A religious school can’t be a public school, and a public school can’t be religious. These fundamental legal tenets have long protected both the integrity of our public-education system, which serves all students, and the right of private religious schools to indoctrinate students in accordance with a particular faith. In approving a Catholic public charter school, however, Oklahoma officials are not just blurring these lines separating church and state; they’re attempting to completely eviscerate them. We’re suing to put a stop to it.

American Civil Liberties Union

OKPLAC, Inc. v. Statewide Virtual Charter School Board | American Civil Liberties Union

The ACLU and partners are working with plaintiffs to fight against the sponsoring and funding of the nation’s first religious public charter school.

Oklahoma’s public-school system includes both brick-and-mortar and virtual charter schools. State statutory provisions and the state constitution require these schools and all other public schools to remain open to all students — regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, religion, LGBTQ status, disability, or any other characteristic — and to teach a non-religious curriculum. St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School will do neither. Nevertheless, in June, the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, which authorizes and sponsors online charter schools, approved St. Isidore’s application, setting the school up to receive taxpayer funds and operate as a government entity.

In its application, St. Isidore asserts that it will be managed by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and will participate “in the evangelizing mission of the Church.” To that end, the school’s application makes clear that it will discriminate in admissions and student discipline, as necessary to satisfy the Catholic Church’s religious beliefs. This means that students could be denied admission or punished based on their religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or other failures to comply with Catholic doctrine. St. Isidore even refused to certify that it will not discriminate against students with disabilities if accommodating a student would violate Catholic beliefs. The school also plans to discriminate in employment.

Not surprisingly, St. Isidore’s curriculum will be thoroughly religious, as “the School fully embraces the teachings of the Catholic Church” and will incorporate these teachings “into every aspect of the School,” including all subjects taught and all activities offered. The school aims to ensure all students know and believe that:

• “among all creatures, the human person is the only one created in God’s image with the ability to know and love God, and that God created persons male and female”;
• “because of sin humanity was separated from God, but in God’s love He has provided a path to salvation through the saving power of Christ, the second person of the Trinity, in His suffering, death and resurrection”; and
• “human persons are destined for eternal life with the Holy Trinity but that in freedom, an individual may reject God’s invitation and by this definitive self-exclusion end up in hell.”

A private religious school is, of course, well within its rights to teach these lessons. And churches are free to inculcate these beliefs in Sunday school. But they are wildly unconstitutional in public schools. Indeed, the mere notion of a religious public school is a constitutional oxymoron. This would be true for any proposed religious charter school — whether imposing Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or any other faith on students. Government institutions cannot be religious entities, and that is what St. Isidore is. Even Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general has said that approving St. Isidore as a charter school is unlawful and has vowed to fight it.

Allowing St. Isidore to operate as planned would transform Oklahoma’s public schools into tools of discrimination and religious indoctrination. And, as the first religious public school in the nation, it could inspire copycats in other states, with grave consequences. It would threaten to severely undermine public education, a cornerstone of our democracy, while infringing the religious freedom of students, families, and taxpayers.

Our lawsuit, filed today in Oklahoma state court with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Education Law Center, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, takes a stand against the insidious efforts to co-opt public schools for private, religious interests. We represent Oklahoma faith leaders, parents, and public-education advocates who have had enough. Public schools are not Sunday schools, and we and our allies will fight to keep it that way.

Police violence is a pervasive issue across the country that has led to harassment, injuries, and deaths. Racial discrimination and excessive force disproportionately impact communities of color, which often have an outsized police presence. And although investigations have repeatedly exposed patterns of racism and unconstitutional policing within law enforcement departments, they are rarely held accountable.

Victims who survive unconstitutional policing encounters must contend with a criminal legal system that, due to its own racial biases, wrongfully convicts them or forces them to plead out to fabricated resisting arrest charges—often preventing them from exercising their constitutional right to hold police accountable for their misconduct.

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The ACLU of Louisiana’s Justice Lab aims to combat these injustices. The statewide program, which has already filed more than 50 cases on behalf of individuals challenging police violence, recognizes the systemic and discriminatory nature of police brutality and seeks to put an end to it through litigation and storytelling. It also fulfills an urgent need, as Louisiana law bars civil rights challenges after one year following the incident, and the Supreme Court case Heck v. Humphrey makes it very difficult for people to bring a civil rights challenge seeking money damages for constitutional violations that resulted in their conviction. The Justice Lab represents people who often face significant legal hurdles to accountability, including the use of fabricated legal charges intended to beget their silence.

Here, Anthony Monroe, a Justice Lab client who has experienced police violence firsthand and filed his case after the traditional one-year bar passed, and Alanah Odoms, the ACLU of Louisiana’s executive director, share their insight, experiences, and how they’re fighting back.

These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

The day after Thanksgiving, Mr. Monroe was leaving work after the 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift. He passed a slow-moving diesel truck without speeding, and noticed a Louisiana State Trooper parked on the side of the road. The state trooper began following Mr. Monroe, but he was confident he had nothing to worry about because he had done nothing wrong. Then the trooper turned his car’s lights on and pulled him over.

“He got out of his vehicle, had one hand on a flashlight and another hand on his gun. And I’m thinking something about this is not right.

“When I stepped out of my vehicle, that’s when the process started. He grabbed both of my hands, pulling me toward him, and made it look like I was resisting arrest. Another trooper showed up, and they threw me on the ground, [started] jumping on my back and pounding on me, with my hands behind my back.

“They keep pressing down, and I’m screaming ‘Oh my god, I can’t breathe.’ This isn’t supposed to be happening to me. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“He’d been trained to do this. He never de-escalated the situation. He kept making the situation get worse and worse and worse … And after they brutalized me, then I got charged with resisting arrest.

“If you’ve been victimized like this and brutally beaten and attacked, it takes 28 to 34 months for you to get your mind right, because the first year, you’re still having nightmares, you’re waking up with sweats, you’re not being able to sleep, you’re getting up and down.

“And the justice that I’ve gotten so far has been good with the ACLU, but not with the Louisiana state troopers. The system is geared to make money off of people.

“The law should be blind, but it’s not. You shouldn’t have the freedom to abuse people like that in the United States, no matter where you live.

“I hope the law changes after they see what I’ve been through, and what has happened to me…We should be able to live in peace, every day.”

“The ACLU justice lab is a systemic, comprehensive approach to addressing police violence. We want to hold police accountable — and the departments that employ them — so that they can change their policy and conduct. We have filed 50 cases in three years, in every federal jurisdiction in Louisiana.

“This is something that we at the ACLU have decided to take up as a decades-long commitment because we don’t think there’s a silver bullet. There’s not one case that you can file. There’s not one piece of legislation that you can pass that’s going to change this.

“Police violence is an outgrowth — and it’s not just in the South. I think it’s important to state the problems that are endemic to policing, which are white supremacy and toxic masculinity. That’s why we know it’s going to take a sustained approach. It’s going to take a lot of resources, a lot of really smart, dedicated people pushing in the same direction and shifting this narrative.

“What I want folks to know is that we actually have an opportunity to do a lot better by people if we actually change policy. We want something better for our children and for their children, just like our ancestors wanted better for us.”

Earlier this month, a federal grand jury indicted Culpeper County, Virginia Sheriff Scott Jenkins for allegedly taking cash bribes and large campaign donations in exchange for appointing people “auxiliary deputy sheriffs” and allowing them to carry concealed firearms without a permit. Another sheriff, Chuck Jenkins (no relation) of Frederick County, Maryland, was also recently indicted for an alleged scheme that involved machine gun trafficking in exchange for political support in his re-election campaign.

These two sheriffs have more than just their names and reputed scandals in common: they both work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Despite the criminal charges and a record of civil rights violations, the Biden administration has chosen to continue partnering with the two sheriffs through an immigration enforcement program known as 287(g), which permits state and local law enforcement agencies across the country to exercise federal authorities that are usually reserved to ICE agents.

(Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office)

The program sounds technical, but its effect is devastatingly simple: Millions of our neighbors live in fear that if they interact with local law enforcement — even just seeking protection in urgent situations such as domestic violence — they’ll be turned over to ICE and deported from their families and the places they call home.

The two sheriffs are far from the only controversial law enforcement officials in the program. A 2022 ACLU report found that 65 percent of the Biden administration’s 287(g) partners have records of racial profiling and other civil rights violations, while 59 percent have records of pushing anti-immigrant hate.

Some of these sheriffs have expressed their anti-immigrant beliefs as a core part of their jobs. In an interview in which he touted the 287(g) program and appeared in uniform, Jenkins (of Maryland) described immigration to the U.S. as “chemical warfare against the United States,” because “the entire world hates this country, everybody around the world hates America, what we stand for, what we’re all about, the fabric of our society.” He bragged about creating a “virtual fence” around his county through immigration enforcement — falsely contending that neighboring counties without the program are “overwhelmed by illegals, a lot of criminals.”

The Biden administration can’t control local sheriffs — who are free to disagree with the Biden administration’s immigration policy and have the right to express their views.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

And the federal government should not fund law enforcement by those who violate the civil rights of people in our communities.

We’ve seen again and again that sheriffs who make anti-immigrant statements have condoned or even encouraged illegal racial profiling in the policing of their communities. A glaring example is Alamance County, North Carolina Sheriff Terry Johnson, a current 287(g) participant with a long history of racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric. A damning Justice Department civil rights investigation found that the sheriff fostered a “culture of discrimination” that permeated the entire agency, and a pattern of discriminatory targeting of Latino people in arrests and detention. This prompted ICE to terminate the 287(g) partnership with the sheriff in 2012. But the Trump administration re-signed the sheriff onto the program — and the Biden administration has so far refused to terminate the agreement.

As a candidate, President Biden pledged to roll back 287(g) agreements initiated under Trump. More than two years into Biden’s term, the 287(g) program has only minorly shrunk from a peak of 152 partnerships under President Trump to 137 partnerships.

Meanwhile, numerous law enforcement leaders have spoken out against the program even while many face political and legal attempts to compel their participation. They include Mecklenburg County, North Carolina’s Sheriff Garry McFadden, who believes 287(g) undermines public safety and the prerogative of local voters. The state legislature in Florida has passed a law attempting to override local prerogatives and force sheriffs to apply to join the 287(g) program, while House Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation that would require ICE to approve any partnership application — no matter how abusive the sheriff.

Without a Senate-confirmed ICE director, the 287(g) program’s fate largely lies with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. He continues to face down impeachment threats by the Republican-controlled House, which may be (wrongly) stalling the ICE reform agenda.

White House interests are at stake. President Biden issued important executive orders that led to a new policy to address racial profiling. But there’s a total mismatch between these White House efforts and its inaction on the 287(g) program, which is a notorious vehicle for racial profiling.

The consequences for our neighbors and loved ones are stark. “I’ve actually had clients who have told me that they didn’t go to the hospital when they had their first child because they were really worried,” said local attorney Adriel Orozco, who co-wrote our complaint on 287(g) partner Alamance County.

It’s long past time for the Biden administration to stop empowering racist sheriffs — and do more to support civil rights and protections in our communities.