President Biden’s 100-day deportation moratorium, announced late last month, was a monumental achievement for immigrant justice activists and immigrant communities. Less visible but potentially groundbreaking: The Department of Homeland Security’s promise to conduct a top-to-bottom review of programs and policies governing the arrests and deportations of immigrants in the United States.

While a Texas court temporarily enjoined the deportation moratorium (the ACLU has intervened in the case), the top-to-bottom review will go forward. Its success is the key to the puzzle of how to actually limit deportations and keep families together over the course of Biden’s presidency. What’s at stake? Whether millions of immigrants and their family members — many of whom have lived in the U.S. for years — will be forced to live in fear of being deported, and torn away from their families and communities.

DHS set out the deportation moratorium in a short memo, which stated that immigration enforcement in the interior of the United States should “prioritize responding to threats to national security, public safety, and border security.” It set out corresponding “interim civil enforcement priorities” that will apply during the 100-day period, pending the full review. And this week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement will issue new interim guidelines designed to make ICE agents accountable to the interim priorities. Taken together, this is a major break from the Trump administration’s approach, which effectively made all undocumented people targets for deportation and gave ICE agents free rein.

We have serious reservations about the interim enforcement priorities, which use sweeping and overbroad terms that have harmed communities of color for decades and mischaracterize all recent border crossers as threats to border security. Still, this news is significant: limiting immigration enforcement to these priorities would likely protect tens of thousands of people from deportation.

But without additional serious reforms, there is no reason to believe that ICE will abide by the Biden interim priorities and their eventual successor priorities. Even now, ICE agents are saying publicly that they intend to undermine the new administration, ICE’s spokesperson is touting the agency’s “unlimited discretion to evaluate any conduct” to justify arresting individuals on “public safety” grounds, and ICE is deporting individuals who should be protected by the Biden interim priorities.

As long as ICE has the resources to track, arrest, and deport large numbers of people, it will attempt to do so, bending the law to its prerogative. That is the lesson of the Obama years, when ICE flouted the enforcement priorities and related reforms, deporting thousands of individuals who did not meet its criteria. ICE also continued to regularly issue detainers requesting that state and local law enforcement agencies jail individuals past their release date, so that ICE could deport them, although the DHS secretary had directed detainers to be used only in “special circumstances.”

At the time, immigrant justice groups argued that ICE’s deportation and detention quotas had not changed in response to the Obama enforcement priorities, and there was simply “no evidence” that ICE agents would “actually modify their practices.” In recent years, Freedom of Information Act requests have confirmed that ICE deportations continue to be quota-driven — not public safety driven, as it claims.

Biden’s review of immigrant enforcement policies must reckon with how to change both ICE culture and capacity. This is hard, but one of the clearest fixes is ending ICE programs that use state and local law enforcement as “force multipliers.” These include the 287(g) program, ICE detainers, and Secure Communities.

Under these programs, local police have helped ICE ensnare thousands of people in an indiscriminate deportation dragnet — the opposite of the limited approach the Biden administration has promised. Here’s how: Being in the business of immigration enforcement incentivizes local police to make pretextual arrests on state or local criminal grounds — with the actual goal of identifying immigrants to detain for ICE’s deportation. It emboldens law enforcement officers across the country to use immigration enforcement as a means of threatening and harassing people in immigrant communities. Racial profiling, harassment, and constitutional violations have resulted, as congressional hearings have detailed.

Local police jail people on ICE detainers, which ICE agents issue unilaterally with no outside review. ICE uses detainers in local jails as a “stop gap measure” to give the agency time to pick up people encountered by local police, despite often lacking probable cause to believe they are deportable. This is one reason why so many U.S. citizens and immigrants have been wrongfully detained by local police on behalf of ICE.

It doesn’t have to be this way. These ICE programs are in many ways a vestige of the post-9/11 era of government overreach and destruction of civil rights. ICE turned to state and local law enforcement, claiming “terrorism” concerns as justification in a strategy championed by Kris Kobach. Here, as in so many instances, “terrorism” was simply cover for the government to expand its powers and engage in biased profiling — not make us safer.

Over the past four years, we grew accustomed to a regular barrage of blatant, segregationist-style racism from the White House. Donald Trump tweeted that “the Squad,” four Democratic Congresswomen who are Black, Latinx, and South Asian, should “go back” to the “corrupt” countries they came from; that same year, he called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas,” mocking her belief that she might be descended from Native American ancestors. But as outrageous as the racist comments Trump regularly spewed were, the racially unjust governmental actions his administration took and, in the case of COVID-19, didn’t take, impacted millions more — especially Black and Brown people.

To begin to heal and move toward real racial justice, we must address not only the harms of the past four years, but also the harms tracing back to this country’s origins. Racism has played an active role in the creation of our systems of education, health care, ownership, and employment, and virtually every other facet of life since this nation’s founding.

Our history has shown us that it’s not enough to take racist policies off the books if we are going to achieve true justice. Those past policies have structured our society and created deeply-rooted patterns and practices that can only be disrupted and reformed with new policies of similar strength and efficacy. In short, a systemic problem requires a systemic solution. To combat systemic racism, we must pursue systemic equality.

A system is a collection of elements that are organized for a common purpose. Racism in America is a system that combines economic, political, and social components. That system specifically disempowers and disenfranchises Black people, while maintaining and expanding implicit and explicit advantages for white people, leading to better opportunities in jobs, education, and housing, and discrimination in the criminal legal system. For example, the country’s voting systems empower white voters at the expense of voters of color, resulting in an unequal system of governance in which those communities have little voice and representation, even in policies that directly impact them.

In the years ahead, the ACLU will pursue administrative and legislative campaigns targeting the Biden-Harris administration and Congress. We will leverage legal advocacy to dismantle systemic barriers, and will work with our affiliates to change policies nearer to the communities most harmed by these legacies. The goal is to build a nation where every person can achieve their highest potential, unhampered by structural and institutional racism.

To begin, in 2021, we believe the Biden administration and Congress should take the following crucial steps to advance systemic equality:

The administration must issue an executive order creating a Justice Department lead staff position on voting rights violations in every U.S. Attorney office. We are seeing a flood of unlawful restrictions on voting across the country, and at every level of state and local government. This nationwide problem requires nationwide investigatory and enforcement resources. Even if it requires new training and approval protocols, a new voting rights enforcement program with the participation of all 93 U.S. Attorney offices is the best way to help ensure nationwide enforcement of voting rights laws. These assistant U.S. attorneys should begin by ensuring that every American in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons who is eligible to vote can vote, and monitor the Census and redistricting process to fight the dilution of voting power in communities of color.

We are also calling on Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to finally create a fair and equal national voting system, the cause for which John Lewis devoted his life.

Black borrowers pay more than other students for the same degrees, and graduate with an average of $7,400 more in debt than their white peers. In the years following graduation, the debt gap more than triples. Nearly half of Black borrowers will default within 12 years. In other words, for Black Americans, the American dream costs more. Last week, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, along with House Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Maxine Waters, and others, called on President Biden to cancel up to $50,000 in federal student loan debt per borrower. We couldn’t agree more. By forgiving $50,000 of student debt, President Biden can unleash pent up economic potential in Black communities, while relieving them of a burden that forestalls so many hopes and dreams. Black women in particular will benefit from this executive action, as they are proportionately the most indebted group of all Americans.

In both low and high income majority-Black communities, traditional bank branches are 50 percent more likely to close than in white communities. The result is that nearly 50 percent of Black Americans are unbanked or underbanked, and many pay more than $2,000 in fees associated with subprime financial institutions. Over their lifetime, those fees can add up to as much as two years of annual income for the average Black family. The U.S. Postal Service can and should meet this crisis by providing competitive, low-cost financial services to help advance economic equality. We call on President Biden to appoint new members to the Postal Board of Governors so that the Post Office can do the work of providing essential services to every American.

Across the country, millions of people are living in communities of concentrated poverty, including 26 percent of all Black children. The Biden administration should again implement the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which required localities that receive federal funds for housing to investigate and address barriers to fair housing and patterns or practices that promote bias. In 1980, the average Black person lived in a neighborhood that was 62 percent Black and 31 percent white. By 2010, the average Black person’s neighborhood was 48 percent Black and 34 percent white. Reinstating the Obama-era Fair Housing Rule will combat this ongoing segregation and set us on a path to true integration.

Congress should also pass the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act, or a similar measure, to finally redress the legacy of redlining and break down the walls of segregation once and for all.

To realize broadband’s potential to benefit our democracy and connect us to one another, all people in the United States must have equal access and broadband must be made affordable for the most vulnerable. Yet today, 15 percent of American households with school-age children do not have subscriptions to any form of broadband, including one-quarter of Black households (an additional 23 percent of African Americans are “smartphone-only” internet users, meaning they lack traditional home broadband service but do own a smartphone, which is insufficient to attend class, do homework, or apply for a job). The Biden administration, Federal Communications Commission, and Congress must develop and implement plans to increase funding for broadband to expand universal access.

The United States faces a crisis of child poverty. Seventeen percent of all American children are impoverished — a rate higher than not just peer nations like Canada and the U.K., but Mexico and Russia as well. Currently, more than 50 percent of Black and Latinx children in the U.S. do not qualify for the full benefit, compared to 23 percent of white children, and nearly one in five Black children do not receive any credit at all. To combat this crisis, President Biden and Congress should enhance the child tax credit and make it fully refundable. If we enhance the child tax credit, we can cut child poverty by 40 percent and instantly lift over 50 percent of Black children out of poverty.

We cannot repair harms that we have not fully diagnosed. We must commit to a thorough examination of the impact of the legacy of chattel slavery on racial inequality today. In 2021, Congress must pass H.R. 40, which would establish a commission to study reparations and make recommendations for Black Americans.

For the past century, the ACLU has fought for racial justice in legislatures and in courts, including through several landmark Supreme Court cases. While the court has not always ruled in favor of racial justice, incremental wins throughout history have helped to chip away at different forms of racism such as school segregation (Brown v. Board), racial bias in the criminal legal system (Powell v. Alabama, i.e. the Scottsboro Boys), and marriage inequality (Loving v. Virginia). While these landmark victories initiated necessary reforms, they were only a starting point. Systemic racism continues to pervade the lives of Black people through voter suppression, lack of financial services, housing discrimination, and other areas. More than anything, doing this work has taught the ACLU that we must fight on every front in order to overcome our country’s legacies of racism. That is what our Systemic Equality agenda is all about.

In the weeks ahead, we will both expand on our views of why these campaigns are crucial to systemic equality and signal the path this country must take. We will also dive into our work to build organizing, advocacy, and legal power in the South — a region with a unique history of racial oppression and violence alongside a rich history of antiracist organizing and advocacy. We are committed to four principles throughout this campaign: reconciliation, access, prosperity, and empowerment. We hope that our actions can meet our ambition to, as Dr. King said, lead this nation to live out the true meaning of its creed.