As millions of people in the U.S. shelter in their homes, and millions more who aren’t able to stay indoors practice social distancing or other measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19, a crisis is brewing in the facilities where immigrants are detained. Cramped conditions and inadequate access to hygiene or medical care have created what one medical expert called a “tinderbox” for the disease in a letter to Congress.

Many of those in detention are asylum seekers, who came to the U.S. to ask for protection after fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. Many others were long-time U.S. residents who were picked up by ICE during workplace raids or traffic stops in recent months. Some have been fighting deportation for years-old criminal charges that may have been as minor as marijuana possession or a DUI. The Trump administration’s appetite for detaining people rather than allowing them to stay on supervised release during their immigration proceedings has been relentless. As public health experts warn that congregate facilities like immigration detention centers put detained people and the greater community at greater risk for infection, we are reminded that this obsession has endangered us all and forced tens of thousands of people to face the pandemic with virtually no protection at all.

The ACLU has been fighting to secure the release of as many detained immigrants as possible. While ICE says it’s released nearly 700 people from detention as of late this week, lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have fought the ACLU’s lawsuits tooth and nail. In one case, after a judge ordered 22 medically vulnerable immigrants released from two jails in Pennsylvania, DHS rushed to request a stay that would force them to remain inside.

Now, at least 100 detained immigrants have tested positive for COVID-19, according to ICE, and their numbers are growing every day.

Two of those who were released because of the ACLU’s suits are Alfredo Garza and Mario Rodas, Sr. Both have life-threatening medical conditions. In this week’s At Liberty podcast, we hear from them about what it’s like to be in an immigration detention facility during a pandemic, as well as Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Prison Project. Eunice is part of the team that is working around the clock to file litigation and get medically vulnerable immigrants out of detention.

Listen to the new episode here, and for more details on Alfredo and Mario’s story, read our recent report.

America’s youth is warring with a “law and order” president and demanding revolution. That setting describes the response to the 2018 shootings at a high school in Parkland, Florida. It also captures the scene at a university in Kent, Ohio, on May 4, 1970, nearly a half century earlier.

Back then, students were not protesting the two decade long “war on terror” in Afghanistan, nor President Donald Trump’s crackdown on “illegal immigration,” nor the killing of 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that launched the March for Our Lives movement.

The protest at Kent State University was about the “war on communism” in Vietnam and President Richard Nixon’s crackdown on domestic dissent and civil rights. Students fighting injustice faced a fate of being murdered by American soldiers and law enforcement officers on American college campuses.

Four students were shot to death at the end of the spring semester at Kent State. Their murders by the Ohio National Guard came to symbolize the divide between young people, who were increasingly angered by the inaction of their parents in addressing the major issues of their time, and their elders, who refused to accept the inevitable: The world was changing, and the young people were the new adults in the room.

The civil rights movement for Black economic mobility and voting rights, amidst America’s dominating prosperity after World War II, set the stage for the youth campaign for change that came to define the 1960s and early 1970s.

Many white middle class baby boomers, particularly in the industrial North and the progressive West, attended integrated public schools with upwardly mobile Black people. Black people also gained increased access to white collar employment due to federal integration laws implemented during the second term of President Dwight Eisenhower.

Many of these students, Black or white, were the first in their families to attend college, like the kids at Kent State that fateful year.

Just days after the Kent State killings, two young Black men were killed amid protests at Jackson State College in Mississippi, an historically Black college. They were shot to death by members of the Jackson Police Department and the Mississippi Highway Patrol.

The protests of May 1970, which spread to some 1,300 campuses, erupted after President Nixon escalated the Vietnam War by invading Cambodia. The protests only grew angrier after the Ohio and Mississippi killings. The largest student strike in American history followed, with more than 500 colleges and universities suspending classes, shutting down. 

A major issue for college-age youth was that the U.S. government could draft 18 to 20 year olds to fight in the Vietnam War but they could not vote. The Kent State shooting occurred just one year before the ratification of the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

The student protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s were the first interethnic protest movements in modern America. They were directly influenced by the nonviolent civil rights movement prominently led by Martin Luther King Jr. The diversity in the student protest movement allowed for more open dialogue on conspicuous consumption and America's military-industrial complex, ideas that were previously considered taboo and too subversive for conversation in conservative Eisenhower America.

Conflicts in the youth movement of the early 1970s brought to the forefront of public consciousness the class schism between working class baby boomers who were drafted to fight in Vietnam, and privileged ones who could afford to avoid it by going to college.

Those protests also helped to galvanize new waves in the women's rights and gay rights movements in America in the decades that followed. These movements served as templates for the student organizing that took place generations later in the March for Our Lives movement.

The 58,000 killed in the Vietnam War between 1964 and 1975 far exceeds the hundreds of millennial and Generation Z youth and teachers killed at school massacres that have occurred since 1999: Columbine High in Colorado in 1999 (13 dead), Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut in 2012 (26 dead), and Stoneman Douglas High in 2018 (17 dead). But, the student movements and civil unrest that occurred in response to these events and unresponsiveness of the federal government during both eras galvanized young people to action in ways that have improved and continue to improve society.

The dissent relieved discontent for young people, who railed against elders and their acceptance of status quo politics at odds with changing social mores. These movements were revolutions that continue to inform the experiment that is American democracy, then, now, and into the future.

Today, despite similar histories of protest, millennials and baby boomers are at war over societal ideals. This is epitomized in the scornful millennial dismissal, "Okay Boomer!" The issue is the same that existed not only between the boomers and their parents -- the Silent Generation -- but between all generations: Change, and resistance, acceptance, and adaptation to it.

The student protests following the shootings at Kent State and Parkland were outcries for better tomorrows for the young people who would follow them, not for themselves. The revolutionary spirit of each successive generation informs the world and everyone in it. We should celebrate youth protest and rebellion, while offering guidance when asked for advice.

The spirit of the youth protest that peaked during Kent State and Watergate, and was marked by the Vietnam War and the resignation of Nixon, is as alive and evident as ever today. Today, the Trump presidency, with its xenophobic attacks on immigrants and non-white groups, and the resistance by people in power to implement comprehensive federal gun control legislation is fueling it anew.

Youth protest is the most fertile ground for cultivating America's ethos. This form of free speech is essential for the sustenance, maintenance, and evolution of American life.

The events at Kent State 50 years ago crystallized a generation’s fight for social change. The impact of that fight is proof that in rising up and taking a stand, we all can make the world better for everyone.

Apple and Google last week announced a joint contact tracing effort that would use Bluetooth technology to help alert people who have been in close proximity to someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Similar proposals have been put forward by an MIT-associated effort called PACT as well as by multiple European groups.
 
These proposals differ from the traditional public health technique of “contact tracing” to try to stop the spread of a disease. In place of human interviewers, they would use location or proximity data generated by mobile phones to contact people who may have been exposed. 
 
While some of these systems could offer public health benefits, they may also cause significant risks to privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. If such systems are to work, there must be widespread, free, and quick testing available. The systems must also be widely adopted, but that will not happen if people do not trust them. For there to be trust, the tool must protect privacy, be voluntary, and store data on an individual’s device rather than in a centralized repository.
 
A well-designed tool would give people actionable medical information while also protecting privacy and giving users control, but a poorly designed one could pose unnecessary and significant risks to privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. To help distinguish between the two, the ACLU is publishing a set of technology principles against which developers, the public, and policymakers can judge any contact tracing apps and protocols.
 
Technology principles that embed privacy by design are one important type of protection. There still need to be strict policies to mitigate against overreach and abuse. These policies, at a minimum, should include:

• Voluntariness — Whenever possible, a person testing positive must consent to any data sharing by the app. The decision to use a tracking app should be voluntary and uncoerced. Installation, use, or reporting must not be a precondition for returning to work or school, for example.
• Use Limitations — The data should not be used for purposes other than public health — not for advertising and especially not for any punitive or law enforcement purposes.
• Minimization — Policies must be in place to ensure that only necessary information is collected and to prohibit any data sharing with anyone outside of the public health effort.
• Data Destruction — Both the technology and related policies and procedures should ensure deletion of data when there is no longer a need to hold it.
• Transparency — If the government obtains any data, it must be fully transparent about what data it is acquiring, from where, and how it is using that data.
• No Mission Creep – Policies must be in place to ensure tracking does not outlive the effort against COVID-19.

These policies, at a minimum, must be in place to ensure that any tracking app will be effective and will accord with civil liberties and human rights.
 
The Apple/Google proposal, for instance, offers a strong start when measured against these technology principles. Rather than track sensitive location histories, the Apple/Google protocol aims to use Bluetooth technology to record one phone’s proximity to another. Then, if a person tests positive, those logs can be used to notify people who were within Bluetooth range and refer them for testing, recommend self-isolation, or encourage treatment if any exists. Like the similar proposals, it relies on Bluetooth because the location data our cell phones generate is not accurate enough for contact tracing.
 
Like location histories, however, proximity records can be highly revealing because they expose who we spend time with. To their credit, the Apple/Google developers have considered that privacy problem. Rather than identify the people who own the phones, apps based on the protocol would use identifiers that cannot easily be traced back to phone owners.
 
As of this writing, the Apple/Google protocol could better address certain important privacy-related questions, however. For example, how does the tool define an epidemiologically relevant “contact”? The public needs to know if it is a good technological approximation of what public health professionals believe is a concern. Otherwise, the tool could be collecting far more personal information than is warranted by the crisis or could cause too many false alarms. And if there is indeed a plan to terminate the program at the conclusion of the pandemic, what criteria are the companies using to indicate when to press the built-in self-destruct button?
 
Another issue is whether phone users control when to submit their proximity logs for publication to the exposure database. These decisions should be made by the phone user. There may be good reasons why people do not want to upload all their data. User control can help to reduce false positives, for example if a user knows that identified contacts during that time were inaccurate (because they were in a car or wearing protective gear). It would also encourage people whose records include particularly sensitive contact information to at least volunteer the non-sensitive part of their records rather than fail to participate completely.

Also, when users share their proximity logs, what will they reveal? Right now, under the Apple/Google proposal, an infected user publicly shares a set of keys. Each key provides 24 hours of linkable data — a length of time that threatens the promised anonymity of the system. It is too easy to re-identify someone from 24 hours of data and the current proposal makes it impossible for the user to redact selected times during the day. There are other options that would ensure that identifiers published in the exposure database are as difficult as possible to connect to a person’s name or identity. 
 
Voluntariness is particularly important. A critical mass of people will need to use a contact tracing app for it to be an effective public health mechanism, but some proposals to obtain that level of adoption have been coercive and scary. This is the wrong approach. When people feel that their phones are antagonistic rather than helpful, they will just turn location functions off or turn their phones off entirely. Others could simply leave their phone at home or acquire and register a second, dummy phone that is not their primary device with which they leave home. Good public health measures will leverage people’s own incentives to report disease, respond to warnings, and help stop the virus’s spread.
 
In the coming weeks and months, we are going to see a push to reopen the economy — an effort that will rely heavily on public health measures that include contact tracing. Bluetooth proximity tracking may be tried as a part of such efforts, though we don’t know how practical it will prove in real-world deployments. But privacy-by-design principles and the policy safeguards outlined here must be core to that effort if we are to benefit from a proximity tracking tool that can give people actionable medical information while also protecting privacy and giving users control.

Jennifer Stisa Granick, Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project