ACLU: We Are Not Okay

We Are Not Okay

We, your Black friends, family, and colleagues, are not okay. A Black woman, asleep in her bed, was murdered in cold blood and the system didn’t just find her killers innocent — they found their crime, the crime of ending the life of a Black woman, unworthy of even being charged.

We work alongside you at the American Civil Liberties Union, fighting for a country that’s never loved us and forced to fight within a system built to harm and kill us. A legal system that says explicitly that Black lives do not matter. A system that calls for more accountability for putting bullets into drywall than into a Black woman.

I ask you to imagine how the system would have responded if these police had murdered a white woman EMT (during a global pandemic) in her sleep. Does anyone think it would have taken six months to convene the grand jury? Does anyone think there wouldn’t even be a trial? Does anyone think that this country reacts and punishes the harm done to Black women with even a semblance of the outrage and protection we reserve for other communities?

If you are not Black and you’re asking yourself, “How can I help my Black friends, family members, and colleagues?”, here is a non-exhaustive list of what you can do today:

1. Offer your Black staff and colleagues the opportunity to take time off and help redistribute their workload. Do not just send a note that says, “It’s okay if you need to take some time.” Send a note that says, “I want to support you in taking time off. What can I take off your plate? What meetings can I attend in your place? How can I make that happen?”

2. Be mindful of when/how you are processing your feelings. If you’re not Black, this is the time to be especially mindful of how, when, and with whom you are processing your grief, pain, and anger. Do not put additional emotional labor on your Black friends and colleagues. 

3. Do acknowledge the impact of this tragedy. Carve out space in agendas you create to address the trauma and be clear not to move on with “business as usual” without holding that space. 

4. Call each other in and call each other forward. Be in solidarity by spending your political capital on racial justice at work and find a way to do it without virtue signaling or centering yourself. Most of your allyship should take place “backstage,” out of the spotlight.

Continue educating yourself, amplifying Black voices, donating to Black leadership causes, protesting and demanding justice for Black lives. Those actions matter. At the very same time, support and uplift Black people — on your teams, in our organization, and in your life. For every public, external action you take for racial justice, I invite you to take an action inside our walls with that same spirit.

To my Black colleagues: I know you’re not okay. I’m not okay either. We have been fighting for justice every day for 400 years and today we are grieving, we are enraged, and we are exhausted. I see you, I’m with you, I am you. We are not alone in our grief, not abandoned in our anger, not uncared for in our exhaustion. We are in this with each other, with the legacies of our ancestors and the vision of our youth. With the wisdom of our elders and the unwavering guidance of our leaders.

Published October 1, 2020 at 02:11AM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3jjiQQc

ACLU: We Are Not Okay

We Are Not Okay

We, your Black friends, family, and colleagues, are not okay. A Black woman, asleep in her bed, was murdered in cold blood and the system didn’t just find her killers innocent — they found their crime, the crime of ending the life of a Black woman, unworthy of even being charged.

We work alongside you at the American Civil Liberties Union, fighting for a country that’s never loved us and forced to fight within a system built to harm and kill us. A legal system that says explicitly that Black lives do not matter. A system that calls for more accountability for putting bullets into drywall than into a Black woman.

I ask you to imagine how the system would have responded if these police had murdered a white woman EMT (during a global pandemic) in her sleep. Does anyone think it would have taken six months to convene the grand jury? Does anyone think there wouldn’t even be a trial? Does anyone think that this country reacts and punishes the harm done to Black women with even a semblance of the outrage and protection we reserve for other communities?

If you are not Black and you’re asking yourself, “How can I help my Black friends, family members, and colleagues?”, here is a non-exhaustive list of what you can do today:

1. Offer your Black staff and colleagues the opportunity to take time off and help redistribute their workload. Do not just send a note that says, “It’s okay if you need to take some time.” Send a note that says, “I want to support you in taking time off. What can I take off your plate? What meetings can I attend in your place? How can I make that happen?”

2. Be mindful of when/how you are processing your feelings. If you’re not Black, this is the time to be especially mindful of how, when, and with whom you are processing your grief, pain, and anger. Do not put additional emotional labor on your Black friends and colleagues. 

3. Do acknowledge the impact of this tragedy. Carve out space in agendas you create to address the trauma and be clear not to move on with “business as usual” without holding that space. 

4. Call each other in and call each other forward. Be in solidarity by spending your political capital on racial justice at work and find a way to do it without virtue signaling or centering yourself. Most of your allyship should take place “backstage,” out of the spotlight.

Continue educating yourself, amplifying Black voices, donating to Black leadership causes, protesting and demanding justice for Black lives. Those actions matter. At the very same time, support and uplift Black people — on your teams, in our organization, and in your life. For every public, external action you take for racial justice, I invite you to take an action inside our walls with that same spirit.

To my Black colleagues: I know you’re not okay. I’m not okay either. We have been fighting for justice every day for 400 years and today we are grieving, we are enraged, and we are exhausted. I see you, I’m with you, I am you. We are not alone in our grief, not abandoned in our anger, not uncared for in our exhaustion. We are in this with each other, with the legacies of our ancestors and the vision of our youth. With the wisdom of our elders and the unwavering guidance of our leaders.

Published September 30, 2020 at 09:41PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3jjiQQc

ACLU: We Are Not Okay

We Are Not Okay

We, your Black friends, family, and colleagues, are not okay. A Black woman, asleep in her bed, was murdered in cold blood and the system didn’t just find her killers innocent — they found their crime, the crime of ending the life of a Black woman, unworthy of even being charged.

We work alongside you at the American Civil Liberties Union, fighting for a country that’s never loved us and forced to fight within a system built to harm and kill us. A legal system that says explicitly that Black lives do not matter. A system that calls for more accountability for putting bullets into drywall than into a Black woman.

I ask you to imagine how the system would have responded if these police had murdered a white woman EMT (during a global pandemic) in her sleep. Does anyone think it would have taken six months to convene the grand jury? Does anyone think there wouldn’t even be a trial? Does anyone think that this country reacts and punishes the harm done to Black women with even a semblance of the outrage and protection we reserve for other communities?

If you are not Black and you’re asking yourself, “How can I help my Black friends, family members, and colleagues?”, here is a non-exhaustive list of what you can do today:

1. Offer your Black staff and colleagues the opportunity to take time off and help redistribute their workload. Do not just send a note that says, “It’s okay if you need to take some time.” Send a note that says, “I want to support you in taking time off. What can I take off your plate? What meetings can I attend in your place? How can I make that happen?”

2. Be mindful of when/how you are processing your feelings. If you’re not Black, this is the time to be especially mindful of how, when, and with whom you are processing your grief, pain, and anger. Do not put additional emotional labor on your Black friends and colleagues. 

3. Do acknowledge the impact of this tragedy. Carve out space in agendas you create to address the trauma and be clear not to move on with “business as usual” without holding that space. 

4. Call each other in and call each other forward. Be in solidarity by spending your political capital on racial justice at work and find a way to do it without virtue signaling or centering yourself. Most of your allyship should take place “backstage,” out of the spotlight.

Continue educating yourself, amplifying Black voices, donating to Black leadership causes, protesting and demanding justice for Black lives. Those actions matter. At the very same time, support and uplift Black people — on your teams, in our organization, and in your life. For every public, external action you take for racial justice, I invite you to take an action inside our walls with that same spirit.

To my Black colleagues: I know you’re not okay. I’m not okay either. We have been fighting for justice every day for 400 years and today we are grieving, we are enraged, and we are exhausted. I see you, I’m with you, I am you. We are not alone in our grief, not abandoned in our anger, not uncared for in our exhaustion. We are in this with each other, with the legacies of our ancestors and the vision of our youth. With the wisdom of our elders and the unwavering guidance of our leaders.

Published October 1, 2020 at 02:11AM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/36r4CJz

ACLU: We Are Not Okay

We Are Not Okay

We, your Black friends, family, and colleagues, are not okay. A Black woman, asleep in her bed, was murdered in cold blood and the system didn’t just find her killers innocent — they found their crime, the crime of ending the life of a Black woman, unworthy of even being charged.

We work alongside you at the American Civil Liberties Union, fighting for a country that’s never loved us and forced to fight within a system built to harm and kill us. A legal system that says explicitly that Black lives do not matter. A system that calls for more accountability for putting bullets into drywall than into a Black woman.

I ask you to imagine how the system would have responded if these police had murdered a white woman EMT (during a global pandemic) in her sleep. Does anyone think it would have taken six months to convene the grand jury? Does anyone think there wouldn’t even be a trial? Does anyone think that this country reacts and punishes the harm done to Black women with even a semblance of the outrage and protection we reserve for other communities?

If you are not Black and you’re asking yourself, “How can I help my Black friends, family members, and colleagues?”, here is a non-exhaustive list of what you can do today:

1. Offer your Black staff and colleagues the opportunity to take time off and help redistribute their workload. Do not just send a note that says, “It’s okay if you need to take some time.” Send a note that says, “I want to support you in taking time off. What can I take off your plate? What meetings can I attend in your place? How can I make that happen?”

2. Be mindful of when/how you are processing your feelings. If you’re not Black, this is the time to be especially mindful of how, when, and with whom you are processing your grief, pain, and anger. Do not put additional emotional labor on your Black friends and colleagues. 

3. Do acknowledge the impact of this tragedy. Carve out space in agendas you create to address the trauma and be clear not to move on with “business as usual” without holding that space. 

4. Call each other in and call each other forward. Be in solidarity by spending your political capital on racial justice at work and find a way to do it without virtue signaling or centering yourself. Most of your allyship should take place “backstage,” out of the spotlight.

Continue educating yourself, amplifying Black voices, donating to Black leadership causes, protesting and demanding justice for Black lives. Those actions matter. At the very same time, support and uplift Black people — on your teams, in our organization, and in your life. For every public, external action you take for racial justice, I invite you to take an action inside our walls with that same spirit.

To my Black colleagues: I know you’re not okay. I’m not okay either. We have been fighting for justice every day for 400 years and today we are grieving, we are enraged, and we are exhausted. I see you, I’m with you, I am you. We are not alone in our grief, not abandoned in our anger, not uncared for in our exhaustion. We are in this with each other, with the legacies of our ancestors and the vision of our youth. With the wisdom of our elders and the unwavering guidance of our leaders.

Published September 30, 2020 at 09:41PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/36r4CJz

ACLU: CBP Wants to Destroy Records of Misconduct. We Can’t Let Them.

CBP Wants to Destroy Records of Misconduct. We Can’t Let Them.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency, operates with routine impunity. Now, the agency has asked the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which maintains federal agency records, to approve destruction of internal CBP records of misconduct. 
 
An agency rife with abuse should not be allowed to purge its own paper trail of wrongdoing. That’s why this week, the ACLU of Texas Border Rights Center, along with more than 100 partner organizations, filed a public comment urging NARA to reject CBP’s proposal. The principal reason: CBP’s own oversight system is a disaster, and future study of the agency’s failures of accountability will be stymied by the documents’ destruction. 
 
The documents CBP seeks to ultimately destroy include “records developed to track and monitor complaints that are or will be investigated by DHS Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) regarding alleged violations of civil rights and civil liberties”; “records pertaining to administrative and criminal investigations on [CBP] employees, contractors, and those in CBP custody”; and records and reports of Prison Rape Elimination Act allegations. 

Today, CBP employs more than 44,000 Border Patrol agents and CBP officers, and maintains a budget of nearly $17 billion. Despite the agency’s massive workforce and budget, accountability mechanisms have failed to ensure any semblance of accountability. For example, a Cato Institute study found that between 2006 to 2016, CBP “misconduct and disciplinary infractions outstripped all other federal law enforcement” and “it is virtually impossible to assess the extent of corruption or misconduct … because most publicly available information is incomplete or inconsistent.” Just this year, instead of purchasing medical supplies for immigrants, CBP wasted the allocated funds on dog food and dirt bikes. 

The agency’s complaint and disciplinary systems are broken. According to data obtained by the American Immigration Council in 2017, the agency took “no action” in 95.9 percent of complaints filed against the agency between 2012 and 2015. Despite independent advisory panel recommendations issued in 2016, CBP has still not fixed its disciplinary system. The panel recommended CBP hire 350 internal affairs investigators and appoint a discipline czar to coordinate internal accountability. The agency has done neither.

CBP records related to CRCL investigations would, under this proposal, be destroyed after four short years. The ACLU of Texas and the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties filed at least 11 separate complaints with CBP’s joint intake system in 2019 alone (See additional examples here, here, and here.). Those complaints contained numerous individual examples of CBP abuse and were built on hundreds of interviews. Only one resulted in a confirmed DHS Office of Inspector General investigation, while others received form letter responses from CRCL ensuring inquiry into the allegations with no further communication about the complaint. Documentation collected by CBP stemming from these complaints could prove vital to future examinations of a particularly abusive period in the agency’s history.  

Moreover, CRCL whistleblowers have also raised alarm bells about the oversight body’s diminishing ability to hold CBP accountable. Last year, former CRCL staff attorney and advisor Ellen Gallagher said the agency seemed to “mislead the public” by soliciting complaints of alleged violations “if [CRCL had no intention of specifically investigating or resolving those individual complaints.” Just last month, CRCL staff claimed publicly that CBP was ignoring their concerns about the development of a new use-of-force policy and the agency’s intention to use “chemical deterrents” at the border.   

CRCL’s frequent inaction and CBP’s own undermining of the office’s oversight role further bolsters the need for complete and permanent retention of internal agency records. We simply do not know what types of abuse could be documented in these files. 

CBP misconduct often only becomes public via leaks, investigative reporting, or lawsuits, meaning the loss of internal records could forever bury unknown abuses. For example, the first death of a child in CBP custody in over 10 years was revealed by journalists, after CBP failed to report the death to Congress, as required. Independent lawyers uncovered children held in deplorable conditions at a Border Patrol station in Clint, TX. Border Patrol’s racist and xenophobic Facebook page was uncovered by a reporter, and the prevalence of sexual harrassment and rape within the agency has been revealed only when survivors and former officials spoke up. Lawsuits have similarly uncovered severe agent misconduct, including kidnapping, sexual assault, and an agent intentionally running over a migrant. 

With systemic failures of oversight, CBP’s abject failure to hold its own personnel accountable, and a complete lack of transparency, the last thing the agency should be permitted to do is purge its own records.

Published October 1, 2020 at 01:16AM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3cMs3OE

ACLU: CBP Wants to Destroy Records of Misconduct. We Can’t Let Them.

CBP Wants to Destroy Records of Misconduct. We Can’t Let Them.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency, operates with routine impunity. Now, the agency has asked the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which maintains federal agency records, to approve destruction of internal CBP records of misconduct. 
 
An agency rife with abuse should not be allowed to purge its own paper trail of wrongdoing. That’s why this week, the ACLU of Texas Border Rights Center, along with more than 100 partner organizations, filed a public comment urging NARA to reject CBP’s proposal. The principal reason: CBP’s own oversight system is a disaster, and future study of the agency’s failures of accountability will be stymied by the documents’ destruction. 
 
The documents CBP seeks to ultimately destroy include “records developed to track and monitor complaints that are or will be investigated by DHS Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) regarding alleged violations of civil rights and civil liberties”; “records pertaining to administrative and criminal investigations on [CBP] employees, contractors, and those in CBP custody”; and records and reports of Prison Rape Elimination Act allegations. 

Today, CBP employs more than 44,000 Border Patrol agents and CBP officers, and maintains a budget of nearly $17 billion. Despite the agency’s massive workforce and budget, accountability mechanisms have failed to ensure any semblance of accountability. For example, a Cato Institute study found that between 2006 to 2016, CBP “misconduct and disciplinary infractions outstripped all other federal law enforcement” and “it is virtually impossible to assess the extent of corruption or misconduct … because most publicly available information is incomplete or inconsistent.” Just this year, instead of purchasing medical supplies for immigrants, CBP wasted the allocated funds on dog food and dirt bikes. 

The agency’s complaint and disciplinary systems are broken. According to data obtained by the American Immigration Council in 2017, the agency took “no action” in 95.9 percent of complaints filed against the agency between 2012 and 2015. Despite independent advisory panel recommendations issued in 2016, CBP has still not fixed its disciplinary system. The panel recommended CBP hire 350 internal affairs investigators and appoint a discipline czar to coordinate internal accountability. The agency has done neither.

CBP records related to CRCL investigations would, under this proposal, be destroyed after four short years. The ACLU of Texas and the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties filed at least 11 separate complaints with CBP’s joint intake system in 2019 alone (See additional examples here, here, and here.). Those complaints contained numerous individual examples of CBP abuse and were built on hundreds of interviews. Only one resulted in a confirmed DHS Office of Inspector General investigation, while others received form letter responses from CRCL ensuring inquiry into the allegations with no further communication about the complaint. Documentation collected by CBP stemming from these complaints could prove vital to future examinations of a particularly abusive period in the agency’s history.  

Moreover, CRCL whistleblowers have also raised alarm bells about the oversight body’s diminishing ability to hold CBP accountable. Last year, former CRCL staff attorney and advisor Ellen Gallagher said the agency seemed to “mislead the public” by soliciting complaints of alleged violations “if [CRCL had no intention of specifically investigating or resolving those individual complaints.” Just last month, CRCL staff claimed publicly that CBP was ignoring their concerns about the development of a new use-of-force policy and the agency’s intention to use “chemical deterrents” at the border.   

CRCL’s frequent inaction and CBP’s own undermining of the office’s oversight role further bolsters the need for complete and permanent retention of internal agency records. We simply do not know what types of abuse could be documented in these files. 

CBP misconduct often only becomes public via leaks, investigative reporting, or lawsuits, meaning the loss of internal records could forever bury unknown abuses. For example, the first death of a child in CBP custody in over 10 years was revealed by journalists, after CBP failed to report the death to Congress, as required. Independent lawyers uncovered children held in deplorable conditions at a Border Patrol station in Clint, TX. Border Patrol’s racist and xenophobic Facebook page was uncovered by a reporter, and the prevalence of sexual harrassment and rape within the agency has been revealed only when survivors and former officials spoke up. Lawsuits have similarly uncovered severe agent misconduct, including kidnapping, sexual assault, and an agent intentionally running over a migrant. 

With systemic failures of oversight, CBP’s abject failure to hold its own personnel accountable, and a complete lack of transparency, the last thing the agency should be permitted to do is purge its own records.

Published September 30, 2020 at 08:46PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3cMs3OE

ACLU: Ten Questions College Students Should Ask About Their Schools’ COVID-19 Apps

Ten Questions College Students Should Ask About Their Schools’ COVID-19 Apps

As colleges and universities around the country attempt to resume some semblance of in-person education this fall, many schools are requiring their students to download COVID-19 apps as a condition of returning to campus. These apps vary in what they do, but we are highly skeptical of, or outright opposed, to many of them. It is unlikely that any of these apps will make a significant difference in stemming the spread of the coronavirus on campuses, and it appears that many such apps invade students’ privacy. Many of them, as professor of sociology and technology Zeynep Tufekci argues, are merely “performative” on the part of college administrators — an effort to make a show that they are doing something — and will likely prove to be actively counterproductive.
 
In public institutions, these app installation requirements represent a government demand that citizens install a particular piece of software on their personal phones. It is true that the current outbreak constitutes an extraordinary situation, but we don’t want this to open the door to a future where people become prisoners of their phones, as various government agencies use compulsory app installation rules to turn them into enforcement devices for all kinds of legal and administrative rules.
 
It is difficult for us at the ACLU to track what is happening at thousands of schools across the United States, but we encourage returning students and staff being asked to download apps onto their personal devices to ask some sharp questions of school administrators.
 
1. What does it try to do? Does it administer daily health surveys, remind you to get tested, or provide daily exposure notifications? Does it connect to testing or treatment regimes? Will it help you get in touch with campus health services, or inform you where you can get tested? Does it record your movements or the people that you are near? (We are skeptical and have raised many questions about both location tracking and proximity tracking as anti-coronavirus measures and oppose the former in all circumstances.)

2. Is it used as an enforcement device? Any apps that are used to try to ensure compliance with quarantines or social-distancing rules dramatically raise the stakes around their accuracy and dependability.

3. What data does it collect? Does it require students to identify themselves, or can it be run anonymously? Does it collect health information? If so, does that data align with current public health advice? Does it collect location data or associational data (who you spend time with)? How frequently does it collect any such information — i.e., how fine-grained is it?

4. Is that data stored centrally, or only on your device? Data that is stored on someone else’s computers raises many more privacy issues than data stored locally on your phone.

5. Who has access to the data collected by the app? A company? School administrators? Campus or town police? Others? If it is used as an enforcement measure, who is notified of suspected social-distancing violations — administrators, academic deans, campus police, others?

6. Is it voluntary? Are you given a choice about whether to use it? Are there places on campus you can’t go without the app?

7. What other policies govern its use? Have administrators communicated with you about its security or privacy protections? Are those protections strong?

8. How much control do you have over it? If it’s not voluntary, can you turn location tracking off, pause it, etc., or is it the functional equivalent of an ankle bracelet?

9. What servers does it talk to? Some apps are built with third-party software development kits (SDKs) that are unnecessarily intrusive, show advertisements, or consume your battery or data plan.

10. Is the source code for the app available? Have students or faculty at your university had the opportunity to review that code to verify that the app operates as advertised? If not, why not?
 
Some COVID-19 apps — for example, symptom checklists for student that properly protect privacy — may be harmless or even helpful. But many others will create bad precedents while doing little to stem the spread of COVID. Asking detailed questions of school administrators can help ensure that the current pandemic doesn’t lead to a long-term erosion in the rights of students, and of us all.

Published September 30, 2020 at 06:47PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3cLJVZQ

ACLU: Ten Questions College Students Should Ask About Their Schools’ COVID-19 Apps

Ten Questions College Students Should Ask About Their Schools’ COVID-19 Apps

As colleges and universities around the country attempt to resume some semblance of in-person education this fall, many schools are requiring their students to download COVID-19 apps as a condition of returning to campus. These apps vary in what they do, but we are highly skeptical of, or outright opposed, to many of them. It is unlikely that any of these apps will make a significant difference in stemming the spread of the coronavirus on campuses, and it appears that many such apps invade students’ privacy. Many of them, as professor of sociology and technology Zeynep Tufekci argues, are merely “performative” on the part of college administrators — an effort to make a show that they are doing something — and will likely prove to be actively counterproductive.
 
In public institutions, these app installation requirements represent a government demand that citizens install a particular piece of software on their personal phones. It is true that the current outbreak constitutes an extraordinary situation, but we don’t want this to open the door to a future where people become prisoners of their phones, as various government agencies use compulsory app installation rules to turn them into enforcement devices for all kinds of legal and administrative rules.
 
It is difficult for us at the ACLU to track what is happening at thousands of schools across the United States, but we encourage returning students and staff being asked to download apps onto their personal devices to ask some sharp questions of school administrators.
 
1. What does it try to do? Does it administer daily health surveys, remind you to get tested, or provide daily exposure notifications? Does it connect to testing or treatment regimes? Will it help you get in touch with campus health services, or inform you where you can get tested? Does it record your movements or the people that you are near? (We are skeptical and have raised many questions about both location tracking and proximity tracking as anti-coronavirus measures and oppose the former in all circumstances.)

2. Is it used as an enforcement device? Any apps that are used to try to ensure compliance with quarantines or social-distancing rules dramatically raise the stakes around their accuracy and dependability.

3. What data does it collect? Does it require students to identify themselves, or can it be run anonymously? Does it collect health information? If so, does that data align with current public health advice? Does it collect location data or associational data (who you spend time with)? How frequently does it collect any such information — i.e., how fine-grained is it?

4. Is that data stored centrally, or only on your device? Data that is stored on someone else’s computers raises many more privacy issues than data stored locally on your phone.

5. Who has access to the data collected by the app? A company? School administrators? Campus or town police? Others? If it is used as an enforcement measure, who is notified of suspected social-distancing violations — administrators, academic deans, campus police, others?

6. Is it voluntary? Are you given a choice about whether to use it? Are there places on campus you can’t go without the app?

7. What other policies govern its use? Have administrators communicated with you about its security or privacy protections? Are those protections strong?

8. How much control do you have over it? If it’s not voluntary, can you turn location tracking off, pause it, etc., or is it the functional equivalent of an ankle bracelet?

9. What servers does it talk to? Some apps are built with third-party software development kits (SDKs) that are unnecessarily intrusive, show advertisements, or consume your battery or data plan.

10. Is the source code for the app available? Have students or faculty at your university had the opportunity to review that code to verify that the app operates as advertised? If not, why not?
 
Some COVID-19 apps — for example, symptom checklists for student that properly protect privacy — may be harmless or even helpful. But many others will create bad precedents while doing little to stem the spread of COVID. Asking detailed questions of school administrators can help ensure that the current pandemic doesn’t lead to a long-term erosion in the rights of students, and of us all.

Published September 30, 2020 at 11:17PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3cLJVZQ

ACLU: Victory: After Three Years of Battling in Court, the Trump Administration Abandons its Policy of Banning Abortion for Unaccompanied Immigrant Minors

Victory: After Three Years of Battling in Court, the Trump Administration Abandons its Policy of Banning Abortion for Unaccompanied Immigrant Minors

As a direct result of the immense courage of our clients and three years of litigation, the Trump administration has officially abandoned its policy of preventing young immigrants in its custody from accessing abortion care. Yesterday, the administration adopted a new policy that prohibits Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) staff and staff employed by any ORR-funded shelter from blocking or interfering with unaccompanied pregnant minors’ access to abortion. ORR’s adoption of this new policy was a condition of our agreement to dismiss our case, which we have done today.

It was three years ago that our heroic client Jane Doe — who at the time was 17 and was seeking refuge in the United States on her own — took on the Trump administration. In September 2017, we learned that ORR was trying to stop Ms. Doe from having an abortion through her fierce guardian ad litem, Rochelle Garza, and Texas-based Jane’s Due Process. 

Pursuant to the orders of then-ORR Director Scott Lloyd, Ms. Doe was effectively held hostage in the shelter where she was residing for over a month. The federal government prevented her from leaving the shelter to attend any abortion-related appointments; forced her to undergo a medically unnecessary ultrasound and to receive religious “counseling” from an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center, where they also prayed over her; and she was kept under intensive surveillance. Lloyd also instructed staffers to inform Jane Doe’s parents of her pregnancy and abortion request against Ms. Doe’s express wishes, and despite the fact that she had already obtained a court order permitting her to proceed with her abortion without involving her parents.

We rushed into court on behalf of Ms. Doe, and after weeks of court battles, obtained a court order allowing her to access abortion. Since then, we have fought alongside Ms. Doe and on behalf of our other plaintiffs, Jane Poe, Jane Roe and Jane Moe, who were also subjected to ORR’s coercive, anti-abortion tactics, to stop the federal government from commandeering the reproductive decisions of all young immigrants in its custody. Today, we are able to proudly declare that justice has finally been served.

Our success is especially meaningful for Ms. Doe, who fearlessly represented hundreds of others to ensure that what happened to her would never happen to anyone else. In response to our victory, she said, “I am happy to know that my fight means that other young women like me will be able to make the decision about whether to become a parent for themselves.”

We are certainly taking a moment to celebrate, but the fight for Ms. Doe’s vision of “reproductive freedom for all” is far from over — including for others currently in immigration detention. Indeed, the recent allegations from the Irwin County Detention Center that a government-contracted doctor performed unwarranted gynecological procedures on women in ICE detention are very disturbing, especially in light of our country’s long history of forcibly sterilizing Black and Brown people. These reports follow
years of reproductive abuse by this administration of those in immigration detention.
       
In states across the country, the right to reproductive freedom is also in peril. Anti-abortion politicians have not slowed down, even during a global pandemic. Many states tried to weaponize the COVID-19 crisis to prohibit abortion under the guise of protecting public health, a terrifying preview of what would happen if Roe v. Wade were overturned. And with the devastating passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the balance of the Supreme Court could soon be shifted against the constitutional right to abortion. In light of President Trump’s vow to only appoint justices that would overturn Roe v. Wade, it is no exaggeration to say that the future of legal abortion is at stake.

So, we celebrate with one eye on the Supreme Court, and the other on the road ahead. We’ll continue to fight for access to reproductive health care for people in federal custody and beyond to ensure that the Jane Doe’s victory does not become hollow and her vision for the future is realized: that all people are able to access reproductive health care, including abortion, without obstacles, shame, or stigma.

Published September 30, 2020 at 09:00PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3cLPjMz

ACLU: Victory: After Three Years of Battling in Court, the Trump Administration Abandons its Policy of Banning Abortion for Unaccompanied Immigrant Minors

Victory: After Three Years of Battling in Court, the Trump Administration Abandons its Policy of Banning Abortion for Unaccompanied Immigrant Minors

As a direct result of the immense courage of our clients and three years of litigation, the Trump administration has officially abandoned its policy of preventing young immigrants in its custody from accessing abortion care. Yesterday, the administration adopted a new policy that prohibits Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) staff and staff employed by any ORR-funded shelter from blocking or interfering with unaccompanied pregnant minors’ access to abortion. ORR’s adoption of this new policy was a condition of our agreement to dismiss our case, which we have done today.

It was three years ago that our heroic client Jane Doe — who at the time was 17 and was seeking refuge in the United States on her own — took on the Trump administration. In September 2017, we learned that ORR was trying to stop Ms. Doe from having an abortion through her fierce guardian ad litem, Rochelle Garza, and Texas-based Jane’s Due Process. 

Pursuant to the orders of then-ORR Director Scott Lloyd, Ms. Doe was effectively held hostage in the shelter where she was residing for over a month. The federal government prevented her from leaving the shelter to attend any abortion-related appointments; forced her to undergo a medically unnecessary ultrasound and to receive religious “counseling” from an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center, where they also prayed over her; and she was kept under intensive surveillance. Lloyd also instructed staffers to inform Jane Doe’s parents of her pregnancy and abortion request against Ms. Doe’s express wishes, and despite the fact that she had already obtained a court order permitting her to proceed with her abortion without involving her parents.

We rushed into court on behalf of Ms. Doe, and after weeks of court battles, obtained a court order allowing her to access abortion. Since then, we have fought alongside Ms. Doe and on behalf of our other plaintiffs, Jane Poe, Jane Roe and Jane Moe, who were also subjected to ORR’s coercive, anti-abortion tactics, to stop the federal government from commandeering the reproductive decisions of all young immigrants in its custody. Today, we are able to proudly declare that justice has finally been served.

Our success is especially meaningful for Ms. Doe, who fearlessly represented hundreds of others to ensure that what happened to her would never happen to anyone else. In response to our victory, she said, “I am happy to know that my fight means that other young women like me will be able to make the decision about whether to become a parent for themselves.”

We are certainly taking a moment to celebrate, but the fight for Ms. Doe’s vision of “reproductive freedom for all” is far from over — including for others currently in immigration detention. Indeed, the recent allegations from the Irwin County Detention Center that a government-contracted doctor performed unwarranted gynecological procedures on women in ICE detention are very disturbing, especially in light of our country’s long history of forcibly sterilizing Black and Brown people. These reports follow
years of reproductive abuse by this administration of those in immigration detention.
       
In states across the country, the right to reproductive freedom is also in peril. Anti-abortion politicians have not slowed down, even during a global pandemic. Many states tried to weaponize the COVID-19 crisis to prohibit abortion under the guise of protecting public health, a terrifying preview of what would happen if Roe v. Wade were overturned. And with the devastating passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the balance of the Supreme Court could soon be shifted against the constitutional right to abortion. In light of President Trump’s vow to only appoint justices that would overturn Roe v. Wade, it is no exaggeration to say that the future of legal abortion is at stake.

So, we celebrate with one eye on the Supreme Court, and the other on the road ahead. We’ll continue to fight for access to reproductive health care for people in federal custody and beyond to ensure that the Jane Doe’s victory does not become hollow and her vision for the future is realized: that all people are able to access reproductive health care, including abortion, without obstacles, shame, or stigma.

Published September 30, 2020 at 04:30PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3cLPjMz

ACLU: Punished for Reporting Sexual Harassment: How One Law School Almost Got a Student Survivor Banned From the Bar

Punished for Reporting Sexual Harassment: How One Law School Almost Got a Student Survivor Banned From the Bar

George Washington University law student Dorea K. Batté saw the texts, missed calls, and voicemails pour into her phone by the hundreds. When she blocked the number they were coming from, her stalker found a way to use different numbers to contact her. She kept blocking the numbers; he kept reaching her using new ones. Feeling helpless and overwhelmed and after warning her stalker twice to stop contacting her — to no avail — Batté finally went to her law school’s Title IX office to get help. As a reminder, Title IX is the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination — including sexual harassment — in education.

Batté wasn’t trying to get anyone in trouble; she just wanted the harassment to stop. So when her school offered a non‑disciplinary solution to her Title IX complaint — a mutual no-contact order, where neither student could interact with the other — she gladly accepted.

The order was informal, requiring nothing more than agreement by both parties. It involved no disciplinary proceedings and no disciplinary findings. Batté was assured that the “administrative order” did not go into her academic record or appear otherwise in anything that would show up in a background check. The no-contact order worked: Batté had no further problems with the other student.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Batté’s interactions with GW. After applying for admission to practice as an attorney in 2020, Batté learned the university reported to the D.C. Bar that Batté had a disciplinary record: the no-contact order that she had sought to continue her legal education harassment‑free. Suddenly, Batté’s bar admission was in jeopardy, given the “character and fitness” portion of the process. The university also put a hold on releasing Batté’s transcript.

University administrators declined to fix the problem they created — and one they had promised Batté wouldn’t happen from the start. Instead a GW administrator admitted that she “understood how the complaint started.” Yet she remarkably stood by her bar report, only telling Batté that she was free to “provide whatever explanation you believe to be appropriate to the D.C. Bar.” Batté was shocked that her law school had effectively recast her as a wrongdoer for doing nothing more than trying to continue her education free from harassment.

Only when the ACLU of the District of Columbia got involved did GW finally write to the bar to clarify that a no-contact order is not a “disciplinary” action — not for students accused of wrongdoing, who have yet to go through a fair investigative process, and most certainly not for complainants, who have been accused of no wrongdoing at all.

Despite this seemingly happy ending, Batté’s experience continues to present a cautionary tale. When the ACLU-D.C. asked GW to reform its reporting process to prevent future students from suffering adverse consequences for invoking Title IX, the school would not commit. In a recent story about Batté’s experience, a GW spokesperson told a reporter, “Mutual no-contact orders are not disciplinary actions, they are not reported to third parties as disciplinary actions, and they are not listed as a sanction on university conduct records.” This was news to us.

It is unclear whether this isolated statement, given in response to a media request and unaccompanied by any formal policy document, represents a concrete change in GW policy or an empty talking point in response to negative publicity. Accordingly, future Title IX complainants or respondents could suffer the same consequences for agreeing to what they were led to believe was a non-disciplinary course of action. There is no telling how many students at GW — and at an untold number of other schools — are still saddled with undeserved disciplinary records for trying to have a harassment-free education.

The new Title IX regulations released by the U.S. Department of Education in May of this year — which went into effect last month — place a heavy emphasis on the availability of supportive measures for complainants and respondents alike. The rule touts mutual no-contact orders as one possible supportive measure that, depending on the circumstances, may be used as an accommodation that does not punish the respondent. But if schools use mutual no-contact orders to punish the complaining student, it will not only fail as an accommodation; it will also chill complainants from reporting harassment at all.

While the ACLU and ACLU-D.C. take issue with several key parts of the new rule — and in fact the ACLU has brought a challenge to those provisions in court — we agree with the DOE that access to supportive measures is of utmost importance for many survivors. However, these supportive measures can’t be used to penalize complainants for invoking their civil rights under Title IX — which is exactly what GW’s policy does.  
Policies and practices like GW’s serve a retaliatory function that flies in the face of the purpose of Title IX — a law meant to ensure students’ equal access to education, regardless of their sex. Protocols like GW’s chill students from reporting sexual harassment. In turn, survivors who are unable to access needed accommodations and formal investigatory mechanisms suffer psychologically and academically.

The fact that schools punish survivors for experiencing and reporting sexual harassment and assault is tragically
not new. The problem is particularly common and devastating for Black women and girls, who are more likely than their white peers to be punished when seeking school support. Because of insidious racial and sex stereotypes, school administrators more often minimize Black survivors’ harms and assign them blame for the misconduct reported. These reactions exacerbate the already severe underreporting of gender-based harassment and violence.

Parts of the new Title IX regulations already serve as major deterrents from seeking help for students who have experienced sexual harassment and assault. Schools should take care not to impose additional roadblocks to students’ access to education by recasting seeking assistance as misconduct.
GW and all schools should publicly commit and memorialize in writing that they will not report voluntary mutual no-contact orders as “disciplinary action,” or otherwise penalize their students for using their Title IX resources to receive an education free from sex discrimination.

Published September 29, 2020 at 10:59PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2HKJMdT

ACLU: Immigration Detention and Coerced Sterilization: History Tragically Repeats Itself

Immigration Detention and Coerced Sterilization: History Tragically Repeats Itself

The recent news of a whistleblower’s allegations that a for-profit ICE detention center forced sterilization procedures on immigrant women shocked many people and drew comparisons to Nazi sterilization campaigns. The ICE detention story reflects a long pattern in the United States of the coerced sterilization of marginalized populations, particularly of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples. In fact, the Nazi’s borrowed ideas for their sterilization regimen from eugenic sterilization laws adopted in the U.S. in the early 20th century.

Over the course of this long history, both public and private actors in the U.S. targeted the poor, the disabled, immigrants, and racial minorities for forced sterilization. Spurred by the eugenics movement popular at the turn of the century, states enacted laws beginning in 1907 that authorized the sterilization of the “feebleminded.” More than 60,000 coercive sterilizations were performed throughout the U.S. pursuant to these eugenics laws. In Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court legitimized early 20th century eugenic sterilization practices with Oliver Wendell Holmes’ notorious declaration: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
 
It was not until Nazi Germany adopted American eugenic theory and practice that public opinion about eugenics ultimately shifted in the United States. The counter-movement against eugenic sterilization culminated in the Supreme Court’s 1942 decision in Skinner v. Oklahoma. While Skinner rejected eugenic sterilization as a valid state goal and recognized that procreation is a basic civil right, the Supreme Court has never explicitly overruled Buck v. Bell.   
 
Although support for eugenics-based sterilization laws waned, new justifications for coerced sterilization arose. Following World War II, concerns about population control, immigration, and welfare costs emerged as new rationales for targeting marginalized populations. By the 1960s, a new era of sterilization abuse was born, which once again focused on the poor, immigrants, and people of color.
 
For example, in the 1974 case of Relf v. Weinberger, a federal court found that poor people in the South were being forced to agree to sterilization when doctors threatened to withhold welfare benefits or medical care, including for childbirth. Relf involved the forced sterilization of two Black sisters, just 12 and 14 years old, who were sterilized by a federally-funded family planning clinic in Alabama. Their mother signed an “X” on a consent form she could not read, discovering too late that she had inadvertently “consented” to the permanent sterilization of her daughters Mary Alice and Minnie Relf. The federal court in Relf emphasized that coercive medical practices crossed the line between family planning and eugenics.
 
On the other side of the country and during the same era as Relf, the case of Madrigal v. Quilligan exposed coercive sterilization at the Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center in the early 1970s. After a whistleblower leaked evidence of rampant sterilization abuse at the Medical Center, a group of women filed a lawsuit alleging that medical personnel systematically coerced Mexican American women into submitting to sterilization. The Madrigal case involved women whose primary language was Spanish and who had undergone a tubal ligation after childbirth by cesarean section. Hospital staff repeatedly approached the women for consent to sterilization while they were in the midst of labor — some after being heavily medicated — and pressured the women into signing English language consent forms that they could not understand.
 
A medical student who was a firsthand witness on the maternity ward testified about what she viewed as the Medical Center’s concerted effort to reduce the birth rate of racial minorities. The medical student detailed coercive practices she witnessed:

“The doctor would hold a syringe in front of the mother who was in labor pain and ask her if she wanted a pain killer; while the woman was in the throes of a contraction the doctor would say, ‘Do you want the pain killer? Then sign the papers. Do you want the pain to stop? Do you want to have to go through this again? Sign the papers.’”

The Madrigal case revealed how discrimination along intersectional lines of gender, race, poverty, and immigration status coalesced to result in sterilization abuse.
 
The recent allegation about coerced sterilizations of immigrant women at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia eerily echoes the story of Madrigal v. Quilligan. The complaint against ICDC asserts that officials transferred detainees to a physician who sterilized the women without proper informed consent. The whistleblower, nurse Dawn Wooten, described multiple forms of medical abuse, from failures to protect patients against COVID-19, to forced hysterectomies.
 
The reports of forced hysterectomies and other unwarranted gynecological procedures at ICDC were also intertwined with a pattern of lack of informed consent to medical treatment. In connection with the hysterectomies, Ms. Wooten explained: “These immigrant women, I don’t think they really, totally, all the way understand this is what’s going to happen depending on who explains it to them.”
 
Some nurses would try to communicate with detained immigrants by simply Googling Spanish rather than using appropriate interpretation protocols. One detained immigrant reported that the procedure she was supposed to have was never properly explained to her, stating that she “felt like they were trying to mess with my body.” When she asked what procedure was planned and why, she was given three different responses by three different individuals. As in the Madrigal case, the ICDC allegations raise the concern that medical personnel are targeting vulnerable women for coerced sterilization based on their race, poverty, and immigration status.
 
The allegation of coerced sterilization in ICE detention is far from the only form of reproductive injustice inflicted upon immigration detainees. Former Office of Refugee Resettlement Director Scott Lloyd attempted to block teen migrants from accessing abortion care, even when their pregnancies were the result of rape. The Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy forcibly separated parents from their children, including children under the age of five.
 
As advocates for reproductive justice have emphasized, the fundamental civil rights to abortion, procreation, and parenting are deeply linked. All three pillars of reproductive autonomy have been simultaneously under attack during the Trump Administration, especially in the context of immigration detention. Given Justice Ginsburg’s passing and the likelihood she will be replaced by a Trump appointee, reproductive justice advocates must work even more urgently to protect the reproductive autonomy of marginalized people.

Published September 29, 2020 at 10:36PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/36hsDCL

ACLU: Punished for Reporting Sexual Harassment: How One Law School Almost Got a Student Survivor Banned From the Bar

Punished for Reporting Sexual Harassment: How One Law School Almost Got a Student Survivor Banned From the Bar

George Washington University law student Dorea K. Batté saw the texts, missed calls, and voicemails pour into her phone by the hundreds. When she blocked the number they were coming from, her stalker found a way to use different numbers to contact her. She kept blocking the numbers; he kept reaching her using new ones. Feeling helpless and overwhelmed and after warning her stalker twice to stop contacting her — to no avail — Batté finally went to her law school’s Title IX office to get help. As a reminder, Title IX is the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination — including sexual harassment — in education.

Batté wasn’t trying to get anyone in trouble; she just wanted the harassment to stop. So when her school offered a non‑disciplinary solution to her Title IX complaint — a mutual no-contact order, where neither student could interact with the other — she gladly accepted.

The order was informal, requiring nothing more than agreement by both parties. It involved no disciplinary proceedings and no disciplinary findings. Batté was assured that the “administrative order” did not go into her academic record or appear otherwise in anything that would show up in a background check. The no-contact order worked: Batté had no further problems with the other student.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Batté’s interactions with GW. After applying for admission to practice as an attorney in 2020, Batté learned the university reported to the D.C. Bar that Batté had a disciplinary record: the no-contact order that she had sought to continue her legal education harassment‑free. Suddenly, Batté’s bar admission was in jeopardy, given the “character and fitness” portion of the process. The university also put a hold on releasing Batté’s transcript.

University administrators declined to fix the problem they created — and one they had promised Batté wouldn’t happen from the start. Instead a GW administrator admitted that she “understood how the complaint started.” Yet she remarkably stood by her bar report, only telling Batté that she was free to “provide whatever explanation you believe to be appropriate to the D.C. Bar.” Batté was shocked that her law school had effectively recast her as a wrongdoer for doing nothing more than trying to continue her education free from harassment.

Only when the ACLU of the District of Columbia got involved did GW finally write to the bar to clarify that a no-contact order is not a “disciplinary” action — not for students accused of wrongdoing, who have yet to go through a fair investigative process, and most certainly not for complainants, who have been accused of no wrongdoing at all.

Despite this seemingly happy ending, Batté’s experience continues to present a cautionary tale. When the ACLU-D.C. asked GW to reform its reporting process to prevent future students from suffering adverse consequences for invoking Title IX, the school would not commit. In a recent story about Batté’s experience, a GW spokesperson told a reporter, “Mutual no-contact orders are not disciplinary actions, they are not reported to third parties as disciplinary actions, and they are not listed as a sanction on university conduct records.” This was news to us.

It is unclear whether this isolated statement, given in response to a media request and unaccompanied by any formal policy document, represents a concrete change in GW policy or an empty talking point in response to negative publicity. Accordingly, future Title IX complainants or respondents could suffer the same consequences for agreeing to what they were led to believe was a non-disciplinary course of action. There is no telling how many students at GW — and at an untold number of other schools — are still saddled with undeserved disciplinary records for trying to have a harassment-free education.

The new Title IX regulations released by the U.S. Department of Education in May of this year — which went into effect last month — place a heavy emphasis on the availability of supportive measures for complainants and respondents alike. The rule touts mutual no-contact orders as one possible supportive measure that, depending on the circumstances, may be used as an accommodation that does not punish the respondent. But if schools use mutual no-contact orders to punish the complaining student, it will not only fail as an accommodation; it will also chill complainants from reporting harassment at all.

While the ACLU and ACLU-D.C. take issue with several key parts of the new rule — and in fact the ACLU has brought a challenge to those provisions in court — we agree with the DOE that access to supportive measures is of utmost importance for many survivors. However, these supportive measures can’t be used to penalize complainants for invoking their civil rights under Title IX — which is exactly what GW’s policy does.  
Policies and practices like GW’s serve a retaliatory function that flies in the face of the purpose of Title IX — a law meant to ensure students’ equal access to education, regardless of their sex. Protocols like GW’s chill students from reporting sexual harassment. In turn, survivors who are unable to access needed accommodations and formal investigatory mechanisms suffer psychologically and academically.

The fact that schools punish survivors for experiencing and reporting sexual harassment and assault is tragically
not new. The problem is particularly common and devastating for Black women and girls, who are more likely than their white peers to be punished when seeking school support. Because of insidious racial and sex stereotypes, school administrators more often minimize Black survivors’ harms and assign them blame for the misconduct reported. These reactions exacerbate the already severe underreporting of gender-based harassment and violence.

Parts of the new Title IX regulations already serve as major deterrents from seeking help for students who have experienced sexual harassment and assault. Schools should take care not to impose additional roadblocks to students’ access to education by recasting seeking assistance as misconduct.
GW and all schools should publicly commit and memorialize in writing that they will not report voluntary mutual no-contact orders as “disciplinary action,” or otherwise penalize their students for using their Title IX resources to receive an education free from sex discrimination.

Published September 29, 2020 at 06:29PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2HKJMdT

ACLU: Immigration Detention and Coerced Sterilization: History Tragically Repeats Itself

Immigration Detention and Coerced Sterilization: History Tragically Repeats Itself

The recent news of a whistleblower’s allegations that a for-profit ICE detention center forced sterilization procedures on immigrant women shocked many people and drew comparisons to Nazi sterilization campaigns. The ICE detention story reflects a long pattern in the United States of the coerced sterilization of marginalized populations, particularly of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples. In fact, the Nazi’s borrowed ideas for their sterilization regimen from eugenic sterilization laws adopted in the U.S. in the early 20th century.

Over the course of this long history, both public and private actors in the U.S. targeted the poor, the disabled, immigrants, and racial minorities for forced sterilization. Spurred by the eugenics movement popular at the turn of the century, states enacted laws beginning in 1907 that authorized the sterilization of the “feebleminded.” More than 60,000 coercive sterilizations were performed throughout the U.S. pursuant to these eugenics laws. In Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court legitimized early 20th century eugenic sterilization practices with Oliver Wendell Holmes’ notorious declaration: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
 
It was not until Nazi Germany adopted American eugenic theory and practice that public opinion about eugenics ultimately shifted in the United States. The counter-movement against eugenic sterilization culminated in the Supreme Court’s 1942 decision in Skinner v. Oklahoma. While Skinner rejected eugenic sterilization as a valid state goal and recognized that procreation is a basic civil right, the Supreme Court has never explicitly overruled Buck v. Bell.   
 
Although support for eugenics-based sterilization laws waned, new justifications for coerced sterilization arose. Following World War II, concerns about population control, immigration, and welfare costs emerged as new rationales for targeting marginalized populations. By the 1960s, a new era of sterilization abuse was born, which once again focused on the poor, immigrants, and people of color.
 
For example, in the 1974 case of Relf v. Weinberger, a federal court found that poor people in the South were being forced to agree to sterilization when doctors threatened to withhold welfare benefits or medical care, including for childbirth. Relf involved the forced sterilization of two Black sisters, just 12 and 14 years old, who were sterilized by a federally-funded family planning clinic in Alabama. Their mother signed an “X” on a consent form she could not read, discovering too late that she had inadvertently “consented” to the permanent sterilization of her daughters Mary Alice and Minnie Relf. The federal court in Relf emphasized that coercive medical practices crossed the line between family planning and eugenics.
 
On the other side of the country and during the same era as Relf, the case of Madrigal v. Quilligan exposed coercive sterilization at the Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center in the early 1970s. After a whistleblower leaked evidence of rampant sterilization abuse at the Medical Center, a group of women filed a lawsuit alleging that medical personnel systematically coerced Mexican American women into submitting to sterilization. The Madrigal case involved women whose primary language was Spanish and who had undergone a tubal ligation after childbirth by cesarean section. Hospital staff repeatedly approached the women for consent to sterilization while they were in the midst of labor — some after being heavily medicated — and pressured the women into signing English language consent forms that they could not understand.
 
A medical student who was a firsthand witness on the maternity ward testified about what she viewed as the Medical Center’s concerted effort to reduce the birth rate of racial minorities. The medical student detailed coercive practices she witnessed:

“The doctor would hold a syringe in front of the mother who was in labor pain and ask her if she wanted a pain killer; while the woman was in the throes of a contraction the doctor would say, ‘Do you want the pain killer? Then sign the papers. Do you want the pain to stop? Do you want to have to go through this again? Sign the papers.’”

The Madrigal case revealed how discrimination along intersectional lines of gender, race, poverty, and immigration status coalesced to result in sterilization abuse.
 
The recent allegation about coerced sterilizations of immigrant women at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia eerily echoes the story of Madrigal v. Quilligan. The complaint against ICDC asserts that officials transferred detainees to a physician who sterilized the women without proper informed consent. The whistleblower, nurse Dawn Wooten, described multiple forms of medical abuse, from failures to protect patients against COVID-19, to forced hysterectomies.
 
The reports of forced hysterectomies and other unwarranted gynecological procedures at ICDC were also intertwined with a pattern of lack of informed consent to medical treatment. In connection with the hysterectomies, Ms. Wooten explained: “These immigrant women, I don’t think they really, totally, all the way understand this is what’s going to happen depending on who explains it to them.”
 
Some nurses would try to communicate with detained immigrants by simply Googling Spanish rather than using appropriate interpretation protocols. One detained immigrant reported that the procedure she was supposed to have was never properly explained to her, stating that she “felt like they were trying to mess with my body.” When she asked what procedure was planned and why, she was given three different responses by three different individuals. As in the Madrigal case, the ICDC allegations raise the concern that medical personnel are targeting vulnerable women for coerced sterilization based on their race, poverty, and immigration status.
 
The allegation of coerced sterilization in ICE detention is far from the only form of reproductive injustice inflicted upon immigration detainees. Former Office of Refugee Resettlement Director Scott Lloyd attempted to block teen migrants from accessing abortion care, even when their pregnancies were the result of rape. The Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy forcibly separated parents from their children, including children under the age of five.
 
As advocates for reproductive justice have emphasized, the fundamental civil rights to abortion, procreation, and parenting are deeply linked. All three pillars of reproductive autonomy have been simultaneously under attack during the Trump Administration, especially in the context of immigration detention. Given Justice Ginsburg’s passing and the likelihood she will be replaced by a Trump appointee, reproductive justice advocates must work even more urgently to protect the reproductive autonomy of marginalized people.

Published September 29, 2020 at 06:06PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/36hsDCL

ACLU: How the ACLU is Flexing its Political Muscle in the 2020 Elections

How the ACLU is Flexing its Political Muscle in the 2020 Elections

This week, the presidential candidates will face off in their first debate of the general election. Voters will hear Donald Trump and Joe Biden talk about their views on the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy, and the Supreme Court vacancy created by the untimely passing of ACLU alumna Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The ACLU and our supporters will be listening closely for how their answers relate to key civil liberties issues, including racial justice and reproductive freedom, just as we have throughout the presidential campaign.

This cycle, the ACLU has gotten involved in the presidential campaign in a serious way for the first time. During the primaries and caucuses, our volunteers spread across the early states to get commitments (on camera) from the candidates of both parties, on issues like access to abortion and immigrants’ rights. In fact, it was our volunteer, Nina Grey, who secured the all-important commitment from Joe Biden to end the Hyde Amendment, which has blocked access to reproductive health care to low income individuals for decades. 

Now, as we enter the thick of the general election, we’re not backing down. Instead, we’re making sure every voter understands the civil liberties issues at stake, and knows how they can safely and effectively exercise their right to vote. Our message to voters: Vote like your rights depend on it.

In Michigan, we’ve launched a voter turnout campaign for the Presidential election, to build on the success of last cycle’s Proposition 3 Promote the Vote ballot initiative, which brought no-excuse absentee voting and same day voter registration to the state. We are ensuring that voters — particularly Black Michiganders, young people, and other populations positioned to benefit from the ballot measure — are educated on their rights and options, and encouraged to get to the polls. We are running a parallel voter turnout program in the other important presidential battleground of Wisconsin.

We are also continuing our commitment to down-ballot races that often have the greatest impact on policies and practices that affect civil rights. Our focus on hyper-local races, like sheriffs and district attorneys, has brought about crucial improvements on bail reform, reductions in prison and jail populations, protections in access to abortion, and the end of immigration detention agreements with the federal government. Voters have the opportunity to usher in even more change in this vein on Nov. 3.

In the 2020 ballot measure space, we’ve made racial justice one of our top priorities for this election cycle. Our largest financial and personnel commitments have focused on three ballot referenda with strong racial justice implications. In California, the ACLU and its affiliates will invest approximately $1 million to lift a ban on affirmative action. In Oklahoma, we have spent more than $3 million to enact far-reaching criminal justice reforms that will help address racial biases and systemic inequality in the criminal legal system. In Nebraska, we’ve invested over $1 million to fight the extortionist practices of predatory payday lending institutions, which takes $28 million a year from low-income people, disproportionately people of color, in the state. Taken together and coupled with another ballot measure investments, the ACLU is flexing its political power to advance an agenda of systemic equality — one that gets at the root causes and persistent effects of systemic racism.  

We are a nonpartisan organization, and we don’t endorse or oppose particular candidates for office. But we’re involved in elections because the stakes are incredibly high for civil rights and civil liberties issues in America. The ACLU aims to educate voters about the civil liberties and civil rights records of candidates — through paid and earned media and other forms of voter communication — and encourage voters to factor those records into how they vote. At the same time, we mobilize ACLU volunteers to ensure that Americans around the country understand the potential consequences of these elections, certainly the most consequential in generations in terms of civil liberties and civil rights. Our volunteers will make millions of phone calls and send millions of text messages to voters over the course of this election. And through our new platform, Let People Vote, we’re ensuring people know how and when to vote, as well as how to get involved in their state.

The ACLU takes its nonpartisan status very seriously. We are not nonpartisan merely out of tradition or to protect our tax status; we are nonpartisan because our commitment to civil rights and civil liberties drives everything we do. We have an issue-based agenda, not a party-based one. We are nonpartisan because we have had allies from all political stripes and all political parties — and opponents, also, from all points on the political spectrum. Rather than judge politicians based on their party affiliation, we judge them on their civil liberties and civil rights records and stances. We thanked Chuck Grassley — the Republican senator from Iowa — for his leadership on the First Step Act with a full-page ad in his local newspaper. And yet, we are likely to clash horns with the same Senator Grassley for refusing to defer the confirmation process for Justice Ginsburg’s successor until after inauguration. We are an equal opportunity friend and foe, but a constant advocate for civil liberties and civil rights. When we engage in politics, we do so to highlight the issues that affect our daily work and the lives of millions of Americans.

Success for us is infusing a higher profile discussion of key civil liberties issues into elections and into voters’ calculus when casting their votes. We engage in electoral work because this is when citizens are most engaged, our issues are most salient, and voters have the greatest power to affect policy. It is also when politicians are most likely to take seriously what voters care about. Our goal is to make sure candidates know civil liberties and civil rights issues matter to voters and move the needle on key policies and practices.

We’re trying to change hearts and minds on civil liberties issues, and therefore we have short- and long-term goals. For instance, an anti-civil liberties candidate may very well win despite our best efforts to educate voters about that race, but we will have fulfilled our mission if we’re able to increase voters’ understanding and awareness of civil liberties issues.
 
We, therefore, have made and remain committed to the following assurances about our electoral work:

The ACLU will not endorse or oppose specific candidates for elected office. Our goal is to ensure that voters are educated about the potential consequences of an election, not to support specific candidates.

The ACLU will not tell people to vote for particular candidates. Educated voters can make their own decisions. The ACLU’s job is to provide voters with the information they need to know about what is at stake.

The ACLU will not coordinate with any partisan organization in electoral work. While the ACLU believes deeply in working in coalition with other nonprofits, we have no interest in partisan coordination. Our aims are different from those of a political party, and are driven by issue-based goals. (We know, for instance, gerrymandered political maps that disenfranchise voters have been drawn by both Republicans and Democrats — and we have opposed them in both instances.)

The ACLU will let civil rights and civil liberties issues drive its electoral work. The ACLU is not doing electoral work to affect the balance of political power, but to drive concrete policy outcomes that matter for people’s lives. We will choose to engage in electoral races where important civil rights and civil liberties issues are at stake. And we aim to establish a mandate for politicians to enact policies that expand rights and freedoms for all. For every election we participate in, we will be able to identify a set of concrete policies and practices that have changed because of our electoral engagement and the ultimate decision of the voters.

The ACLU will aim to educate voters about the consequences of specific elections. This could include issuing scorecards, hosting ACLU-sponsored issue-based town hall meetings, doing issue-focused radio ads or TV, mailers, billboards, or transit ads. The goal is to infuse a discussion of civil rights and civil liberties into a political race and to communicate to the public how the choice of elected officials leads to differences in policies and impacts on people’s lives.

The ACLU will urge voters to go to the polls. It does not matter how much voters understand about an election if they do not vote. In the end, the choices that people make on Election Day have great consequences. The ACLU will encourage voters to make their voices heard.

The ACLU will defend election integrity and ensure that every vote is counted, regardless of the party affiliation of the voter. In addition to our advocacy to inform and turn out voters, we engage in advocacy and litigation to ensure that every vote counts. This includes 31 lawsuits in more than 20 states, as well as pressing for laws in states like North Carolina to ensure that voters who have their mail ballots rejected have an opportunity to “cure” or fix them. With offices in each and every state, and boots on the ground in every voting jurisdiction, the ACLU is uniquely situated to ensure that every vote is counted in this critical election. 

Electoral work in this frame is a natural extension of the work we have been doing for 100 years. The ACLU has never shied away from a fight when civil liberties were at stake, whether that fight was in a courtroom, Congress or a state legislature, in the streets, or at the ballot box. We ask you to join us in this important endeavor.

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Paid for by American Civil Liberties Union, Inc., 125 Broad Street, New York, NY 10004, and authorized by Nebraskans for Responsible Lending.
 
Authorized and paid for by American Civil Liberties Union, Inc., 125 Broad Street, New York, NY 10004, 212-549-2500, on behalf of Yes on 805, Inc.
 
Paid for by American Civil Liberties Union, Inc. (major donor committee ID # 1259514) and authorized by Yes on 16, Opportunity for All Coalition, Sponsored by Civil Rights Organizations. 

Published September 29, 2020 at 08:03PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/34b6YJA

ACLU: How the ACLU is Flexing its Political Muscle in the 2020 Elections

How the ACLU is Flexing its Political Muscle in the 2020 Elections

This week, the presidential candidates will face off in their first debate of the general election. Voters will hear Donald Trump and Joe Biden talk about their views on the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy, and the Supreme Court vacancy created by the untimely passing of ACLU alumna Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The ACLU and our supporters will be listening closely for how their answers relate to key civil liberties issues, including racial justice and reproductive freedom, just as we have throughout the presidential campaign.

This cycle, the ACLU has gotten involved in the presidential campaign in a serious way for the first time. During the primaries and caucuses, our volunteers spread across the early states to get commitments (on camera) from the candidates of both parties, on issues like access to abortion and immigrants’ rights. In fact, it was our volunteer, Nina Grey, who secured the all-important commitment from Joe Biden to end the Hyde Amendment, which has blocked access to reproductive health care to low income individuals for decades. 

Now, as we enter the thick of the general election, we’re not backing down. Instead, we’re making sure every voter understands the civil liberties issues at stake, and knows how they can safely and effectively exercise their right to vote. Our message to voters: Vote like your rights depend on it.

In Michigan, we’ve launched a voter turnout campaign for the Presidential election, to build on the success of last cycle’s Proposition 3 Promote the Vote ballot initiative, which brought no-excuse absentee voting and same day voter registration to the state. We are ensuring that voters — particularly Black Michiganders, young people, and other populations positioned to benefit from the ballot measure — are educated on their rights and options, and encouraged to get to the polls. We are running a parallel voter turnout program in the other important presidential battleground of Wisconsin.

We are also continuing our commitment to down-ballot races that often have the greatest impact on policies and practices that affect civil rights. Our focus on hyper-local races, like sheriffs and district attorneys, has brought about crucial improvements on bail reform, reductions in prison and jail populations, protections in access to abortion, and the end of immigration detention agreements with the federal government. Voters have the opportunity to usher in even more change in this vein on Nov. 3.

In the 2020 ballot measure space, we’ve made racial justice one of our top priorities for this election cycle. Our largest financial and personnel commitments have focused on three ballot referenda with strong racial justice implications. In California, the ACLU and its affiliates will invest approximately $1 million to lift a ban on affirmative action. In Oklahoma, we have spent more than $3 million to enact far-reaching criminal justice reforms that will help address racial biases and systemic inequality in the criminal legal system. In Nebraska, we’ve invested over $1 million to fight the extortionist practices of predatory payday lending institutions, which takes $28 million a year from low-income people, disproportionately people of color, in the state. Taken together and coupled with another ballot measure investments, the ACLU is flexing its political power to advance an agenda of systemic equality — one that gets at the root causes and persistent effects of systemic racism.  

We are a nonpartisan organization, and we don’t endorse or oppose particular candidates for office. But we’re involved in elections because the stakes are incredibly high for civil rights and civil liberties issues in America. The ACLU aims to educate voters about the civil liberties and civil rights records of candidates — through paid and earned media and other forms of voter communication — and encourage voters to factor those records into how they vote. At the same time, we mobilize ACLU volunteers to ensure that Americans around the country understand the potential consequences of these elections, certainly the most consequential in generations in terms of civil liberties and civil rights. Our volunteers will make millions of phone calls and send millions of text messages to voters over the course of this election. And through our new platform, Let People Vote, we’re ensuring people know how and when to vote, as well as how to get involved in their state.

The ACLU takes its nonpartisan status very seriously. We are not nonpartisan merely out of tradition or to protect our tax status; we are nonpartisan because our commitment to civil rights and civil liberties drives everything we do. We have an issue-based agenda, not a party-based one. We are nonpartisan because we have had allies from all political stripes and all political parties — and opponents, also, from all points on the political spectrum. Rather than judge politicians based on their party affiliation, we judge them on their civil liberties and civil rights records and stances. We thanked Chuck Grassley — the Republican senator from Iowa — for his leadership on the First Step Act with a full-page ad in his local newspaper. And yet, we are likely to clash horns with the same Senator Grassley for refusing to defer the confirmation process for Justice Ginsburg’s successor until after inauguration. We are an equal opportunity friend and foe, but a constant advocate for civil liberties and civil rights. When we engage in politics, we do so to highlight the issues that affect our daily work and the lives of millions of Americans.

Success for us is infusing a higher profile discussion of key civil liberties issues into elections and into voters’ calculus when casting their votes. We engage in electoral work because this is when citizens are most engaged, our issues are most salient, and voters have the greatest power to affect policy. It is also when politicians are most likely to take seriously what voters care about. Our goal is to make sure candidates know civil liberties and civil rights issues matter to voters and move the needle on key policies and practices.

We’re trying to change hearts and minds on civil liberties issues, and therefore we have short- and long-term goals. For instance, an anti-civil liberties candidate may very well win despite our best efforts to educate voters about that race, but we will have fulfilled our mission if we’re able to increase voters’ understanding and awareness of civil liberties issues.
 
We, therefore, have made and remain committed to the following assurances about our electoral work:

The ACLU will not endorse or oppose specific candidates for elected office. Our goal is to ensure that voters are educated about the potential consequences of an election, not to support specific candidates.

The ACLU will not tell people to vote for particular candidates. Educated voters can make their own decisions. The ACLU’s job is to provide voters with the information they need to know about what is at stake.

The ACLU will not coordinate with any partisan organization in electoral work. While the ACLU believes deeply in working in coalition with other nonprofits, we have no interest in partisan coordination. Our aims are different from those of a political party, and are driven by issue-based goals. (We know, for instance, gerrymandered political maps that disenfranchise voters have been drawn by both Republicans and Democrats — and we have opposed them in both instances.)

The ACLU will let civil rights and civil liberties issues drive its electoral work. The ACLU is not doing electoral work to affect the balance of political power, but to drive concrete policy outcomes that matter for people’s lives. We will choose to engage in electoral races where important civil rights and civil liberties issues are at stake. And we aim to establish a mandate for politicians to enact policies that expand rights and freedoms for all. For every election we participate in, we will be able to identify a set of concrete policies and practices that have changed because of our electoral engagement and the ultimate decision of the voters.

The ACLU will aim to educate voters about the consequences of specific elections. This could include issuing scorecards, hosting ACLU-sponsored issue-based town hall meetings, doing issue-focused radio ads or TV, mailers, billboards, or transit ads. The goal is to infuse a discussion of civil rights and civil liberties into a political race and to communicate to the public how the choice of elected officials leads to differences in policies and impacts on people’s lives.

The ACLU will urge voters to go to the polls. It does not matter how much voters understand about an election if they do not vote. In the end, the choices that people make on Election Day have great consequences. The ACLU will encourage voters to make their voices heard.

The ACLU will defend election integrity and ensure that every vote is counted, regardless of the party affiliation of the voter. In addition to our advocacy to inform and turn out voters, we engage in advocacy and litigation to ensure that every vote counts. This includes 31 lawsuits in more than 20 states, as well as pressing for laws in states like North Carolina to ensure that voters who have their mail ballots rejected have an opportunity to “cure” or fix them. With offices in each and every state, and boots on the ground in every voting jurisdiction, the ACLU is uniquely situated to ensure that every vote is counted in this critical election. 

Electoral work in this frame is a natural extension of the work we have been doing for 100 years. The ACLU has never shied away from a fight when civil liberties were at stake, whether that fight was in a courtroom, Congress or a state legislature, in the streets, or at the ballot box. We ask you to join us in this important endeavor.

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Paid for by American Civil Liberties Union, Inc., 125 Broad Street, New York, NY 10004, and authorized by Nebraskans for Responsible Lending.
 
Authorized and paid for by American Civil Liberties Union, Inc., 125 Broad Street, New York, NY 10004, 212-549-2500, on behalf of Yes on 805, Inc.
 
Paid for by American Civil Liberties Union, Inc. (major donor committee ID # 1259514) and authorized by Yes on 16, Opportunity for All Coalition, Sponsored by Civil Rights Organizations. 

Published September 29, 2020 at 03:33PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/34b6YJA