Last week, the ACLU’s Border Litigation Project and University of Chicago Law’s International Human Rights Clinic published a report detailing child abuse by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The report, based on a portion of the more than 30,000 pages of government records we obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, identifies numerous cases of serious alleged misconduct by CBP officials between 2009 and 2014, focusing on the agency’s verbal, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse of migrant children.

CBP responded by calling our report “unfounded.” Here, we address the false statements CBP made in its response.  

“CBP . . . is greatly disappointed that [the report] doesn’t acknowledge that the [Office of Inspector General] conducted an investigation in 2014 that determined that prior claims made by the ACLU were completely unfounded.  The OIG conducted 57 unannounced visits to 41 different CBP facilities and “did not observe misconduct or inappropriate conduct by DHS employees during our unannounced visits.”  The full report is available here.”

Certain key facts are omitted here.

First, OIG conducted unannounced CBP site visits only after immigrants’ rights groups filed a complaint in June 2014 detailing 116 cases of child abuse or neglect. Second, the visits occurred in July and August 2014 — months after these abuses had been reported and after those children referenced in the complaint had been released. Third, in the fall of 2014, OIG announced that it would no longer conduct site inspections, without explaining why.

Perhaps most importantly, in June 2015 — almost a year after the visits touted in CBP’s response — a coalition of immigrants’ rights advocates filed a class action lawsuit challenging CBP detention conditions. The litigation, which continues today, documents former CBP detainees’ horrific experiences, including through photos showing just how bleak these facilities are. CBP fought to keep all of this information secret — and was sanctioned by a federal judge for willfully destroying video evidence about conditions in its detention facilities.

“The ‘report’ equates allegations with fact . . .”

To the contrary, our report notes that many of the complaints at issue never appear to have made it past the allegation stage — which is itself a problem. Because DHS “oversight” agencies routinely close investigations without rigorous, thorough review, all “allegations” inevitably remain “unfounded.”

Our report details how DHS’s two oversight agencies, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and OIG, lack sufficient authority and routinely fail to undertake independent, timely, or robust investigations. Using CRCL’s own records, for example, we show how this agency prematurely closed investigations, allowed complaints to go uninvestigated for months or years, and declined to pursue investigations on certain issues when it had “too many” other complaints.

The records we have obtained reflect hundreds of cases in which minors report remarkably similar episodes of abuse or neglect over a multi-year period. These are reports made by children who were apprehended and detained hundreds of miles apart, from California to Texas, and who had no opportunity to consult one another.

“[The report] . . . flatly ignores a number of improvements made by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. . .”

Let’s assess each of these “improvements.”

CBP references its National Standards on Transport, Escort, Detention, and Search (TEDS), published in October 2015. According to the agency, these standards “have been implemented in all CBP facilities” and include “provisions related to sexual abuse and assault prevention and response.”

Rather than “flatly ignore” the TEDS standards, we discuss them in our report even though they had not been adopted at the time of the alleged abuses described. These basic requirements for humane detention conditions — including ensuring children’s access to clean bedding, edible food, and clean drinking water — should have been clear to CBP officials well before the TEDS standards were formally adopted. Yet there is evidence that CBP continues to fail to meet these basic standards — as an Arizona federal district court acknowledged as late as November 2016.

The other “improvement” is the agency’s implementation of the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA).

In actuality, CBP ignores key PREA requirements. CBP must conduct an annual review of sexual abuse data and prepare an annual report of its findings and corrective actions, and then make this report publicly available online.

CBP last published a PREA report in March 2017, covering May 2014 through December 2015. This means that CBP has not released any public report about its PREA compliance during 2016, 2017, or 2018.

Additionally, the PREA requires CBP officials to report alleged sexual abuse “under applicable mandatory reporting laws.” There is no indication, from the records we have obtained from the government or otherwise, that the agency does so.

“CBP's Office of Professinal Responsibility investigates allegations of misconduct on the part of CBP employees when an NGO provides sufficient information necessary to conduct an appropriate inquiry." 

OPR’s investigations routinely conclude with no finding of policy or other violations by CBP. For example, since CBP’s National Use of Force Review Board was established in late 2014, OPR has never concluded that any CBP use-of-force has violated agency policy — including the brutal and unjustified tasing of U.S. citizen Jessica Cooke and the senseless tasing and beating of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, which led to his death.

Additionally, even CBP employees who have been found to violate agency policy regularly evade discipline or any other meaningful form of accountability. Recall, for example, the case of Cruz Velazquez — a teenager who died after two CBP officers encouraged him to drink liquid methamphetamine. Despite video evidence of these officials’ egregious disregard for human life, and despite a “CBP investigation,” no disciplinary action was ever taken against either CBP officer.

“. . . the report contains a number of anecdotal assertions and does not provide specifics, preventing CBP from commencing reasonable steps to examine these assertions and addressing their concerns.” 

Each and every “anecdote” referenced in our report is supported by one or more government document, all of which are cited in the endnotes and provided online for public review. At the end of June, we’ll publish the next set of records, which include audio files of CBP officials subjecting children to coercive and abusive interviews. 

The government did everything it could to delay the release of these records. It has taken over three years of aggressive litigation to obtain these records, and many of the specifics at issue have been withheld by the government itself. For example, the government initially redacted case numbers from responsive records and only provided this information after the presiding federal district court judge ordered it to do so. Additionally, the government has withheld the name of CBP officials accused of misconduct and abuse. Although the federal district court judge has held that the public is entitled to this information, the government has refused to release it. 

Our report speaks in the voices of defenseless children who were mistreated by federal agents acting on behalf of our government. The heavy burden is on the government — which today confines more than 10,000 immigrant children — to show that its standards can be independently verified to be in the best interests of these children.

While the House was busy passing the divisive “empty gesture” known as the Protect and Serve Act during Police Week, the Senate took up a bill that Attorney General Jeff Sessions describes as “the centerpiece of our crime reduction strategy.” This bill, which the Senate unanimously passed and the House could take up in the next two weeks, authorizes the Project Safe Neighborhoods grant program. This program gives more federal dollars and resources for “a nationwide law enforcement program focused on the reduction of violent crime.”

Project Safe Neighborhoods has been around since 2001, and in that time, about $2 billion has been spent encouraging federal-local partnerships around “reducing gun violence in the United States.” Some of those partnerships, like Boston’s Operation Ceasefire, have been characterized as holistic, using a law enforcement and social services approach to reduce violence. Others, like Richmond’s Project Exile, have been described as punitive and exclusively enforcement focused.     

In the almost two decades that PSN has been around, it has received little fanfare or question. PSN has been overwhelmingly supported by past administrations and congresses, but this continued rubber-stamping must end, especially with this attorney general, who is focused on making mass incarceration worse.

“The war on crime and drugs did not fail. It was roaring success,” Sessions has said. So why is a Congress focused on bipartisan criminal justice reform fueling Session’s drug war?           

Without a hearing or opportunity to amend the PSN authorization in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over the bill, the Senate quietly advanced the legislation. But this bill is no “empty gesture” for law enforcement. It gives $50 million over two years for what is being coined as "violence reduction," with funding prioritized for enforcement against “identified subsets of individuals or organizations responsible for increasing violence in a particular geographic area.”  

And the big winner in all of this is Sessions, who has very specific plans for what the “centerpiece” of his “law and order” agenda will do. He also has a very broad definition of violent crime and its causes, which range from marijuana use to immigration status. According to Sessions, “U.S. Attorneys [will] establish a crime plan from the bottom up.” They will “prioritize prosecutions of the most violent people in the most violent areas." And U.S. attorneys exercising their “prosecutorial responsibilities to enforce our immigration law” will build on the PSN “centerpiece.” Sessions told law enforcement, “My goal is to … unleash you.”

But what exactly is Sessions unleashing law enforcement for? Is it for misrepresented crime statistics? Sessions claimed a spike in violent crime in recent years even though statisticians at the Department of Justice have found “no change” in violent crime rates. Or is it because of the myth of the “ACLU effect?” Sessions’ belief that “crime [goes] up” when you tell officers to follow the Constitution (he calls it “let[ting] the ACLU run the police department’) is based on a study with faulty findings.

Whatever the reason, some jurisdictions, like Memphis and Richmond, are rightfully concerned about what a Sessions’ Project Safe Neighborhood program will mean for their cities. Ed Chung at the Center for American Progress faults PSN because the program allows "the federal government [to direct] communities as to how they should spend millions of dollars over which they previously had local control." Local advocates would rather see the federal government invest in “jobs and economic viability of our neighborhoods.” And there is the reality that “arresting your way to lower crime has negative collateral effects.”  

Before the authorization of Project Safe Neighborhood lands on the president’s desk, the Congress must seriously consider this $50 million dollar check it's giving Jeff Session that he will make out to the war on drugs. And jurisdictions across the country must be vigilant about PSN coming to their town. If cities don’t want to be complicit in Session’s boom for mass incarceration, they must push back.  

When I was growing up, I avoided dresses and had short hair. I was basically a happy-go-lucky kid, but I was also different. In seventh grade, I wrote a letter to my mom: “I don’t like my body. I don’t like what I have,” but I held off on giving it to her. Then while I was away at Bible camp, I blurted out over the phone: “Mom, I’m a dude.” She told me she loved me no matter what.

I came out publicly as a boy in high school and went through therapy, hormone treatment, and surgery to help the body I saw in the mirror reflect the person I felt I was. I was the first openly transgender student at my school and the first to publicly transition. I started using the boys’ bathroom my senior year.

But a handful of students and parents at my school, Boyertown Area Senior High in Pennsylvania, sued to stop the school from allowing transgender students like me to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that match our their gender identities — saying the presence of someone like me there violates other people’s privacy. Less than an hour after arguments in a federal court yesterday in Philadelphia, three judges rejected that argument and said that treating transgender students equally does not hurt anyone else.

I was so relieved. When I started at Boyertown Area Senior High, the first time I stepped into the girls’ bathroom, the girls stared at me because I looked like a guy. It was uncomfortable, and it was clear that I didn’t belong there. I asked school administrators if there was another option, and they said I could use the nurse’s bathroom.

I had started seeing a psychotherapist who is a gender specialist, and I started taking steps to live in a way that reflected who I am. In 10th grade, I asked my teachers to call me “A” rather than my birth name, a girls’ name.

That summer, I started taking hormones to helpfully become the guy I was meant to be. I was already wearing guys’ clothes at home, school, work, and church. When I went back to school in the fall, I asked my teachers to call me Aidan and refer to me as “he” or “him,” which they did. I immediately felt different in every part of my life. Schoolwork was easier for me. I felt happier and more myself.

There were more steps. I began the process of legally changing my name to Aidan Maxwell DeStefano. I stopped competing on the girls’ track team — but stayed on as a manager because I loved the team. I had a bilateral mastectomy. I began the process of changing my legal documents, including my birth certificate, from saying “female” to saying “male.”

In 11th grade, the boys’ cross-country team asked me to join, and my counselor told me I could use the boys’ bathroom if I wanted to.

By the time I first walked into the boys’ bathroom in 12th grade, I was ready. I knew I was a guy, and everyone seemed to support me. I even got elected me to the homecoming court. When I ran my last race on the cross-country team, it felt great to hear the cheers from the other guys, my teammates. And in the locker room, I really felt like “one of the guys,” something I had been waiting for my whole life.

Being able to be my true self is more important than I can describe. In my last semesters of high school, I made the honor roll three times in a row — something I had never achieved before because I had been too distracted and stressed trying to hide who I was.

I was so shocked and angry when I found out that other students were suing the school to stop the policy of allowing kids like me from using a bathroom that matches our gender identity. I’m lucky to have a supportive family and friends, but most transgender kids I know don’t. What happens at school can make or break their world. And being allowed to use the bathrooms we choose is a way to show support and make us feel recognized for who we are.

At one hearing in this case, the judge asked me how many times I’d used the men’s restroom at the courthouse that day. I had been there several times — I had literally peed in the same room as one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, and he had had no idea the guy next to him was trans.

I graduated high school last year. Now I’m at community college, and I’m really happy. My experience in high school was formative — I became who I am with crucial support from my family, friends, teachers, and school administrators. No one stood in my way when it came to something as basic as using the bathroom consistent with who I am — and every trans person should have that same basic freedom. High school helped give me a strong sense of myself.

Now, as I make decisions about my future, I know I’m going to live my own life the way I want it to be.