Albania : First Post-Program Monitoring-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Albania
Published November 30, 2020 at 08:00AM Read more at imf.org
Somalia : First Review Under the Extended Credit Facility-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Somali
Published November 30, 2020 at 08:00AM Read more at imf.org
The Questions You Probably THINK You Know the Answer to — But Likely Don’t — About ICE Detention
What is ICE detention? What is it not?
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE — pronounced “ice,” like a cube) detention is civil detention. It is not intended to be punishment for a criminal conviction, though conditions are often as bad or worse than those you’d find in prison. It may be shocking to learn that the U.S. government detains tens of thousands of people each day in immigrant detention.
ICE detention exists to ensure people who are currently going through immigration proceedings in the U.S. attend their court dates. An immigration judge can also determine a person’s release presents a “danger to the community” (a subjective determination that isn’t necessarily accurate or fair). ICE detention also serves to effectuate deportation orders for people who are out of legal options to stay in this country. Generally, people in ICE detention are in limbo, waiting to learn whether they can legally remain in the country, or whether they will be deported.
Why should we be concerned about immigration detention?
Immigration detention rips tens of thousands of people away from their families and their communities — including long-time residents who are our neighbors, co-workers and family members. This country has not always spent taxpayer money to lock up immigrants. Until the 1980s, when the private prison profiteers began to flourish, immigrants were free while they navigated the legal process.
In many ways, the detention system mirrors the growth of our mass incarceration crisis — the same machinery that leads to the over-policing and disproportionate sentencing of Black and Brown people in a criminal context has led to growth in the immigration context as well. Now, jails and prisons that emptied out due to criminal justice reforms have turned into detention facilities. Many of them are run by for-profit providers (more on that, later).
The immigrant detention system is marred by the rampant abuse, neglect, and degradation of detained people. These trends have only worsened under the Trump administration, with reports of increased use of force, solitary confinement, patterns of sexual abuse, and an utter failure to protect people from COVID-19. Fiscal Year 2020, which ended Sept. 30, was the deadliest year in ICE detention in 15 years.
Why don’t people in immigrant detention seek legal paths to citizenship?
Many people are surprised to learn that there really aren’t any legal paths to citizenship for many (if not most) of the 11 million undocumented people in this country. But some of the people in detention did take the “legal route,” including by presenting themselves at a port of entry to apply for asylum. These people have sought refuge in the U.S., and they have been caged as a result. For many of them, there is no clear path out of detention, much less to legal citizenship.
Many people in detention have no way to contact lawyers, or money to pay for them. Many detention centers are in rural locations far from legal organizations, advocates, or other resources to help people navigate the complex system. This problem has only been exacerbated in recent years. An ACLU report released earlier this year found that the more than 40 detention facilities that have opened under Trump have 75 percent fewer lawyers within a 100 mile radius than those opened under prior administrations.
Why wouldn’t we detain people with criminal convictions?
The immigration system lacks many of the protections that are triggered when someone is charged with a crime. If someone poses a threat to public safety, we want to operate in a system that requires the government to show probable cause before an independent judge, with the defendant having access to the full range of due process protections. This is not available in the immigration system.
It’s important to keep in mind that immigrants who committed a crime serve criminal sentences in prisons and jails, just like U.S. citizens do. Once they have served that time, they should be released, just as U.S. citizens are. Instead, many serve a double punishment, facing detention and deportation after they’ve already served their criminal sentence. In some instances, people are locked up in immigration detention even longer than their initial criminal sentence.
What is the role of for-profit prisons in the system? Isn’t immigrant detention a government-run program?
The vast majority of people in immigrant detention — 81 percent, according to our recent report — are detained in facilities that are owned and/or operated by for-profit providers like CoreCivic, Geo Group, and LaSalle. That number jumps to 91 percent when you only consider people in facilities opened under the Trump administration. There is simply no way to extricate the profit motive from the vast system of detention that exists in this country.
The profit motive also helps to explain why the medical care, food, and accommodations for detained people are so completely inadequate. These companies receive a certain amount of money per person, which leads to a negative financial incentive to provide good care. That’s why we routinely hear stories of people with cancer being given ibuprofen, for example, or people having to go to court to access soap during a pandemic. Instead of spending millions of dollars imprisoning people looking to build a new life in the U.S., we could help them navigate the legal process and land on their feet.
If we don’t detain people, how will we ensure they make their court date?
The data show that most undocumented people show up for court. Detention is not necessary, nor is it a humane or acceptable de facto response. We do not jail everyone who is awaiting court dates in the criminal legal system because it is a clear violation of their civil liberties, and our constitution protects against that. The same logic should apply to our immigration system. We can build a system that supports immigrants — and the government’s interests — without the cost and the abuses that are part of this fundamentally flawed system.
What are the alternatives to detention?
There are a number of community-based alternatives to detention that are just as effective for ensuring people show up to court, save taxpayers money, and are vastly more humane. The Family Case Management Program (FCMP), for example, connected families with a case manager and legal support and boasted a 99 percent success rate, as reported by ICE. It cost just $36 a day per family, compared to $319 per day per person for family detention. The Trump administration ended the program in June 2017, but President-elect Biden has pledged to invest in “community-based management programs.” We will fight to ensure that people are allowed to remain with their families and communities while their immigration cases are pending.
Published November 30, 2020 at 11:56PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2KPWdGB
The Questions You Probably THINK You Know the Answer to — But Likely Don’t — About ICE Detention
What is ICE detention? What is it not?
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE — pronounced “ice,” like a cube) detention is civil detention. It is not intended to be punishment for a criminal conviction, though conditions are often as bad or worse than those you’d find in prison. It may be shocking to learn that the U.S. government detains tens of thousands of people each day in immigrant detention.
ICE detention exists to ensure people who are currently going through immigration proceedings in the U.S. attend their court dates. An immigration judge can also determine a person’s release presents a “danger to the community” (a subjective determination that isn’t necessarily accurate or fair). ICE detention also serves to effectuate deportation orders for people who are out of legal options to stay in this country. Generally, people in ICE detention are in limbo, waiting to learn whether they can legally remain in the country, or whether they will be deported.
Why should we be concerned about immigration detention?
Immigration detention rips tens of thousands of people away from their families and their communities — including long-time residents who are our neighbors, co-workers and family members. This country has not always spent taxpayer money to lock up immigrants. Until the 1980s, when the private prison profiteers began to flourish, immigrants were free while they navigated the legal process.
In many ways, the detention system mirrors the growth of our mass incarceration crisis — the same machinery that leads to the over-policing and disproportionate sentencing of Black and Brown people in a criminal context has led to growth in the immigration context as well. Now, jails and prisons that emptied out due to criminal justice reforms have turned into detention facilities. Many of them are run by for-profit providers (more on that, later).
The immigrant detention system is marred by the rampant abuse, neglect, and degradation of detained people. These trends have only worsened under the Trump administration, with reports of increased use of force, solitary confinement, patterns of sexual abuse, and an utter failure to protect people from COVID-19. Fiscal Year 2020, which ended Sept. 30, was the deadliest year in ICE detention in 15 years.
Why don’t people in immigrant detention seek legal paths to citizenship?
Many people are surprised to learn that there really aren’t any legal paths to citizenship for many (if not most) of the 11 million undocumented people in this country. But some of the people in detention did take the “legal route,” including by presenting themselves at a port of entry to apply for asylum. These people have sought refuge in the U.S., and they have been caged as a result. For many of them, there is no clear path out of detention, much less to legal citizenship.
Many people in detention have no way to contact lawyers, or money to pay for them. Many detention centers are in rural locations far from legal organizations, advocates, or other resources to help people navigate the complex system. This problem has only been exacerbated in recent years. An ACLU report released earlier this year found that the more than 40 detention facilities that have opened under Trump have 75 percent fewer lawyers within a 100 mile radius than those opened under prior administrations.
Why wouldn’t we detain people with criminal convictions?
The immigration system lacks many of the protections that are triggered when someone is charged with a crime. If someone poses a threat to public safety, we want to operate in a system that requires the government to show probable cause before an independent judge, with the defendant having access to the full range of due process protections. This is not available in the immigration system.
It’s important to keep in mind that immigrants who committed a crime serve criminal sentences in prisons and jails, just like U.S. citizens do. Once they have served that time, they should be released, just as U.S. citizens are. Instead, many serve a double punishment, facing detention and deportation after they’ve already served their criminal sentence. In some instances, people are locked up in immigration detention even longer than their initial criminal sentence.
What is the role of for-profit prisons in the system? Isn’t immigrant detention a government-run program?
The vast majority of people in immigrant detention — 81 percent, according to our recent report — are detained in facilities that are owned and/or operated by for-profit providers like CoreCivic, Geo Group, and LaSalle. That number jumps to 91 percent when you only consider people in facilities opened under the Trump administration. There is simply no way to extricate the profit motive from the vast system of detention that exists in this country.
The profit motive also helps to explain why the medical care, food, and accommodations for detained people are so completely inadequate. These companies receive a certain amount of money per person, which leads to a negative financial incentive to provide good care. That’s why we routinely hear stories of people with cancer being given ibuprofen, for example, or people having to go to court to access soap during a pandemic. Instead of spending millions of dollars imprisoning people looking to build a new life in the U.S., we could help them navigate the legal process and land on their feet.
If we don’t detain people, how will we ensure they make their court date?
The data show that most undocumented people show up for court. Detention is not necessary, nor is it a humane or acceptable de facto response. We do not jail everyone who is awaiting court dates in the criminal legal system because it is a clear violation of their civil liberties, and our constitution protects against that. The same logic should apply to our immigration system. We can build a system that supports immigrants — and the government’s interests — without the cost and the abuses that are part of this fundamentally flawed system.
What are the alternatives to detention?
There are a number of community-based alternatives to detention that are just as effective for ensuring people show up to court, save taxpayers money, and are vastly more humane. The Family Case Management Program (FCMP), for example, connected families with a case manager and legal support and boasted a 99 percent success rate, as reported by ICE. It cost just $36 a day per family, compared to $319 per day per person for family detention. The Trump administration ended the program in June 2017, but President-elect Biden has pledged to invest in “community-based management programs.” We will fight to ensure that people are allowed to remain with their families and communities while their immigration cases are pending.
Published November 30, 2020 at 06:26PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2KPWdGB
Greece : Second Post-Program Monitoring Discussions-Press Release; Staff Report; Staff Statement; and Statement by the Executive Director for Greece
Published November 30, 2020 at 08:00AM Read more at imf.org
President Trump is on his way out the door, even if he goes kicking and screaming. The Biden-Harris administration will have its hands full picking up the pieces. Trump has left the federal government a kind of environmental disaster area, desperately in need of a massive cleanup. No president in US history has done more to degrade the presidency, constitutional norms, or American politics. The good news is that Trump did most of his damage unilaterally, through executive action, and therefore Biden can unilaterally reverse those actions.
On one matter, however, changing course will be far more challenging. With the support of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society, Trump has appointed more than three hundred new federal judges. He has named fully 30 percent of federal court of appeals judges, and three Supreme Court justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. They all serve for life. And unless Democrats win both runoff Senate races in Georgia, Biden will require the assent of a Republican-controlled Senate to appoint any new judges or justices. What does this landscape mean for the future of the federal courts, and the Supreme Court in particular?
To find a Supreme Court as conservative as today’s, you have to go back to the Progressive Era and the early days of the New Deal, when practically the only constitutional rights the Supreme Court recognized were the rights of big business owners to be free of regulation designed to protect consumers and workers. Today’s court has six Republican appointees and only three Democratic ones, and the Republican appointees all came with burnished conservative credentials. Trump’s last-minute appointment of Justice Barrett saw a civil rights hero, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, replaced by a deeply Catholic abortion opponent and acolyte of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Kavanaugh has thus far shown himself to be more conservative than Anthony Kennedy, whose seat he has assumed. And Justice Gorsuch, while less predictable, has many very conservative views, including a fundamental distrust of the administrative state.
So, what is a civil libertarian to do? When preelection opinion polls appeared to promise that Democrats could win not only the presidency but also the Senate, some talked of “court reform.” The reformers argued that the Republicans had effectively “packed” the Supreme Court through a series of technically legal but unprecedented maneuvers, from the refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing almost a year out from one general election to the ramming through of Justice Barrett’s confirmation just days before another. But absent Democratic control of the Senate, court reform is illusory.
And even if reform had been possible, it risks further politicizing the court, and that, in turn, would carry its own substantial costs. Constitutional rights and civil liberties, by definition, protect those who cannot protect themselves through the political process: members of minority groups, dissidents, the vulnerable and powerless. Their protection requires an institution that does not answer directly to the democratic polity. Indeed, that’s the best argument for life tenure, as a guarantee of independence. If the court becomes just another political arena, constitutional rights will cease to function as a check on majority power.
We are stuck, therefore, with the hand that has been dealt us. What then? When one considers how many important cases have been decided in the last couple decades by 5–4 votes, with Justice Ginsburg in the majority, it is easy to despair. The right to marriage equality, and recent decisions upholding the right to abortion, were decided by a single vote. Privacy rights to cell phone location data, Guantánamo detainees’ access to court, and juveniles’ right not to be executed similarly were all decided by a single vote. So, too, was the court’s recent protection of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, and its invalidation of Trump’s attempt to skew the 2020 census by asking about citizenship. The Affordable Care Act survived its first and most significant challenge by a single vote as well. (As ACLU National Legal Director, I was counsel in the census and cellphone privacy cases, and filed an amicus brief in the DACA case.) If the liberal side in these cases had had to attract not just one conservative vote, but two, we might have lost them all.
But there is reason not to give up hope. A conservative-dominated Supreme Court is actually nothing new. The bench has been comprised of a majority of conservative and Republican appointees ever since 1971. Yet, in that time span, the court has ruled that discrimination on the basis of sex violates equal protection, recognized the right to abortion, and rebuffed a concerted effort by the Reagan administration to overturn that right. It invalidated laws making same-sex sexual relations a crime and recognized marriage equality. It expanded the jury trial rights of criminal defendants and the First Amendment rights of anonymous pamphleteers, flag-burners, proponents of unpopular and even hateful views, and Internet users. It limited the application of the death penalty, upheld affirmative action, and ruled that ostensibly neutral housing practices that have a disparate effect on racial minorities violate federal law. And most recently, the court ruled that laws that prohibit discrimination “because of sex” also prohibit discrimination on the basis of transgender status or sexual orientation (I was counsel in this last case as well).
Last term alone, the court reached “liberal” results in virtually all of its most controversial cases — including abortion, LGBT rights, DACA, and Trump’s claim that he could not be required to turn over private financial records to a grand jury or congressional committees. Whatever else one might say, the court has not been the unremittingly conservative body that some predicted and many feared.
Why would a conservative court have reached all of these liberal decisions? One reason is that constitutional cases are decided by the application of precedent, so justices are not free to vote their party line, as are members of Congress. The law is not, of course, divorced from politics, but it is different from politics in this sense. Precedents do not dictate results, but they provide more direction and constraint than cynics are generally inclined to acknowledge. One reason the conservative court has reached liberal results is because that was actually the best reading of the law.
Second, the court’s legitimacy rests on its remaining open to argument. If the court decided every controversial issue on partisan ideological lines, it would lose its ability to resolve disputes in a way that people by and large accept. Consider, for example, Trump’s current attack on the results of the presidential election. The federal courts are hearing — and rejecting — those claims, and are virtually certain to reject Trump’s effort to reverse the election’s outcome. Once that happens, at least some people will be more likely to accept the results of the election than if we did not have an institution removed from politics to decide the dispute. But the courts’ ability to play that part requires that they are perceived as open to both sides, and guided by law, not pure politics.
Third, the court’s standing with the public also depends on its not diverging too far from where the country is on matters of constitutional principle. Political scientists who have studied the court over time have found that, while it may not literally “follow the election returns,” its decisions generally reflect contemporary public values. A conservative-majority court reached all the liberal outcomes listed above in part because public opinion, over time, increasingly recognized the equality claims of women and LGBT persons, questioned the death penalty, supported affirmative action, and the like.
A caveat is important here. The forces outlined above tend to operate in those cases in which the court knows that it is being watched. But every year, the Supreme Court decides many significant cases that draw relatively little attention — and in those cases, the conservative justices tend to vote much more consistently along conservative lines. Thus, in important cases pitting employees’ or consumers’ rights against businesses, the court has rarely ruled against business. Because the results in these cases are often below the radar, the conservatives may feel less incentive to restrain their ideological biases.
Republicans have long lamented the tendency of their appointees to move to the center once appointed to the court. This was arguably true of Justices Harry Blackmun, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and appears to be true of John Roberts. But if I am right that the court’s reputation turns on its being perceived as fair — as deciding cases based on principle rather than political ideology, as open to argument, and as in tune with the nation’s evolving fundamental values — there will be incentives on any conservative-majority court for one or more justices on the right side of the court to move left, at least in some significant cases. On a liberal-majority court, by the same token, the incentive would be for one or more of the liberals to move right. (Because the Supreme Court has so rarely been dominated by liberals, we don’t have as much evidence for that transformation, but there are certainly examples of Democratic appointees who voted more conservatively than expected once appointed, including Felix Frankfurter and Byron White.)
All of this suggests that it is too early for civil libertarians to give up on the Supreme Court. But it also underscores that the battle for civil liberties must be waged not only, or even mostly, before the court. The Supreme Court did not deliver us equal protection for women or marriage equality. The feminist and LGBT movements did that, through painstaking political and legal work in a variety of forums, including corporate boardrooms, university faculties, city councils, state courts and legislatures, governors’ and mayors’ offices, dinner-table conversations, Congress, and the executive branch. The court then recognized the advances that had been won outside its four walls.
There are some areas of legal dispute in which one simply has no choice but to sue in federal court, so one cannot give up on the judiciary even when it is dominated by conservatives. When a red state passes a law banning abortion, the very politics that made the state law possible are likely to infect the state’s courts — in particular, as most state court judges have to run for election. When the Department of Homeland Security targets immigrants for enforcement actions that deny due process, the only recourse is federal, and neither the president nor Congress have shown much sympathy for immigrants. Criminal defendants often lose through every phase of the state criminal process, only to prevail when, after completing the state appeals process, they are allowed to seek relief from a federal court through a claim of habeas corpus. One of the surest ways for a state judge to lose his seat is to vindicate a criminal defendant’s constitutional rights; federal courts, with their judges’ life tenure, have proved more receptive.
So the work of civil libertarians will continue apace, inside and outside the federal courts. We may increasingly turn to more sympathetic forums to make initial inroads, as advocates for marriage equality so effectively did. But in the end, if the country supports civil liberties and civil rights, the Supreme Court is unlikely to get in the way. This means all of us can and must do our part to defend liberty. As one of the United States’ greatest judges, Learned Hand, said:
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.
Published November 24, 2020 at 03:00PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2UV6hjg
President Trump is on his way out the door, even if he goes kicking and screaming. The Biden-Harris administration will have its hands full picking up the pieces. Trump has left the federal government a kind of environmental disaster area, desperately in need of a massive cleanup. No president in US history has done more to degrade the presidency, constitutional norms, or American politics. The good news is that Trump did most of his damage unilaterally, through executive action, and therefore Biden can unilaterally reverse those actions.
On one matter, however, changing course will be far more challenging. With the support of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society, Trump has appointed more than three hundred new federal judges. He has named fully 30 percent of federal court of appeals judges, and three Supreme Court justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. They all serve for life. And unless Democrats win both runoff Senate races in Georgia, Biden will require the assent of a Republican-controlled Senate to appoint any new judges or justices. What does this landscape mean for the future of the federal courts, and the Supreme Court in particular?
To find a Supreme Court as conservative as today’s, you have to go back to the Progressive Era and the early days of the New Deal, when practically the only constitutional rights the Supreme Court recognized were the rights of big business owners to be free of regulation designed to protect consumers and workers. Today’s court has six Republican appointees and only three Democratic ones, and the Republican appointees all came with burnished conservative credentials. Trump’s last-minute appointment of Justice Barrett saw a civil rights hero, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, replaced by a deeply Catholic abortion opponent and acolyte of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Kavanaugh has thus far shown himself to be more conservative than Anthony Kennedy, whose seat he has assumed. And Justice Gorsuch, while less predictable, has many very conservative views, including a fundamental distrust of the administrative state.
So, what is a civil libertarian to do? When preelection opinion polls appeared to promise that Democrats could win not only the presidency but also the Senate, some talked of “court reform.” The reformers argued that the Republicans had effectively “packed” the Supreme Court through a series of technically legal but unprecedented maneuvers, from the refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing almost a year out from one general election to the ramming through of Justice Barrett’s confirmation just days before another. But absent Democratic control of the Senate, court reform is illusory.
And even if reform had been possible, it risks further politicizing the court, and that, in turn, would carry its own substantial costs. Constitutional rights and civil liberties, by definition, protect those who cannot protect themselves through the political process: members of minority groups, dissidents, the vulnerable and powerless. Their protection requires an institution that does not answer directly to the democratic polity. Indeed, that’s the best argument for life tenure, as a guarantee of independence. If the court becomes just another political arena, constitutional rights will cease to function as a check on majority power.
We are stuck, therefore, with the hand that has been dealt us. What then? When one considers how many important cases have been decided in the last couple decades by 5–4 votes, with Justice Ginsburg in the majority, it is easy to despair. The right to marriage equality, and recent decisions upholding the right to abortion, were decided by a single vote. Privacy rights to cell phone location data, Guantánamo detainees’ access to court, and juveniles’ right not to be executed similarly were all decided by a single vote. So, too, was the court’s recent protection of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, and its invalidation of Trump’s attempt to skew the 2020 census by asking about citizenship. The Affordable Care Act survived its first and most significant challenge by a single vote as well. (As ACLU National Legal Director, I was counsel in the census and cellphone privacy cases, and filed an amicus brief in the DACA case.) If the liberal side in these cases had had to attract not just one conservative vote, but two, we might have lost them all.
But there is reason not to give up hope. A conservative-dominated Supreme Court is actually nothing new. The bench has been comprised of a majority of conservative and Republican appointees ever since 1971. Yet, in that time span, the court has ruled that discrimination on the basis of sex violates equal protection, recognized the right to abortion, and rebuffed a concerted effort by the Reagan administration to overturn that right. It invalidated laws making same-sex sexual relations a crime and recognized marriage equality. It expanded the jury trial rights of criminal defendants and the First Amendment rights of anonymous pamphleteers, flag-burners, proponents of unpopular and even hateful views, and Internet users. It limited the application of the death penalty, upheld affirmative action, and ruled that ostensibly neutral housing practices that have a disparate effect on racial minorities violate federal law. And most recently, the court ruled that laws that prohibit discrimination “because of sex” also prohibit discrimination on the basis of transgender status or sexual orientation (I was counsel in this last case as well).
Last term alone, the court reached “liberal” results in virtually all of its most controversial cases — including abortion, LGBT rights, DACA, and Trump’s claim that he could not be required to turn over private financial records to a grand jury or congressional committees. Whatever else one might say, the court has not been the unremittingly conservative body that some predicted and many feared.
Why would a conservative court have reached all of these liberal decisions? One reason is that constitutional cases are decided by the application of precedent, so justices are not free to vote their party line, as are members of Congress. The law is not, of course, divorced from politics, but it is different from politics in this sense. Precedents do not dictate results, but they provide more direction and constraint than cynics are generally inclined to acknowledge. One reason the conservative court has reached liberal results is because that was actually the best reading of the law.
Second, the court’s legitimacy rests on its remaining open to argument. If the court decided every controversial issue on partisan ideological lines, it would lose its ability to resolve disputes in a way that people by and large accept. Consider, for example, Trump’s current attack on the results of the presidential election. The federal courts are hearing — and rejecting — those claims, and are virtually certain to reject Trump’s effort to reverse the election’s outcome. Once that happens, at least some people will be more likely to accept the results of the election than if we did not have an institution removed from politics to decide the dispute. But the courts’ ability to play that part requires that they are perceived as open to both sides, and guided by law, not pure politics.
Third, the court’s standing with the public also depends on its not diverging too far from where the country is on matters of constitutional principle. Political scientists who have studied the court over time have found that, while it may not literally “follow the election returns,” its decisions generally reflect contemporary public values. A conservative-majority court reached all the liberal outcomes listed above in part because public opinion, over time, increasingly recognized the equality claims of women and LGBT persons, questioned the death penalty, supported affirmative action, and the like.
A caveat is important here. The forces outlined above tend to operate in those cases in which the court knows that it is being watched. But every year, the Supreme Court decides many significant cases that draw relatively little attention — and in those cases, the conservative justices tend to vote much more consistently along conservative lines. Thus, in important cases pitting employees’ or consumers’ rights against businesses, the court has rarely ruled against business. Because the results in these cases are often below the radar, the conservatives may feel less incentive to restrain their ideological biases.
Republicans have long lamented the tendency of their appointees to move to the center once appointed to the court. This was arguably true of Justices Harry Blackmun, David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and appears to be true of John Roberts. But if I am right that the court’s reputation turns on its being perceived as fair — as deciding cases based on principle rather than political ideology, as open to argument, and as in tune with the nation’s evolving fundamental values — there will be incentives on any conservative-majority court for one or more justices on the right side of the court to move left, at least in some significant cases. On a liberal-majority court, by the same token, the incentive would be for one or more of the liberals to move right. (Because the Supreme Court has so rarely been dominated by liberals, we don’t have as much evidence for that transformation, but there are certainly examples of Democratic appointees who voted more conservatively than expected once appointed, including Felix Frankfurter and Byron White.)
All of this suggests that it is too early for civil libertarians to give up on the Supreme Court. But it also underscores that the battle for civil liberties must be waged not only, or even mostly, before the court. The Supreme Court did not deliver us equal protection for women or marriage equality. The feminist and LGBT movements did that, through painstaking political and legal work in a variety of forums, including corporate boardrooms, university faculties, city councils, state courts and legislatures, governors’ and mayors’ offices, dinner-table conversations, Congress, and the executive branch. The court then recognized the advances that had been won outside its four walls.
There are some areas of legal dispute in which one simply has no choice but to sue in federal court, so one cannot give up on the judiciary even when it is dominated by conservatives. When a red state passes a law banning abortion, the very politics that made the state law possible are likely to infect the state’s courts — in particular, as most state court judges have to run for election. When the Department of Homeland Security targets immigrants for enforcement actions that deny due process, the only recourse is federal, and neither the president nor Congress have shown much sympathy for immigrants. Criminal defendants often lose through every phase of the state criminal process, only to prevail when, after completing the state appeals process, they are allowed to seek relief from a federal court through a claim of habeas corpus. One of the surest ways for a state judge to lose his seat is to vindicate a criminal defendant’s constitutional rights; federal courts, with their judges’ life tenure, have proved more receptive.
So the work of civil libertarians will continue apace, inside and outside the federal courts. We may increasingly turn to more sympathetic forums to make initial inroads, as advocates for marriage equality so effectively did. But in the end, if the country supports civil liberties and civil rights, the Supreme Court is unlikely to get in the way. This means all of us can and must do our part to defend liberty. As one of the United States’ greatest judges, Learned Hand, said:
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.
Published November 24, 2020 at 08:30PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/2UV6hjg
Ukraine : Technical Assistance Report—A Follow-Up on Distributed Profit Tax, BEPS Implementation, Voluntary Disclosure Program, and Indirect Methods for Determining Taxable Income
Published November 23, 2020 at 08:00AM Read more at imf.org
Ukraine : Technical Assistance Report—A Follow-Up on Distributed Profit Tax, BEPS Implementation, Voluntary Disclosure Program, and Indirect Methods for Determining Taxable Income
Published November 23, 2020 at 08:00AM Read more at imf.org
Bloody Masks and Fevers on Shift: Immigrant Workers Face Abuse in Nebraska Meatpacking Plant
Last spring, as people across the globe raced to shut themselves indoors and shelter away from the threat of COVID-19, meatpacking workers in America suddenly found themselves exposed, vulnerable, and directly at the front line of the disease’s spread. By early April, the coronavirus was tearing through plants in states like Iowa, South Dakota, Texas, and Nebraska, infecting tens of thousands of mostly immigrant workers who’d been drawn to remote towns and cities by the meatpacking industry and its jobs.
Nervous health officials urged some hotspot plants to temporarily shut down, warning that crowded and enclosed processing rooms were vectors for the disease and were facilitating its spread into nearby communities. Recognizing the threat that the outbreaks posed to their operations – and their bottom line – some producers began implementing rudimentary protections for their workers including paid sick leave, on-site testing, and increased spacing on production lines.
Others, however, did little to protect workers, even after the scale of the danger they faced was obvious and undeniable. Noah’s Ark Processors, a plant operating in Hastings, Nebraska, is a glaring example of the dangerous and abusive treatment that meatpacking workers have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. This week the ACLU filed suit against Noah’s Ark, alleging that the company pressures workers to remain on shift even when they become symptomatic, isn’t replacing blood-stained masks during their long shifts, has done nothing to facilitate social distancing inside the plant, and is failing to provide onsite testing to identify emerging infection clusters.
“Noah’s Ark has refused to implement even the most basic protections against a coronavirus surge in the plant,” said Spencer Amdur, an attorney at the ACLU. “At this point in the pandemic, there is no excuse for failing to do even the bare minimum to protect workers and the surrounding community.”
Alma was one of the workers on the production line at Noah’s Ark and is a plaintiff in the ACLU’s lawsuit. After emigrating from Cuba in 2012, she was hired to work in the plant a few years ago. It was a tough job. Her hands and wrists often ached from grueling hours spent on the “kill floor” – an enclosed room where cow carcasses are butchered and prepared for cold storage – but it paid decently. She and her husband Antonio, also a Noah’s Ark employee, were raising four children, and the family needed the money. (Note: the ACLU is using pseudonyms for them due to their fear of retaliation by management.)
Like many meatpacking plants, the majority of the plant’s workforce were immigrants, and Isabel says that even before COVID-19 emerged she and Antonio were unsettled by the way management treated them. But things took a sharp turn for the worse when the pandemic began.
“People were scared, but [management] made it seem like it wasn’t a big deal,” she said. “The first thing they said was that nobody could miss work. They would say that [COVID-19] was just nonsense. Even when things got more serious, they didn’t care.”
Then, in late April, workers at the plant began to fall ill.
The Noah’s Ark Processing meatpacking plant in Hastings, Nebraska.Calla Kessler for the ACLU
Antonio worked closely with a team of two other co-workers on the kill floor. During their shift, the three spent hours nearly shoulder-to-shoulder. After one contracted COVID-19 and had to be hospitalized, it wasn’t long before Antonio also became symptomatic.
“I told my supervisor that my eyes were hurting and that I had symptoms that were getting worse, and he basically told me to f-off and go back to work,” he said.
Feverish and ill, Antonio went back to the line and finished his shift. But that night, he grew sicker. To make matters worse, Alma had also begun to feel unwell. Noah’s Ark wasn’t providing COVID-19 testing for its workforce, but fortunately for the couple, they had a contact in a local clinic and arranged for a test on their own. The results came back positive for both.
For weeks, the couple battled the virus at home, moving into the basement so they could limit contact with their children.
“It was really hard because the kids were just upstairs, but we couldn’t touch them,” Antonio said.
His case was worse than Alma’s. At one point, he developed shortness of breath and went to a local hospital, but staff there told him that resources were limited and they could only treat the sickest patients. In all, the pair were out of work for seven weeks at home while they fought to recover.
When they returned to Noah’s Ark, they discovered they were only going to be paid for two of the seven weeks they were sick, and at a lower hourly rate. Later, they’d discover that other workers hadn’t been paid at all for the time they spent at home sick.
Since they’d been out, Noah’s Ark had hired a nurse to perform cursory temperature checks of workers, but there was still no on-site testing, even as it became clear that people without fevers could spread the virus. Workers in the cramped, stuffy processing rooms were given masks – but only one per shift. When the masks became soiled with blood and sweat, workers were forced to pull them down below their noses so they could breathe, or take them off altogether. In the windowless cafeteria/break room, they squeezed together at small tables separated by thin, flimsy nylon barriers that provided little protection.
The virus continued to spread among the workforce at Noah’s Ark through April and May. Still, working conditions didn’t get better.
Alma says that managers continued to send a clear signal to sick workers that if they missed shifts their jobs would be at risk. At one point in late summer, a colleague of hers was instructed to stay on the line despite a rising fever. When the woman missed the following two days due to her illness, she was nearly fired. Alma managed to convince her manager to keep her on, but it was a warning to the rest of the workforce. An older worker, who Antonio was close with, died of complications related to COVID-19.
“They think that we are like slaves, not workers,” Alma said. “You aren’t allowed to get sick.”
Noah’s Ark has a record of failing to follow laws meant to protect workers. In October 2019, a district court in Nebraska found the company in contempt for failing to comply with an order to negotiate in good faith with a local meatpacking union. In its ruling, the court said Noah’s Ark had illegally attempted to block workers from joining the union as it sought to slash benefits and workplace safety protections. And federal regulators fined the company in 2019 and 2020 for not paying sick leave or securing dangerous equipment.
“What they’re interested in is money,” Alma said. “They want the factory to produce and they don’t care about the cost.”
Nine months into the pandemic, and in the midst of another alarming rise in infections and deaths, little has changed at Noah’s Ark. Employees working on the production lines and kill floor remain packed together in close quarters, the company still does not have a testing program in place, sick-leave policies have not been publicly posted, and workers are given only one mask per eight-hour shift, even when it becomes soaked in sweat and spattered with blood.
Workers in the cafeteria (left) and kill floor (right) at Noah’s Ark Processing meatpacking plant in Hastings, NE.
“Our lawsuit seeks to establish that Noah’s Ark – just like all other plants – needs to implement basic COVID protections: distancing, masks, sick leave, and testing,” said Rose Godinez, an attorney at the ACLU of Nebraska. “By refusing even these most simple protections, the plant is a public nuisance that threatens to spread the virus throughout Hastings and the broader Tri-City community.”
Godinez says she hopes the court will set standards that can apply to all meatpacking workers, adding that poor safety measures in the industry’s plants don’t just endanger those workers – they put the general public at risk.
In fact, an analysis by The Guardian found that nearly half the counties in the U.S. with the highest per-capita infection rates featured an outbreak related to a meatpacking plant. And cases in Nebraska are rising fast – on November 17, the state recorded its highest single-day positive case count since the start of the pandemic.
Despite the risks posed to the wider community by plants like Noah’s Ark, it’s been difficult for the public to understand where the worst hotspots have been, or to ensure that workforce outbreaks are addressed before they get worse. In May, Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts announced that the state would cease providing the public with data on infection rates at specific plants.
The vast majority of workers in Nebraska’s meatpacking plants are immigrants, following a long history that began near the turn of the century with an influx of emigres from Europe. According to statistics released by Nebraska’s Department of Health in July, despite only comprising 11% of the state’s overall population, people who identify as Hispanic accounted for 60% of coronavirus cases in the state — largely due to meatpacking plants’ immigrant workforce.
“Prior to filing this lawsuit, we have advocated for workers at all levels of government, to no avail,” said Godinez. ”With both the private sector and our local, state, and federal officials refusing to enforce laws requiring a safe workplace, workers were forced to turn to the judicial system.”
Alma and Antonio worked at the plant through the start of Fall. But their working conditions continued to deteriorate. Antonio was eventually fired for missing a single day of work. A month later, Alma decided she had also had enough, and quit.
“There, holidays are not observed. When other companies aren’t working, this one has to work. There’s no law and order,” she said.
Both say they worry for the safety of their former co-workers at Noah’s Ark – who regularly update them on what’s been happening since they left – and are frustrated that federal agencies with a mandate to oversee meatpacking plants haven’t stepped in to help. Alma hopes her suit will hold the company’s owners accountable for their treatment of the plant’s workers during the pandemic.
“I hope things change and get better there,” she said. “Being an immigrant doesn’t make people animals. They are like you and me – they’re just trying to make a living.”
Published November 23, 2020 at 10:44PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3lXqnFv
Bloody Masks and Fevers on Shift: Immigrant Workers Face Abuse in Nebraska Meatpacking Plant
Last spring, as people across the globe raced to shut themselves indoors and shelter away from the threat of COVID-19, meatpacking workers in America suddenly found themselves exposed, vulnerable, and directly at the front line of the disease’s spread. By early April, the coronavirus was tearing through plants in states like Iowa, South Dakota, Texas, and Nebraska, infecting tens of thousands of mostly immigrant workers who’d been drawn to remote towns and cities by the meatpacking industry and its jobs.
Nervous health officials urged some hotspot plants to temporarily shut down, warning that crowded and enclosed processing rooms were vectors for the disease and were facilitating its spread into nearby communities. Recognizing the threat that the outbreaks posed to their operations – and their bottom line – some producers began implementing rudimentary protections for their workers including paid sick leave, on-site testing, and increased spacing on production lines.
Others, however, did little to protect workers, even after the scale of the danger they faced was obvious and undeniable. Noah’s Ark Processors, a plant operating in Hastings, Nebraska, is a glaring example of the dangerous and abusive treatment that meatpacking workers have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. This week the ACLU filed suit against Noah’s Ark, alleging that the company pressures workers to remain on shift even when they become symptomatic, isn’t replacing blood-stained masks during their long shifts, has done nothing to facilitate social distancing inside the plant, and is failing to provide onsite testing to identify emerging infection clusters.
“Noah’s Ark has refused to implement even the most basic protections against a coronavirus surge in the plant,” said Spencer Amdur, an attorney at the ACLU. “At this point in the pandemic, there is no excuse for failing to do even the bare minimum to protect workers and the surrounding community.”
Alma was one of the workers on the production line at Noah’s Ark and is a plaintiff in the ACLU’s lawsuit. After emigrating from Cuba in 2012, she was hired to work in the plant a few years ago. It was a tough job. Her hands and wrists often ached from grueling hours spent on the “kill floor” – an enclosed room where cow carcasses are butchered and prepared for cold storage – but it paid decently. She and her husband Antonio, also a Noah’s Ark employee, were raising four children, and the family needed the money. (Note: the ACLU is using pseudonyms for them due to their fear of retaliation by management.)
Like many meatpacking plants, the majority of the plant’s workforce were immigrants, and Isabel says that even before COVID-19 emerged she and Antonio were unsettled by the way management treated them. But things took a sharp turn for the worse when the pandemic began.
“People were scared, but [management] made it seem like it wasn’t a big deal,” she said. “The first thing they said was that nobody could miss work. They would say that [COVID-19] was just nonsense. Even when things got more serious, they didn’t care.”
Then, in late April, workers at the plant began to fall ill.
The Noah’s Ark Processing meatpacking plant in Hastings, Nebraska.Calla Kessler for the ACLU
Antonio worked closely with a team of two other co-workers on the kill floor. During their shift, the three spent hours nearly shoulder-to-shoulder. After one contracted COVID-19 and had to be hospitalized, it wasn’t long before Antonio also became symptomatic.
“I told my supervisor that my eyes were hurting and that I had symptoms that were getting worse, and he basically told me to f-off and go back to work,” he said.
Feverish and ill, Antonio went back to the line and finished his shift. But that night, he grew sicker. To make matters worse, Alma had also begun to feel unwell. Noah’s Ark wasn’t providing COVID-19 testing for its workforce, but fortunately for the couple, they had a contact in a local clinic and arranged for a test on their own. The results came back positive for both.
For weeks, the couple battled the virus at home, moving into the basement so they could limit contact with their children.
“It was really hard because the kids were just upstairs, but we couldn’t touch them,” Antonio said.
His case was worse than Alma’s. At one point, he developed shortness of breath and went to a local hospital, but staff there told him that resources were limited and they could only treat the sickest patients. In all, the pair were out of work for seven weeks at home while they fought to recover.
When they returned to Noah’s Ark, they discovered they were only going to be paid for two of the seven weeks they were sick, and at a lower hourly rate. Later, they’d discover that other workers hadn’t been paid at all for the time they spent at home sick.
Since they’d been out, Noah’s Ark had hired a nurse to perform cursory temperature checks of workers, but there was still no on-site testing, even as it became clear that people without fevers could spread the virus. Workers in the cramped, stuffy processing rooms were given masks – but only one per shift. When the masks became soiled with blood and sweat, workers were forced to pull them down below their noses so they could breathe, or take them off altogether. In the windowless cafeteria/break room, they squeezed together at small tables separated by thin, flimsy nylon barriers that provided little protection.
The virus continued to spread among the workforce at Noah’s Ark through April and May. Still, working conditions didn’t get better.
Alma says that managers continued to send a clear signal to sick workers that if they missed shifts their jobs would be at risk. At one point in late summer, a colleague of hers was instructed to stay on the line despite a rising fever. When the woman missed the following two days due to her illness, she was nearly fired. Alma managed to convince her manager to keep her on, but it was a warning to the rest of the workforce. An older worker, who Antonio was close with, died of complications related to COVID-19.
“They think that we are like slaves, not workers,” Alma said. “You aren’t allowed to get sick.”
Noah’s Ark has a record of failing to follow laws meant to protect workers. In October 2019, a district court in Nebraska found the company in contempt for failing to comply with an order to negotiate in good faith with a local meatpacking union. In its ruling, the court said Noah’s Ark had illegally attempted to block workers from joining the union as it sought to slash benefits and workplace safety protections. And federal regulators fined the company in 2019 and 2020 for not paying sick leave or securing dangerous equipment.
“What they’re interested in is money,” Alma said. “They want the factory to produce and they don’t care about the cost.”
Nine months into the pandemic, and in the midst of another alarming rise in infections and deaths, little has changed at Noah’s Ark. Employees working on the production lines and kill floor remain packed together in close quarters, the company still does not have a testing program in place, sick-leave policies have not been publicly posted, and workers are given only one mask per eight-hour shift, even when it becomes soaked in sweat and spattered with blood.
Workers in the cafeteria (left) and kill floor (right) at Noah’s Ark Processing meatpacking plant in Hastings, NE.
“Our lawsuit seeks to establish that Noah’s Ark – just like all other plants – needs to implement basic COVID protections: distancing, masks, sick leave, and testing,” said Rose Godinez, an attorney at the ACLU of Nebraska. “By refusing even these most simple protections, the plant is a public nuisance that threatens to spread the virus throughout Hastings and the broader Tri-City community.”
Godinez says she hopes the court will set standards that can apply to all meatpacking workers, adding that poor safety measures in the industry’s plants don’t just endanger those workers – they put the general public at risk.
In fact, an analysis by The Guardian found that nearly half the counties in the U.S. with the highest per-capita infection rates featured an outbreak related to a meatpacking plant. And cases in Nebraska are rising fast – on November 17, the state recorded its highest single-day positive case count since the start of the pandemic.
Despite the risks posed to the wider community by plants like Noah’s Ark, it’s been difficult for the public to understand where the worst hotspots have been, or to ensure that workforce outbreaks are addressed before they get worse. In May, Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts announced that the state would cease providing the public with data on infection rates at specific plants.
The vast majority of workers in Nebraska’s meatpacking plants are immigrants, following a long history that began near the turn of the century with an influx of emigres from Europe. According to statistics released by Nebraska’s Department of Health in July, despite only comprising 11% of the state’s overall population, people who identify as Hispanic accounted for 60% of coronavirus cases in the state — largely due to meatpacking plants’ immigrant workforce.
“Prior to filing this lawsuit, we have advocated for workers at all levels of government, to no avail,” said Godinez. ”With both the private sector and our local, state, and federal officials refusing to enforce laws requiring a safe workplace, workers were forced to turn to the judicial system.”
Alma and Antonio worked at the plant through the start of Fall. But their working conditions continued to deteriorate. Antonio was eventually fired for missing a single day of work. A month later, Alma decided she had also had enough, and quit.
“There, holidays are not observed. When other companies aren’t working, this one has to work. There’s no law and order,” she said.
Both say they worry for the safety of their former co-workers at Noah’s Ark – who regularly update them on what’s been happening since they left – and are frustrated that federal agencies with a mandate to oversee meatpacking plants haven’t stepped in to help. Alma hopes her suit will hold the company’s owners accountable for their treatment of the plant’s workers during the pandemic.
“I hope things change and get better there,” she said. “Being an immigrant doesn’t make people animals. They are like you and me – they’re just trying to make a living.”
Published November 23, 2020 at 05:14PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3lXqnFv
New Court, New President: What’s Next for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
As of now, we know the status of two of the three branches of the federal government. We have President-elect Joe Biden in the executive, and an even more conservative majority in the Supreme Court with the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The future of Congress is still unknown as we await the results of two runoffs in Georgia that could hand control of the Senate to either party.
Even before the results of those Senate races are in, we know that the fate of civil rights and civil liberties hangs in the balance. Civil rights protections previously defended by a narrow majority in the Supreme Court could be in jeopardy. At the same time, the Biden administration will have the opportunity to roll back Trump-era assaults like the Muslim ban; it might also get a chance at its own appointments.
On At Liberty this week, we’re joined by our National Legal Director David Cole, who helps us to understand and forecast the impact of a Biden presidency and the most conservative Supreme Court in more than half a century.
Nicaragua : Requests for Purchase under the Rapid Financing Instrument and Disbursement under the Rapid Credit Facility-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Nicaragua
Published November 20, 2020 at 08:00AM Read more at imf.org
New Court, New President: What’s Next for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
As of now, we know the status of two of the three branches of the federal government. We have President-elect Joe Biden in the executive, and an even more conservative majority in the Supreme Court with the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The future of Congress is still unknown as we await the results of two runoffs in Georgia that could hand control of the Senate to either party.
Even before the results of those Senate races are in, we know that the fate of civil rights and civil liberties hangs in the balance. Civil rights protections previously defended by a narrow majority in the Supreme Court could be in jeopardy. At the same time, the Biden administration will have the opportunity to roll back Trump-era assaults like the Muslim ban; it might also get a chance at its own appointments.
On At Liberty this week, we’re joined by our National Legal Director David Cole, who helps us to understand and forecast the impact of a Biden presidency and the most conservative Supreme Court in more than half a century.
To Protect Black Trans Lives, Decriminalize Sex Work
Like pretty much everything in 2020, Trans Day of Remembrance is going to be different this year. It’s going virtual. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that transgender people are still being murdered for being who we are. The list of names keeps growing. This year is the deadliest ever, and it isn’t even over yet.
Thirty-four trans people have been killed since January. The real number is probably even higher. Trans people are often misgendered by law enforcement or don’t report attacks, so we don’t even know about most of the violence that happens to our sisters. Most of the deaths this year were of Black trans women. Many were sex workers. I am not surprised. As a trans woman of color and a former sex worker myself, I know what it’s like to be targeted for who you are, and to not have anyone to call for help because your job is illegal.
I’m lucky that I was never assaulted in my 12 years of doing sex work. I’m in the minority. But I have been robbed while working. My experience showed me the difficult situation that sex workers face when it comes to reporting: I wanted to seek justice, but I was too afraid of being arrested to go to the police station.
Laws that criminalize sex work push the industry underground, which makes it more dangerous. Sex workers face high rates of violence because clients assume they can assault or rob sex workers and get away with it. They take advantage of the fact that so many of us are afraid of reporting for fear of what will happen to us. If we call the police, we could be arrested for selling sex. We could also be abused by law enforcement. Being a sex worker is dangerous whether you’re trans, cis, LGBTQ, or straight. But it’s especially dangerous if you are a trans woman of color.
Kaniya WalkerCredit: Wilfredo Martinez
Both police and civilians profile trans women of color as sex workers even when we are not engaging in sex work. We’re seen as easy targets, especially if we are from a low-income community. In Washington, D.C., where I live, 4 out of every 5 trans women report being verbally, physically, or sexually assaulted. This violence exists across the country. Nine in 10 trans sex workers or those suspected of being a sex worker reported being harassed, attacked, or assaulted by the police. Trans women who are not sex workers also face violence. I remember a case in New Orleans when a man drove around shooting trans women on the street. They were simply walking — existing — while trans. Anti-sex work laws like SESTA/FOSTA make sex workers, especially trans women of color, even more vulnerable to violence. The law banned online platforms and screening tools that sex workers use to screen clients and share information to stay safe, making it harder for sex workers to protect themselves.
Banning online sex work platforms pushes sex workers out onto the street, which is more dangerous. Client interactions are quick because we don’t want to be caught. I know some girls who feel the need to get a gun license to protect themselves. Others will carry knives or mace. You never know when you will need it. It’s two strangers meeting each other — there’s always a chance that something bad might happen.
You might be wondering why anybody would want to be a sex worker. A lot of us choose to get into sex work because the money is good and it is an environment where we can surround ourselves with other trans people. But some of us just don’t have any other options because of discrimination in the legal job market. Trans people are more likely to be unemployed compared to cisgender people. Thirty-four percent of Black trans people live in poverty. Trans people without a college degree and trans people who have experienced homelessness are even more likely to engage in sex work. These are some of the reasons why sex workers are disproportionately Black or Latinx trans women. It’s what we call survival sex.
Because trans women are more likely to engage in sex work, we’re also more likely to be incarcerated than the general population. I’ve been to jail because I was arrested for being a sex worker. I know it’s not something I or any other sex worker should have to experience, especially if they are trans. Jails and prisons often misgender us and put us in men’s facilities, where we are at higher risk of being assaulted. I’ve heard of trans women being taunted by staff and cellmates, such as asking whether their hair is detachable and making them take it off just to embarrass them. The punishment doesn’t end there. Once you get out of jail or prison, a past conviction can prevent you from getting a job, housing, health care, or other services.
I’m not a sex worker anymore. I’ve moved on to a different career working with Heart to Hand and other trans and sex work advocacy organizations. Now, I use my voice to advocate for the sex workers and trans women of color who feel they don’t have a voice living in a criminalized world. Decriminalizing sex work would help sex workers to go out and make money safely, take care of themselves, and have the option to change careers — if they choose to do that one day.
When we think about a future where we are not grieving so many of our siblings on Trans Day of Remembrance, ending the criminalization of sex work will be a critical part. We cannot survive and thrive if our lives are policed and criminalized.
For more information about the impact of sex work criminalization and evidence-based approaches to decriminalize, visitaclu.org/sexworkand download theACLU research brief.
Published November 20, 2020 at 09:18PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3nKTSuC
Trump’s Last-Ditch Census Move Could Shape the Electoral Map for the Next Decade
Trump’s days as president are coming to an end, but his efforts to weaponize the census continue — and could impact our democracy for the next decade. We’re going to the Supreme Court on Nov. 30 to make sure that doesn’t happen.
If the census fight feels like a case of déjà vu, there’s a good reason. We already took the Trump administration to court to block its attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The Supreme Court agreed with us and ruled that the citizenship question was illegal. Because of that victory, the census proceeded this year as it has for the last 70 years, free of the discriminatory citizenship question.
Still, the fight continues. In spite of squarely losing on the citizenship question, the Trump administration tried again in July to weaponize the census. This time, it issued a memo directing the secretary of commerce to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count that determines how many congressional seats each state gets. This would be an unconstitutional and radical break with the 230-year history of the census, and could reshape the Electoral College map for years to come.
Here’s why excluding undocumented immigrants is a problem for all of us: Members of Congress don’t just represent the people who vote. They represent everyone with a stake in our communities, including over 10 million undocumented people who live in the U.S. That’s why the census has always counted everybody — citizens and noncitizens alike — since it was first conducted in 1790. Everybody counts and everybody is entitled to representation in Congress. The Constitution says so.
On top of being unconstitutional, the exclusion of undocumented people from the census apportionment count is a discriminatory attack on immigrant communities. It’s no surprise: President Trump has been virulently anti-immigrant since even before he came into office, and the census is just one of many arenas he has used to demonize and disempower immigrants. If he prevails, the exclusionary census total Trump is asking for will dilute the political power of states and areas with significant immigrant communities, especially those of color. States with large immigrant populations like California, Texas, and New Jersey would each lose a congressional seat and an Electoral College vote, while white-majority states would gain representation. An undercount would also make it easier for politicians to draw even more skewed legislative district lines for gerrymandering. To avoid these undemocratic outcomes, we must preserve the integrity of the census — by counting everybody.
From the very beginning of the census fight, Trump has been trying to send the message that undocumented people do not count. That’s not only wrong, it’s unlawful and unconstitutional. Undocumented people are part of the fabric of our communities. They count.
This case is not about particular individuals or groups, it’s about whether all of our communities are represented. We all have a stake in our communities, and we all lose when we’re not counted accurately. We won’t let Trump get away with this last-ditch effort to weaponize the census. We defeated him in the Supreme Court last year, and we are confident that we will do it again this month.
Published November 20, 2020 at 09:05PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3nUoTwD
To Protect Black Trans Lives, Decriminalize Sex Work
Like pretty much everything in 2020, Trans Day of Remembrance is going to be different this year. It’s going virtual. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that transgender people are still being murdered for being who we are. The list of names keeps growing. This year is the deadliest ever, and it isn’t even over yet.
Thirty-four trans people have been killed since January. The real number is probably even higher. Trans people are often misgendered by law enforcement or don’t report attacks, so we don’t even know about most of the violence that happens to our sisters. Most of the deaths this year were of Black trans women. Many were sex workers. I am not surprised. As a trans woman of color and a former sex worker myself, I know what it’s like to be targeted for who you are, and to not have anyone to call for help because your job is illegal.
I’m lucky that I was never assaulted in my 12 years of doing sex work. I’m in the minority. But I have been robbed while working. My experience showed me the difficult situation that sex workers face when it comes to reporting: I wanted to seek justice, but I was too afraid of being arrested to go to the police station.
Laws that criminalize sex work push the industry underground, which makes it more dangerous. Sex workers face high rates of violence because clients assume they can assault or rob sex workers and get away with it. They take advantage of the fact that so many of us are afraid of reporting for fear of what will happen to us. If we call the police, we could be arrested for selling sex. We could also be abused by law enforcement. Being a sex worker is dangerous whether you’re trans, cis, LGBTQ, or straight. But it’s especially dangerous if you are a trans woman of color.
Kaniya WalkerCredit: Wilfredo Martinez
Both police and civilians profile trans women of color as sex workers even when we are not engaging in sex work. We’re seen as easy targets, especially if we are from a low-income community. In Washington, D.C., where I live, 4 out of every 5 trans women report being verbally, physically, or sexually assaulted. This violence exists across the country. Nine in 10 trans sex workers or those suspected of being a sex worker reported being harassed, attacked, or assaulted by the police. Trans women who are not sex workers also face violence. I remember a case in New Orleans when a man drove around shooting trans women on the street. They were simply walking — existing — while trans. Anti-sex work laws like SESTA/FOSTA make sex workers, especially trans women of color, even more vulnerable to violence. The law banned online platforms and screening tools that sex workers use to screen clients and share information to stay safe, making it harder for sex workers to protect themselves.
Banning online sex work platforms pushes sex workers out onto the street, which is more dangerous. Client interactions are quick because we don’t want to be caught. I know some girls who feel the need to get a gun license to protect themselves. Others will carry knives or mace. You never know when you will need it. It’s two strangers meeting each other — there’s always a chance that something bad might happen.
You might be wondering why anybody would want to be a sex worker. A lot of us choose to get into sex work because the money is good and it is an environment where we can surround ourselves with other trans people. But some of us just don’t have any other options because of discrimination in the legal job market. Trans people are more likely to be unemployed compared to cisgender people. Thirty-four percent of Black trans people live in poverty. Trans people without a college degree and trans people who have experienced homelessness are even more likely to engage in sex work. These are some of the reasons why sex workers are disproportionately Black or Latinx trans women. It’s what we call survival sex.
Because trans women are more likely to engage in sex work, we’re also more likely to be incarcerated than the general population. I’ve been to jail because I was arrested for being a sex worker. I know it’s not something I or any other sex worker should have to experience, especially if they are trans. Jails and prisons often misgender us and put us in men’s facilities, where we are at higher risk of being assaulted. I’ve heard of trans women being taunted by staff and cellmates, such as asking whether their hair is detachable and making them take it off just to embarrass them. The punishment doesn’t end there. Once you get out of jail or prison, a past conviction can prevent you from getting a job, housing, health care, or other services.
I’m not a sex worker anymore. I’ve moved on to a different career working with Heart to Hand and other trans and sex work advocacy organizations. Now, I use my voice to advocate for the sex workers and trans women of color who feel they don’t have a voice living in a criminalized world. Decriminalizing sex work would help sex workers to go out and make money safely, take care of themselves, and have the option to change careers — if they choose to do that one day.
When we think about a future where we are not grieving so many of our siblings on Trans Day of Remembrance, ending the criminalization of sex work will be a critical part. We cannot survive and thrive if our lives are policed and criminalized.
For more information about the impact of sex work criminalization and evidence-based approaches to decriminalize, visitaclu.org/sexworkand download theACLU research brief.
Published November 20, 2020 at 03:48PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3nKTSuC
Trump’s Last-Ditch Census Move Could Shape the Electoral Map for the Next Decade
Trump’s days as president are coming to an end, but his efforts to weaponize the census continue — and could impact our democracy for the next decade. We’re going to the Supreme Court on Nov. 30 to make sure that doesn’t happen.
If the census fight feels like a case of déjà vu, there’s a good reason. We already took the Trump administration to court to block its attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The Supreme Court agreed with us and ruled that the citizenship question was illegal. Because of that victory, the census proceeded this year as it has for the last 70 years, free of the discriminatory citizenship question.
Still, the fight continues. In spite of squarely losing on the citizenship question, the Trump administration tried again in July to weaponize the census. This time, it issued a memo directing the secretary of commerce to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count that determines how many congressional seats each state gets. This would be an unconstitutional and radical break with the 230-year history of the census, and could reshape the Electoral College map for years to come.
Here’s why excluding undocumented immigrants is a problem for all of us: Members of Congress don’t just represent the people who vote. They represent everyone with a stake in our communities, including over 10 million undocumented people who live in the U.S. That’s why the census has always counted everybody — citizens and noncitizens alike — since it was first conducted in 1790. Everybody counts and everybody is entitled to representation in Congress. The Constitution says so.
On top of being unconstitutional, the exclusion of undocumented people from the census apportionment count is a discriminatory attack on immigrant communities. It’s no surprise: President Trump has been virulently anti-immigrant since even before he came into office, and the census is just one of many arenas he has used to demonize and disempower immigrants. If he prevails, the exclusionary census total Trump is asking for will dilute the political power of states and areas with significant immigrant communities, especially those of color. States with large immigrant populations like California, Texas, and New Jersey would each lose a congressional seat and an Electoral College vote, while white-majority states would gain representation. An undercount would also make it easier for politicians to draw even more skewed legislative district lines for gerrymandering. To avoid these undemocratic outcomes, we must preserve the integrity of the census — by counting everybody.
From the very beginning of the census fight, Trump has been trying to send the message that undocumented people do not count. That’s not only wrong, it’s unlawful and unconstitutional. Undocumented people are part of the fabric of our communities. They count.
This case is not about particular individuals or groups, it’s about whether all of our communities are represented. We all have a stake in our communities, and we all lose when we’re not counted accurately. We won’t let Trump get away with this last-ditch effort to weaponize the census. We defeated him in the Supreme Court last year, and we are confident that we will do it again this month.
Published November 20, 2020 at 03:35PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/3nUoTwD
