After a rebuke from the Supreme Court, President Trump is again trying to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program — a program that protects over 700,000 people from deportation and allows them to work and attend school in the United States, their home. The White House is replacing the full DACA program with a skeleton program that will accept no new applicants and renew protection for only one year, instead of two. 

I served in the Obama administration at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the government agency responsible for creating and launching DACA. It was the result of over a decade of brave advocacy by undocumented youth, who rallied the country’s support by sharing their stories and demanding that the United States see them as the Americans that they are. While we were proud of the program, we knew that DACA was not the end goal for this movement. While critically important, it would only temporarily protect Dreamers for two years at a time. Without permanent, legislative protections, the fate of Dreamers and their families would continue to be at risk. 

When President Trump took office, our fears came true. In the first year, his administration threw the lives of DACA recipients into limbo and attempted to end the program, leaving Dreamers unable to plan for their futures, living under a constant threat of potential deportation. As the country waited for a DACA decision from the Supreme Court, ICE promised to start deporting DACA recipients if given the opportunity. 

But on June 18, 2020, DACA recipients — and America — won. The Supreme Court sided with the lower courts and the American people by declaring the Trump administration’s process of rescinding DACA illegal, “arbitrary, and capricious.” The Trump administration was ordered to accept DACA renewals and new DACA applications, and restore the DACA program to its original state. Instead, the White House is hell-bent on ripping the rug out from underneath 700,000 Americans in waiting, even though he knows that the American people, including most Trump supporters, support Dreamers. Trump’s recent changes to DACA shut hundreds and thousands of immigrant youth out of the program’s protections, leaving them at continued risk of deportation. We know and fear that his next step is a complete end to DACA.  
Our immigration system remains unjust, inhumane, and irrevocably broken, and the ACLU will continue to fight in Congress for permanent legislative protections for all undocumented youth. We will also keep fighting for automatic extensions of DACA and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) work permits during the pandemic.

The Senate must act now to take up and pass the American Dream and Promise Act, which would provide protection from deportation and a fair path to citizenship for Dreamers and immigrants eligible for TPS and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED). While the ACLU remains troubled by provisions in the bill that run counter to basic due process principles, it would nonetheless benefit more than two million people and represent a crucial step toward fundamental reform of an unjust system. 

And as Black and Brown communities fight for historic, overdue reforms to state and local law enforcement, it is critical not to forget that ICE and Customs and Border Protection sow fear and uncertainty in communities of color every day. Congress must divest funding from the federal police forces within these agencies that threaten DACA recipients, their families, and our communities writ large.

We will also be fighting for so much more. States must take steps to vastly improve the wellbeing of undocumented youth and protect them from the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crusade. States should remove barriers that prevent Dreamers from pursuing their education and careers by allowing access to in-state tuition, financial aid, and professional licenses for all, regardless of immigration status. They must also reject the administration’s promise to deport Dreamers and refuse to do ICE and CBP’s bidding. Governors should take steps to restrict their states from spending any resources to collaborate with immigration enforcement agencies. 

As long as Congress refuses to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented youth, we will advocate for broad administrative relief that expands the number of people eligible for protection. DACA was designed narrowly, and forces recipients to spend enormous resources — $495 for the application, plus legal fees —  to renew their status originally every two years, and now every year. We will advocate for DACA to provide longer periods of protection between renewals and for application fees to be truly affordable. And finally, we will keep fighting for a fair, humane, and affordable path to citizenship in Congress so that DACA recipients, their undocumented family members, and all immigrant communities can access full citizenship. 

While Dreamers won in the Supreme Court, Trump continues his anti-immigrant crusade. The fight for permanent protections and a humane immigration system continues.

Andrea Flores, Deputy Director of Policy, ACLU's Equality Division

Despite their intended role as peacekeepers, private university officers are often responsible for violence against students and local residents alike. In July 2015, a University of Cincinnati police officer fatally shot unarmed 37-year-old Sam DuBose. Tyrone West, a 44-year-old Black man, was killed by Morgan State University police in 2013 during a traffic stop. And in 2018, a University of Chicago police officer shot fourth-year student Charles Thomas. 

Sam DuBrose, Tyrone West, and Charles Thomas are just three names on an ever-growing list of people who have been injured or lost their lives at the hands of private police officers. Student dollars go toward the upkeep of these oppressive institutions, which are responsible for the violence and mutilation of bodies.

The presence of these forces on and off campus is not welcome — not by students, and not by the communities at large. 

More than one third of four-year colleges across the country are equipped with their own well-funded, private, and armed police forces that make arrests every day. Yet despite functioning as full-fledged law enforcement, these departments are able to evade public record laws, allowing countless cases of police abuse and force to go unseen and unpunished.

In most states, public record laws apply to private organizations that employ government authority to perform a governmental function. There is no question that campus police fall into this category. But universities continue to argue their private status makes them exempt from such records requests, protecting themselves and displaying a flagrant disregard for accountability. 

The Clery Act, signed in 1990, aimed to create accountability for campus police forces. But the law does not go nearly far enough. For example, while it requires the maintenance of a daily crime log, campus forces often provide little detail and are easily able to withhold information. This statute is the sole measure in place to ensure the accountability of armed campus police officers. 

The majority of these private forces are not just policing their respective campuses, but also have jurisdiction deep in local cities. For example, the University of Chicago is home to one of the largest private police forces in the world. The student body numbers under 15,000, but the UC Police Department puts boots down in surrounding neighborhoods, placing 65,000 city residents under the watch of a force with virtually no accountability. 

This arrangement is not unique to Chicago. In cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and South Bend, Indiana, campus police departments also patrol in the city, often in predominantly Black neighborhoods which already suffer from devastating structural inequalities. People of color, especially Black folks, feel afraid of the people meant to make them feel safe. Educational institutions and the spaces around them can be emancipatory; yet, people of color find themselves in chains.

Young people have started to take notice, and have called for the end to private police on campus. Last year, students at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore demanded the university reverse its decision to create its own police department. Coalitions of students, faculty members, and neighbors at Harvard University, University of Virginia, Columbia University, and Ohio State University have also called for the removal of private police forces. 

But let’s be clear: Universities without private police forces are not spared from the horrors of police brutality. Partnerships with local police are also bringing unwanted publicly funded officers onto campuses. 

While these forces may not run into the same issues with open-record laws, they come with their own array of atrocities. Public police departments with known patterns of corruption, excessive use of force, and racial profiling are welcomed onto campuses with open arms by university administrators. 

Following demands organized by students, the University of Minnesota recently agreed to cut ties with the Minneapolis Police Department. Northwestern University, Columbia University, and New York University students are also calling on their administrators to cut ties with local police. Administrators should follow the lead of student activists and institutions like the University of Minnesota and cut ties with local police departments. Universities are responsible for the safety of their students and the surrounding community  — and police have proven time and time again to pose a threat to safety, rather than promote it.

As calls to defund the police grow, it is imperative that private police forces with no accountability are prioritized. Heavily armed police forces with no transparency are inexcusable, and university administrations must move to defund them. On college campuses, our nation’s playgrounds for research and discovery, we must protect our young minds and the precious communities that surround them at all costs.

Any other choice is a blatant denial of safety and justice to people across the country 一 those who pay to attend these institutions, and those who live in the communities intruded upon by them.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that all three students were killed by university police. Charles Thomas was injured, not killed. We regret this error.

Sanjali De Silva, Communications Intern, ACLU

As the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to become a death sentence for people trapped in prisons and jails across the U.S., the actions — or inaction — of prosecutors to decarcerate have had a tangible life or death impact. We examined the responses from prosecutors in the 20 biggest cities in this country. This is the third post in the series — you can also read the first and second.

11. Austin, Texas
 
Austin’s Margaret Moore understood the need to respond to the pandemic’s threat to people living and working in local jails. She played a significant role in bringing judges to the table to proactively work to save lives during COVID-19. The judges decided to grant no-cost bonds whenever practical to clear jail space, resulting in a dip in the jail population. As of May 12, Travis County’s adult jail system held about 1,600 people and had no positive test results. But test accessibility is distressingly low — only about 1 percent of the county’s average jail population was tested during the pandemic.

Unfortunately, Moore otherwise had an unclear role in Travis County’s pandemic decarceration efforts — unlike prosecutors across the country declining to prosecute various offenses, identifying people to be released from jail, and fighting back against short-sighted restrictions by the Texas governor’s executive order limiting pretrial releases. By mid-March, her re-election opponent, Jose Garza, publicly called upon her and other city officials to do more to decarcerate jails and prisons, thereby removing hotbeds for the spread of the disease. In mid-July, voters weighed in on her limited action, choosing Garza as the Democratic candidate for November’s prosecutor election. 

12. Jacksonville, Florida 

Jacksonville’s Melissa Nelson took early, swift action to save lives facing the pandemic in local jails. By late March, she made a temporary plan to release a significant number of people, directing her office to offer plea deals that avoid jail time, release some people pre-trial, not filing charges in non-violent “marginal” cases, and determining whether a time-served and/or probationary sentence is appropriate in any nonviolent case where the state is currently offering one year of jail time or less. 

The result of these policies: By late April, the number of people held in the Duval County jails fell by 21 percent. These are positive outcomes, but Nelson’s policies still fall short of helping everyone potentially vulnerable to the virus by unilaterally choosing not to consider those accused or convicted of violent or sexual offenses, rather than reviewing their circumstances before making a decision.

13. Fort Worth, Texas 

Fort Worth’s Sharen Wilson has been extraordinarily silent as the pandemic sweeps across the country, despite the deathly threat it poses to those trapped in jails and prisons. But Tarrant County judges and sheriffs picked up her slack, holding court proceedings to grant bonds or shorten sentence lengths so people could get released sooner. 

Unfortunately, Wilson seems to have continued business as usual — including seeking enhancements against people for low-level offenses, such as trespassing, failing to acknowledge that forcing people to spend more time behind bars during a pandemic could have fatal consequences.
 
14. Columbus, Ohio 

In Columbus, Ohio, two prosecutors share responsibility for the city’s criminal system — Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien handles felony cases, while Columbus City Prosecutor Zach Klein has jurisdiction over misdemeanors. Both made small steps towards helping people behind bars as the coronavirus spread throughout the country, but fell short of making the deep changes necessary to save lives.

In late March, Klein announced that his office was already working on criminal justice reform that would “jail only those that need to be locked up,” without providing any details on who that would include. He also expressed concern about crafting blanket policies for release. Instead, jail drops between the start of the pandemic and March 24 largely flowed from sheriffs using alternatives to arrest more often to avoid bringing people to jail.

O’Brien has taken a few steps in the right direction, including limited court proceedings and only pursuing new, serious felonies. However, he did not proactively review cases involving people serving their sentences. Moreover, O’Brien expressed concern about not being more involved in court decisions to release eight youths from a juvenile detention center where the outbreak struck nearly half of the incarcerated youth and about a quarter of the staff. 

These small gestures toward release simply do not go far enough.

15. Charlotte, North Carolina 

Charlotte’s Spencer Merriweather quickly worked to change his pretrial policies in response to COVID-19. At the beginning of the pandemic, his office released a statement saying they have and will continue to work diligently to ensure that the only people in pretrial custody during this crisis are the people he believes pose a risk to public safety. Merriweather claims the initiatives launched by his office to limit pretrial custody of people accused of nonviolent offenses have reduced incarceration by 14 percent since the start of the pandemic. 

Although he has shown flexibility on pretrial policies, Merriweather has not focused at all on those already serving sentences, even as nearby prosecutors do. Decarcerate Mecklenburg, a coalition of community activists, attorneys, and religious leaders, held rolling protests in vehicles circling Mecklenburg County Detention Center, the District Attorney’s Office, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police headquarters, demanding in part that Merriweather release people held on bond along with those with six months or less on their sentence, pregnant women, and everyone over 50 years of age. 

Without action for those vulnerable but already serving time, Merriweather is leaving hundreds if not thousands of people behind bars to face a deadly virus. In fact, in late July, more than 40 people at the Mecklenburg County Detention Center have tested positive for Coronavirus.

Nicole Zayas Fortier, Policy Counsel, ACLU Campaign for Smart Justice,
& Weronika Bzura, Legal Intern, ACLU