Fifty-eight years ago on March 7, television viewers saw 500 peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, teargassed and beaten by police. The marchers were protesting the murder of a young, unarmed Black man and the continued disenfranchisement of Black people in the South.

The brutal, unprovoked attack sparked national outrage, became known as “Bloody Sunday,” and was a catalyst of the voting rights movement. This march led to the signing and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson.

On March 7, 2021 President Biden issued Executive Order 14019 Promoting Access to Voting, a visionary executive order that has the potential to make registration and voting more accessible for millions of Americans, including communities historically excluded from the political process. In the order, President Biden directed federal agencies to “consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.”

In a democracy, governments at all levels should be doing everything they can to help eligible people register to vote. The voting access executive order is an important step toward achieving this goal because it gets the federal government involved in aiding with voter registration, just as state governments already do.

On the anniversary of Bloody Sunday and the two-year anniversary of this executive order, we acknowledge both that the administration and agencies have made progress, and that significant work remains. Building on its promising start, it’s time for the Biden administration and agencies to finish the job and fulfill the promise of the voting access executive order.

That’s why the ACLU, alongside a coalition of civil rights organizations, issued the report “Strengthening Democracy: A Progress Report on Federal Agency Action to Promote Access to Voting,” to highlight, at the agency level, what has been done and what is still needed to help ensure every eligible voter has robust, easy, and equal access to the ballot box.

A few agencies have made noteworthy headway. For example, by accepting National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) designations for the tribal institutions it operates, the Department of the Interior has moved to ensure that eligible students who attend these institutions have regular access to high-quality voter registration. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has also begun working with state election officials to secure NVRA designations. And by incorporating voter registration into the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program, the Treasury Department is helping to address persistent income-based gaps in voter registration by improving access to voter registration among people with low incomes.

However, most agencies have either made minimal progress on their initial strong commitments to expand voter access or have left important opportunities on the table. Our report highlights that most federal agencies have significant room for improvement in their implementation of the voting access executive order.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

1. The Department of Health and Human Services should add an effective voter registration opportunity to the application for benefits on HealthCare.gov by the next open enrollment period.

2. The VA should continue to work closely with election officials in Kentucky, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to finalize designation agreements under the NVRA to provide effective voter registration services to veterans who sign up for health care through the VA. Further, the VA should work to secure designations in additional states and follow through on its commitment to fully explore adding voter registration to its online benefits applications.

3. Indian Health Services should add a voter registration opportunity and assistance to patient interactions at Indian Health Services facilities.

4. The Department of Education should add a voter registration opportunity for applicants using the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

5. The Bureau of Prisons, the agency within the Department of Justice which oversees federal prison facilities, and the U.S. Marshals Service, which oversees people in federal pre-trial custody, amongst other activities, can also fully implement the executive order. While both agencies have made efforts to improve voter access for eligible voters who are currently incarcerated in federal prisons or held in federal pre-trial custody, there is still more that can be done to ensure full implementation of systems facilitating civic engagement and access to the ballot. You can read more about the steps they can take here.

Both President Biden and the agencies must act over the next several months to make the most of this important executive order. If they do not, the voting access order will be a lost opportunity.

Given the likely impasse in Congress with federal voting rights legislation, fulfilling the promise of this order is the best way the federal government can help increase access to registration and voting. Agencies must work now to implement the order, so that the various agency programs will be operational in time for citizens to register and participate in federal elections in 2024.

Children across the nation are working in dangerous, sometimes lethal jobs in American factories, farms and mills — according to a New York Times exposé that has rattled corporate America, President Biden, and Congress.

The kids, who are here without their parents, have fled countries rife with violence and poverty. Many are seeking asylum and other protections under the law. But in the meantime, they are laboring in the shadows — in physically demanding jobs that employers often have trouble filling. These children are helping to put food on our tables and clothes on our backs — sometimes suffering serious injuries as a result. The moral implications are chilling.

The Biden administration responded swiftly, promising an inter-agency task force that will rightly focus on the direct problem of failed child labor protections. But this moment also calls for big policy solutions — without them, children and adults will remain vulnerable to exploitation, in ways that intersect profoundly with our daily lives.

Why would some of the top names in American business look the other way as children are hired into jobs that are only suitable for adults? One reason is the profound shortage of workers — the nation has over 10 million job openings but only 5.7 million unemployed workers. Immigration restrictions are a strain on the American economy, as Labor Secretary Martin Walsh recently explained. Despite bipartisan consensus on the importance of immigration to fueling economic growth and addressing the labor shortage, Congress has struggled for more than two decades to pass sensible immigration reform. The issue remains mired in ugly, xenophobic rhetoric.

There are now more than 11 million undocumented people in the country, living and working as our neighbors and close relatives of U.S. citizens. Many have lived in the country for decades, paying billions in federal, state, and local taxes. The absence of a path to legal status has created an American underclass — people relegated to a lifetime of disadvantage and vulnerability to exploitation — including by employers. This is anathema to our Constitution and values of fairness and dignity for all workers. Yet, as long as our economy depends on the labor of people working in the shadows, immigrant workers will continue to be vulnerable to exploitation and harm, sometimes trapped in jobs with poor working conditions — undermining labor protections for all. And fixing our broken immigration system will also fuel wage and job growth for native-born Americans.

The Biden administration and Congress should use this moment to re-engage in stalled discussions over creating a path to citizenship for our immigrant co-workers, neighbors, and loved ones.

Why are the children laboring in these conditions here without their parents? For some, their parents may not have been allowed to enter the country alongside them, due to restrictive policies like one known as Title 42. It’s a Trump-era policy initially used to shut down the asylum system during the pandemic. President Biden has embraced it for far too long. Policies like this force parents to make an impossible choice: Send their kids alone to the U.S., or keep them in dangerous situations at home or in Mexican border towns, waiting in limbo.

Rather than solving this problem, the Biden administration recently announced its intent to implement a new asylum ban that would continue to restrict many families from accessing asylum together. The ACLU called on the Biden administration to abandon this plan, which mimics the illegal Trump asylum bans that courts halted after our lawsuits.

American Civil Liberties Union

Biden Must Reverse Plans to Revive Deadly Trump-era Asylum Bans | ACLU

The administration’s proposed tweaks to Trump’s bans are mere window-dressing on policies that will still inflict needless suffering.

Kids seeking asylum and other protections should be allowed to enter the country and seek those protections with their parents. Keeping families together is the best way to ensure that children are cared for and kept safe from exploitation.

Why are migrant children working in dangerous jobs in the first place — especially since the U.S. government knows they are here and they are in the process of seeking legal protections?

First, as many as half of all unaccompanied children do not have lawyers. For children old enough to work and who are eligible, a lawyer could support them in applying for a work permit. Without work authorization, these older children are left to work in the shadow economy.

More broadly, these children need lawyers to help them navigate the complex legal system and act as a trusted adult to whom they can turn for help. The White House’s interagency task force should heed advocates’ longstanding calls to ensure legal representation for unaccompanied children — as well as offer social services for their health and well-being.

All you need to know about the current condition of West Virginia’s public-education system is summed up in one recent headline: “West Virginia public schools are underfunded, understaffed and underperforming.” To take one marker, only 28 percent of students in the state are proficient in science. These are big problems that require expansive, thoughtful solutions. Lawmakers should be devoting all available time and resources to protecting public-school students’ educational futures. Instead, they’re working to pass a bill, SB 619, that would exacerbate these crises. If enacted, the bill would allow public schools to teach intelligent design — a form of creationism — as a “theory of how the universe and/or humanity came to exist.”

Teaching any form of creationism in public schools is unconstitutional. It undermines science education, and it is likely to embroil school districts in lengthy and costly litigation. In fact, that is exactly what happened in Dover, Pennsylvania, two decades ago. Despite clear case law that bars teaching creationism in public schools and prohibits other efforts to suppress or chip away at evolution education, the Dover Area School District incorporated into its biology lessons a disclaimer questioning the validity of evolution and promoting intelligent design as an alternative. The ACLU of Pennsylvania and Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued the school district on behalf of local families.

The school district tried to defend its policy by arguing that, unlike other forms of creationism, intelligent design is not a religious belief and is thus properly taught as a scientific alternative to evolution. But after a six-week trial during which extensive expert evidence about intelligent design was presented, Judge John E. Jones III — who was nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush — unequivocally rejected the district’s arguments. He concluded that intelligent design is merely “creationism re-labeled” and “is not science” because it “fails to meet the essential ground rules that limit science to testable, natural explanations.” And he ruled that incorporating intelligent design into public-school science classes violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The massive loss in the case came with a massive bill: The district owed the plaintiffs $2,000,000 in attorneys’ fees, although the plaintiffs agreed to accept only half that amount in recognition of the district’s limited resources and the fact that the community had voted out the school board members who had insisted on pushing intelligent design.

West Virginia lawmakers know that it’s unconstitutional to teach creationism in public schools. They know that, just like in Pennsylvania, schools that take up the legislature’s invitation to do so will be sued and will face millions of dollars in costs and fees. They also know that attacking the integrity of science education will cause West Virginia students to fall even further behind, leaving them unprepared for advanced college coursework in scientific areas, and subsequently disadvantaging them in the competitive technical and scientific job sectors. And they know that employers with science- and tech-related businesses may hesitate to settle in West Virginia if they believe that its government does not value, and many of its residents do not possess, basic scientific knowledge.

Despite knowing all of this, lawmakers continue to press forward with SB 619. Maybe they believe it will score them political points with certain extreme religious groups and others seeking to inject religion into public schools. Any short-term political gain, however, will come at appalling long-term costs: the rights of families and faith communities, not government officials, to instill religious beliefs in their children; the educational and employment success of students; the solvency of public schools already struggling financially; and the economic and job prospects for the entire state of West Virginia.