By Madhuri Grewal, ACLU Federal Immigration Policy Counsel

The Trump administration is infamous for its attacks on immigrants and their loved ones. The administration’s cruelty has no bounds, as we’ve seen from its separation of families, obliteration of our historical commitment to protecting asylum seekers and migrant children, and exploitation of a global pandemic to advance the xenophobic dismantling of the immigration system. We are rightly horrified. For far too long and on far too many occasions, Congress has been funding this anti-immigrant agenda under the radar, with your taxpayer dollars. For years, we’ve pushed back, and now, Congress is listening with a scaled back funding proposal for the Department of Homeland Security — the arm of Trump’s deportation force.

We are inspired by the fierce, coordinated, and growing movement to divest from police forces across the country to put an end to racist policing and the epidemic of police violence in Black and Brown communities. This movement calls us to hold the system of immigration enforcement accountable too. We see similar surveillance, over-militarization, and violence inflicted on Black and Brown communities by the Department of Homeland Security. DHS was created after 9/11, and its sub-agencies Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been funded at record-breaking levels by Congress since their inception. DHS is funded more than all federal law enforcement agencies combined, and these agencies often collaborate with state and local law enforcement and funnel resources such as training, funding, and equipment to local police departments.  

For the current year (Fiscal Year 2020), Congress doled out a whopping $14.7 billion for CBP — funding for mass surveillance of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and for countless abuses (including using emergency funds for dog food and dirt bikes, instead of food and medicine for detained children). ICE received $8.1 billion from Congress — your tax dollars funded drones used at BLM protests and to spread COVID-19 worldwide through continued deportations. Worse still, even with these exorbitant levels of funding, ICE and CBP have regularly raided other parts of the government, including FEMA during multiple hurricane seasons, to expand its detention regime and to build Trump’s border wall — even over Congress’s firm and clear objections. Although we are in the middle of a pandemic, the congressional appropriations process continues to move forward. Your voice, now more than ever, is critical. 

On July 6, the House Appropriations, DHS Subcommittee released its DHS funding bill for Fiscal Year 2021. This is the first major step in a long and highly volatile process, and we can expect the bill to undergo significant changes in the Senate. But the House bill signals a major shift in how the Democratic-led House is approaching funding for the Department of Homeland Security. This shift didn’t happen overnight. Over the last two years, ACLU activists organized and spoke out, sending 71,000 messages and calls to Congress demanding that their representatives cut funding for the agency. Because of that work, the House of Representatives is poised to pass a bill that begins the long overdue process of divesting from ICE and CBP. 

Perhaps most notably, the House bill cuts over $1 billion for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) — the ICE subdivision responsible for detention, raids, and deportations. ERO just launched an indefensible “Citizens Academy” to train ordinary civilians about how it arrests immigrants, including “defensive tactics, firearms familiarization, and targeted arrests.” (It is modeled after programs carried out by another division of ICE and by CBP.) 

The significant cut to ERO includes reducing ICE detention by over 50 percent from the previous fiscal year. This is an unprecedented and overdue reduction, but there’s more: The bill also requires that ICE must not detain more than 10,000 immigrants on any given day during our current global pandemic, compared to the all-time high of over 55,000 during the Trump administration. And if this bill were signed into law today, family detention would be eliminated by the end of the year. 

We’ve made progress in other areas, too. The bill rescinds $1.374 billion in border wall funding, citing Trump’s dubious emergency declaration and subsequent illegal diversion of funds for the wall from the Department of Defense. And moving forward, the bill severely restricts the ability of ICE and CBP to loot funding from other government agencies.  

Yet our work is far from over. Even with these massive cuts in ICE detention, we would continue to see dangerous and unnecessary detention of immigrants by ICE and CBP. Most alarming, the bill still supports DHS grants for state and local law enforcement agencies, which can be repurposed by police to buy military-grade equipment and to collaborate with CBP. And it inexplicably increases funds for Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), an agency that is emblematic of Trump’s brutal immigration agenda, including working closely with local law enforcement to erroneously label immigrants as gang members and upend their lives.

While we will continue to fight for the strongest possible funding bill, with deeper cuts to harmful programs and more accountability and oversight, we are also energized by the progress you helped us achieve. The bill significantly reduces ICE detention, takes meaningful steps to hold ICE and CBP accountable for their wasteful spending, and rescinds money for Trump’s border wall. Congress is finally appreciating its immense “power of the purse” under the Constitution and its role in reining in Trump’s extremist agenda.

By Ronald Newman, ACLU National Political Director

In just over 100 days, Americans will vote not just for an individual candidate to occupy the Oval Office, but for a vision of the next era of the United States. That vision will hold answers to a range of key questions: Will we continue to restrict access to abortion for the most vulnerable? Will we continue to force local law enforcement to do the job of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), regardless of the consequences? Will we continue our racist system of mass incarceration that has harmed Black and Brown communities for decades? Since March 2019, the ACLU’s Rights for All campaign has sought answers to these questions, getting presidential candidates on the record on key civil liberties issues and educating voters on their responses. 

Our view is that it’s not enough for presidential candidates to talk generally about their values and offer platitudes on the campaign trail. We need to know what their specific policies would be, and how they would institute those policies — and advance rights for all — if they secure the presidency. 

One indication we have on how Joe Biden, the presumed Democratic nominee, might perform is found in the recently released Biden-Sanders policy recommendations. While not a definitive plan, it provides us with key insights into what a Joe Biden presidency would prioritize — and the results are mixed in terms of rights for all.

Take reproductive rights for instance. Back in May 2019, an ACLU volunteer asked Biden if, as president, he would end the Hyde Amendment, a ban on abortion coverage for people enrolled in Medicaid that has denied care to people with low incomes — disproportionately women of color — for more than 40 years. Biden said “yes.”  

Biden’s pledge to our volunteer to end Hyde was a reversal from his decades-long held position. Now, the Biden-Sanders task force recommendations reaffirm that promise to repeal Hyde, but don’t offer much on how exactly he’ll do that. 

And the details matter. That’s why we’re holding Biden’s feet to the fire on this commitment, and pushing him to move the nation forward and expand access to abortion. We want Biden to clearly outline how he’ll eliminate abortion coverage restrictions and ensure that people can access abortion, no matter how much money they have or how they get their insurance. For starters, we need him to make a firm commitment to remove all abortion coverage restrictions from his first budget, and tell Congress he won’t sign bills with abortion coverage restrictions, if he is elected.  

Advancing rights for all also includes the 2.3 million individuals who are incarcerated in local, state, and federal prisons and jails nationwide. Everyday, our nation’s leaders deny millions of Americans their humanity and justice, further securing the United States’ title as the biggest jailer in the world. 

So where’s Biden on ending mass incarceration? Just two months after Biden promised to end the Hyde Amendment, he also pledged to an ACLU volunteer to cut the country’s prison population in half. Reducing our incarceration rate by 50 percent is a long overdue step towards liberation for millions of Americans trapped in an oppressive system. And it should very much be a priority for Joe Biden, given his role in pushing the 1994 Crime Bill, which helped create this crisis. Unfortunately, this commitment is missing from the released Biden-Sanders recommendations. 

The Biden-Sanders platform takes positive steps by recommending the end of private prisons, which create perverse incentives for increased incarceration. It discusses the elimination of cash bail, and terminating mandatory minimum sentences. But it is silent on the concrete  commitment to cut incarceration by 50 percent, and the component pieces referenced in the platform are unlikely to get us there. The nation is demanding transformational leadership in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, and we need Biden to send the right signals. Without reaffirming a north star of 50 percent decarceration, one is left to wonder what will be the impact of Biden’s agenda. 

Moving the nation forward also requires a commitment to equality for our nation’s immigrants, who are ensnared in a racist system designed to target people of color. Our vision of rights for all calls for an immediate end to collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement.

In July 2019, an ACLU volunteer asked Biden where he stood on this issue, and he pledged to remove local law enforcement from federal immigration enforcement, including by ending the use of detainers. In the Biden-Sanders platform, there is a call to reverse the unjust use of 287(g) and similar programs that force local law enforcement to take on the role of immigration enforcement. We need follow-through on this agenda. Especially in the face of a devastating pandemic, we need all members of our communities to trust local government officials, and that cannot happen if immigrants are constantly in fear that local government actors are immigration agents in disguise.  

The Biden-Sanders platform moves the fight to ensure rights for all an important step forward, but it doesn’t go far enough. If we want to end Hyde and all abortion coverage restrictions, get to 50 percent decarceration, and cut forced collaboration between immigration enforcement and local police, we need to keep the pressure on the Biden campaign. We must demand that the Biden campaign adopt these policy recommendations and articulate how it intends to institute them. Anything short of a clear roadmap is unacceptable. America deserves leaders who will act with urgency to make the dream of freedom and justice for all real for every person in this country.

By ACLU

The calls of activists have forced a national reckoning with the legacy of white supremacy in our country. That reckoning has led us to examine the systems that exert control over and oppress Black lives, from policing to reproductive health care.

There is a long history of the ways that reproductive freedom has been denied to Black women. There is also an important history of the ways that people of color, led by Black women, have built movements to liberate themselves and reclaim their bodily autonomy. Joining us on At Liberty this week to discuss this often overlooked but vital movement is Renee Bracey Sherman, the founder and executive director of We Testify, an organization dedicated to telling the stories of people who have had abortions.

Sherman walks us through what sets the movement for reproductive justice apart from the broader fight for reproductive rights, talks about recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and shares how building the We Testify community has aided her own journey of healing.

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How Reproductive Justice is part of an Anti-Racist Agenda

The calls of activists have forced a national reckoning with the legacy of white supremacy in our country. That reckoning has led us to an examination…

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