant Rights
As an immigrant community in the US, Filipinos faced discrimination in employment, education, housing and experience with the criminal justice system. KDP organized the community to identify these instances of discrimination and fight back.
KDP helped organize resistance to discriminatory licensure rules affecting Filipino nurses and medical workers. KDP organizing challenged unjust HI visa regulations affecting Filipino immigrants, including the founding of the National Alliance for Fair Licensure of Foreign Nurse Graduates. And it fought to defend Filipino nurses – Narciso and Perez unjustly arrested for murder in Michigan.
KDP along with allies battled the discriminatory Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986. KDP helped to organize the National Day of Justice to combat the racist attacks on immigrant communities in 1985. It helped to found the National Task Force for the Defense of Immigrant Rights (NFIRO) which fought for immigrant on a national level.
SF Bay Area Narciso & Perez protest 1977
An FBI investigation into the poisoning deaths of 10 patients at the Ann Arbor Michigan VA Hospital led to charging Filipino nurses Filipina Narciso and Leonora Perez with murder in 1975. The case was racially charged with accusations of Filipina nurses conspiring to murder US veterans at a time when immigration rates of Asians was high. KDP helped to lead many community protests in support of the nurses’ innocence across the country, such as this one in San Francisco, 1977. Because of the prosecution’s prejudicial presentation of the case and lack of evidence, charges were dropped after a retrial.