On any given day across the country, millions of Americans have had their drivers’ license suspended — not because of unsafe driving or other safety concerns but because of a government imposed debt they can’t afford to pay.

It doesn’t have to be this way. State and local governments can and must end taxation by citation — and right now Congress has a chance to help them do it.

The Driving for Opportunity Act, introduced by Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), is bipartisan legislation that provides grants to states that do not suspend, revoke, or refuse to renew a driver’s license of a person or registration of a motor vehicle for failure to pay a civil or criminal fine or fee.

By helping states cover the costs of reinstating driver’s licenses previously suspended for unpaid fines and fees, the Driving for Opportunity Act would encourage states to do the right thing, and it would give millions of Americans the opportunity to have their driving privileges restored. Right now, the bill is awaiting action by the Senate Judiciary Committee — and there’s no time to waste.

Taxation by citation is a pernicious system, and it works like this: State and local governments create frivolous regulations as predatory money-making schemes to fund government services. For instance, nuisance regulations like loitering, beautification regulations like lawn maintenance requirements, traffic regulations like bans on tinted windows, or quality of life regulations like bans on sleeping in public. The sheer number of regulations, which have no bearing on public safety, make it very likely that someone will run afoul of one of the many finable offenses at some point in time — especially if they live in Black and Brown communities that are already subjected to over-policing.

A person in violation of any one of these unnecessary codes is then slapped with a fine and a bevy of administrative fees, which can then escalate into hundreds or even thousands of dollars. When that person can’t afford to pay their debt, the government suspends their driver’s license. This exposes them to even harsher penalties, including arrest and incarceration, when they have no choice but to drive on a suspended license.

A recent ACLU report documents the pervasive practice of using driver’s license suspension as a consequence for unpaid fines and fees. These burdens are borne disproportionately by Black and Brown communities, fueling a vicious cycle of poverty and criminalization.

The fact is that in most of America, driving isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity. The majority of people living in the U.S. don’t have access to public transportation and rely on driving to get to work, school, religious services, court obligations, and medical appointments. People whose licenses have been suspended are often left with no choice but to drive and risk criminal consequences, making it even more difficult for them to pay off their debt.

State and local governments should not be funding their operations through law enforcement, period. But they do, and it’s nonsensical and counterproductive.

First, debt-based license suspension is not an effective collection tool. Taking away people’s ability to get to work doesn’t just make it harder for them to pay off their initial debt, it also has ripple effects throughout the economy — reducing family incomes and destabilizing communities.

Instead of protecting public safety, debt-based license suspensions undermine it by diverting resources away from important community services and priorities. In 2019, Minneapolis City Attorney Mary Ellen Heng told the Minnesota legislature that her prosecutors spend about 30 percent of their time enforcing these suspensions that have no bearing on public safety.

Worst of all, using courts and law enforcement officers as debt-collectors enables over-criminalization and exacerbates racist policing practices. In Texas, 95 percent of arrest warrants issued in 2016 were for unpaid fines and fees, and more than 640,000 people were jailed as a result.

In Durham County, North Carolina, 80 percent of those with suspended licenses were people of color, mostly Black Americans, and the average time they had lived without a license was 11 years. In New York City — where driving on a suspended license was the fourth-most charged crime in 2018 — 76 percent of drivers are white, yet 80 percent of people arrested for driving on a suspended license in 2018 were Black or Latinx, according to the Fines and Fees Justice Center.

For Black and Brown communities, the practice of debt-based license suspension can be deadly. When Daunte Wright was brutally killed by police in Minnesota, it was during a traffic stop that stemmed from unpaid fines and fees.

Fortunately, more and more states are recognizing the harms of this costly and counterproductive practice. Ten states have already ended debt-based license suspensions, and Congress can encourage more to do so by passing the Driving for Opportunity Act.

Now, this legislation has bipartisan support in Congress and from groups across the political spectrum, including Americans for Tax Reform, Americans for Prosperity, the ACLU, and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Curbing debt-based license suspensions is a common sense opportunity for Congress to advance racial justice and our economic recovery. They shouldn’t wait to seize it.

Face recognition technology may sound futuristic, or perhaps too abstract to seem harmful. But we are already living in a reality in which face recognition and other forms of biometric surveillance pervade our daily lives. These technologies threaten our privacy and free speech rights and, when used by police and immigration enforcement, serve as yet another dangerous system to abuse Black and Brown people on a massive scale. Big Tech companies are profiting off these abuses because they are the ones developing and selling face recognition to government agencies. And it’s our communities — particularly communities of color — that face the harmful consequences.

The good news is that there is a national movement against face recognition that is gaining momentum every day. Recently, a coalition of grassroots organizations from across the country called on Congress to take immediate action to stop government use of dangerous face recognition. Here in Washington state, a place where companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Palantir loom large, we know firsthand how tech companies collaborate with immigration and law enforcement agencies to build large-scale surveillance tools that facilitate and fuel racist systems that harm both immigrants and U.S. citizens.

Face recognition technology is racist, from how it was built to how it is used. It’s been used by police departments to wrongfully arrest Black men, by ICE and CBP to target and track immigrant families, and by the FBI to surveil Black Lives Matter demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights. Face recognition massively expands the government’s power to track our movements and target people based on their race, religion, political affiliation, or speech — and while everyone’s rights are at stake, Black and Brown people are harmed the most when this racist technology collides with our racist systems.

Our law and immigration enforcement systems are rooted in this country’s racist history, including slavery, and were created to uphold white supremacy. This is why it’s often those who sit at the margins — folks of color, immigrants, the poor, disabled, women, and trans or gender nonconforming people — who face systemic violence and brutality. Face recognition technology, which was created by those with the most power in society, will only exacerbate this legacy and pattern of state-sanctioned violence against our communities. We’re already seeing this dynamic at work.

In Detroit, police use of face recognition led to the wrongful arrest of Robert Williams, a Black man who was arrested at his home in front of his family. Face recognition’s proven track record of inaccuracy when used against people of color makes us even more likely to be targeted, arrested, or detained. But even if this technology was perfectly accurate, it would still harm communities of color by facilitating systems that are already racist.

The Department of Homeland Security and its sub-agencies ICE and CBP have already committed horrific abuses. With face recognition, they could potentially pinpoint the location of immigrants across the country, marking them for detention and deportation on an unprecedented scale. In 2017, for example, DHS, ICE, and the Department of Health and Human Services used technology supplied by Palantir to tag, track, locate, and arrest 400 people in an operation that targeted the family members and caregivers of unaccompanied migrant children. Face recognition would only expand the power of agencies like ICE to target and tear apart communities of color throughout the country.

Congress is starting to respond. Last week, Sens. Edward Markey and Jeff Merkley and Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Ayanna Pressley reintroduced the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, an important bill that responds to the imminent threat of this dangerous surveillance technology. This bill comes as grassroots-powered coalitions continue to pass bans on face recognition across the country. King County, Wash. became the latest jurisdiction to ban face recognition after a unanimous vote by its county council. Big Tech companies — most recently Amazon — have also been forced to make commitments to stop selling face recognition to law enforcement. These wins are not an accident; they are the result of years of local organizing and activism from the communities most impacted.

There’s no doubt these victories are important, but any moratorium is still a temporary solution. Our communities have been clear: We want new systems to keep us safe — systems not rooted in slavery and racism. We need Congress to not only stop face recognition technology, but permanently divest from our racist punishment systems and reinvest in our communities. Until the federal government takes action, our communities will remain in danger.

Big Tech companies like Microsoft are already lobbying for weak regulations that protect their corporate interests and effectively greenlight these dangerous systems. In addition to stopping government acquisition, use, and funding of face recognition technology for state and local face surveillance, the federal government must support local grassroots-powered progress by rejecting Big Tech efforts to preempt state and local bans and moratoria. We can’t let Big Tech stamp out our hard-won advancements.

We are at a critical moment. The fight against face recognition comes alongside a nationwide reckoning with racism and policing led by the Black Lives Matter movement. We must take this opportunity to recognize the role of surveillance in exacerbating the inherent racism of our law and immigration enforcement systems. We must stop face and other biometric surveillance and confront these systemic harms. Only then will we be on the path to equity and justice.