Last month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection adamantlydenied that it was detaining U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents of Iranian descent and interrogating them about their religion and political views. The agency also assured the public that it had not issued any directive related to the detentions and interrogations.
There was already strong reason to question CBP’s denials, given the mounting and consistent reports that border officers were, in fact, targeting travelers of Iranian heritage returning to Washington state from Canada. Now, we have even more reason to think CBP lied.
Last Thursday, a local Washington paper published a leaked CBP directive, which appears to have originated with CBP’s Seattle Field Office. Sure enough, the directive instructs officers to target and detain travelers based on their national origin and to interrogate them about their religious background and beliefs.
If this directive is authentic, CBP has been caught in a lie — one that concealed troubling and abusive treatment of travelers who hadn’t done anything wrong.
The directive is a damning document. It makes clear that CBP officers are to target and detain travelers whose national origin or citizenship is Iranian, Lebanese, or Palestinian. It also explicitly instructs officers to interrogate these travelers on their religious affiliation and beliefs, specifically making references to Muslims of the Shia sect.
To be clear, the government has the authority to question travelers to verify their identity, citizenship, or legal status, and to conduct reasonable searches for contraband. The government cannot, however, select travelers for further questioning based on their national origin. And questioning travelers about their political views, associations with others, or religious beliefs and practices can infringe on rights guaranteed by the Constitution and federal law, which we do not surrender at the border.
This kind of biased targeting is nakedly discriminatory. It wrongly renders whole classes of people inherently suspect simply by virtue of who their parents are, where they were born, or what religion they practice. It is also, in many ways, an extension of the Muslim ban — which affects a large number of Iranians — and the Trump administration’s stereotyping, unjust profiling, and targeting of Muslims more broadly.
This targeting is also incredibly demeaning and stigmatizing to the people who experience it. One mother who was detained in Washington state by CBP in early January couldn’t bring herself to explain to her two young children what was happening during their detention. Instead, she went outside the facility to cry so they wouldn’t see her break down. Others — including U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — lamented that even if they are born in the United States or have lived here for decades, they’re still being treated as outsiders.
The reported CBP directive also puts the agency’s downright bigotry and ignorance on full display. The directive states that CBP is looking for people with connections to the military or Iran’s specialized Quds Forces, and then draws a broad and vague connection to the Shia sect of Islam. But there are between 160 and 210 million Shia Muslims worldwide, and approximately 93% of Iran’s population is Shia, so the connection CBP is drawing is based on nothing but bias.
CBP goes on to warn in the directive that “anyone can state they are from a different faith to mask their intentions.” But one’s faith — whether it is Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion — says nothing relevant about one’s “intentions,” whatever that means. That is why this kind of broad-brush targeting, in addition to being wrong and unfair, is a colossal waste of time and taxpayer resources.
Compounding these concerns, the directive instructs CBP’s highly secretive teams, dubbed Tactical Terrorism Response Teams, or “TTRTs,” to vet travelers of Iranian, Lebanese, or Palestinian heritage. According to public statements by CBP officials, these secret teams already have a troubling record of harassing innocent travelers, and the officers who comprise them may rely on their “instincts” to target travelers who the government has never identified as posing a security risk. We’re currently suing CBP over the secrecy shrouding these teams.
The leaked directive continues a broader pattern of CBP misconduct that ranges from humiliating and harassing to cruel, inhumane, and lawless. CBP treats the border as a massive dragnet for vacuuming up intelligence on anyone who crosses it — a gross distortion of CBP’s actual authority. And this is not the first time CBP has lied or misled the public to conceal its misdeeds. CBP officers have written fake court dates to send asylum seekers back to Mexico and distorted statistics to mislead the public about realities at the U.S.-Mexico border.
We will continue to hold CBP accountable and demand that Congress investigate CBP abuses. In the meantime, it is critical for all travelers — U.S. citizens, legal residents, and visitors — to know and assert their rights when crossing the border.
Scarlet Kim, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project, & Hugh Handeyside, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project
Voting should be as easy and convenient as possible, and in many cases it is. But across the U.S., too many politicians are passing measures making it harder to cast a ballot. The goal is to manipulate political outcomes, and the result is a severely compromised democracy that doesn’t reflect the will of the people. Our democracy works best when all eligible voters can participate and have their voices heard.
Suppression efforts range from the seemingly unobstructive, like voter ID laws and cuts to early voting, to mass purges of voter rolls and systemic disenfranchisement. And long before election cycles even begin, legislators can redraw district lines that determine the weight of your vote. Certain communities are particularly susceptible to suppression and in some cases, outright targeted — people of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities.
Below, we’ve listed some of the most rampant methods of voter suppression across the country — and the advocacy and litigation efforts aimed at protecting our fundamental right to vote.
Voter ID Laws
Thirty-six states have identification requirements at the polls. Seven states have strict photo ID laws, under which voters must present one of a limited set of forms of government-issued photo ID in order to cast a regular ballot – no exceptions. These strict ID laws are part of an ongoing strategy to suppress the vote, and it works. Voter ID laws have been estimated by the U.S. Government Accountability Office to reduce voter turnout by 2-3 percentage points, translating to tens of thousands of votes lost in a single state.
Over 21 million U.S. citizens do not have government-issued photo identification. That’s because ID cards aren’t always accessible for everyone. The ID itself can be costly, and even when IDs are free, applicants must incur other expenses to obtain the underlying documents that are needed to get an ID. This can be a significant burden on people in lower-income communities. Further, the travel required is an obstacle for people with disabilities, the elderly, and people living in rural areas.
Voter ID restrictions imposed since 2010
Thirty-six states have identification requirements at the polls, including seven states with strict photo ID laws.
For more information on each highlighted state, click image for full display.
Restricting the terms and requirements of registration is one of the most common forms of voter suppression. Restrictions can include requiring documents to prove citizenship or identification, onerous penalties for voter registration drives or limiting the window of time in which voters can register.
Politicians often use unfounded claims of voter fraud to try to justify registration restrictions. In 2011, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach championed a law requiring Kansans to show “proof of citizenship” documents in order to register to vote, citing false claims of noncitizen voting. Most people don’t carry the required documents on hand — like a passport, or a birth certificate — and as a result, the law blocked over 30,000 Kansans from voting. The ACLU sued and defeated the law in 2018.
Some states restrict registration by allowing people to register long in advance of an election. For example, New York requires voters to register at least 25 days before the election, which imposes an unnecessary burden on the right to vote. By forcing voters to register before the election even becomes salient to the public, it discourages people from registering in the first place. These outdated restrictions — which were designed for a time when registration forms were exclusively completed with pen and paper, and transmitted via snail mail — can significantly impact voter participation. In the 2016 presidential election, over 90,000 New Yorkers were unable to vote because their applications did not meet the 25-day cutoff, and the state had the eighth-worst turnout rate in the country.
Cleaning up voter rolls can be a responsible part of election administration because many people move, die, or become ineligible to vote for other reasons. But sometimes, states use this process as a method of mass disenfranchisement, purging eligible voters from rolls for illegitimate reasons or based on inaccurate data, and often without adequate notice to the voters. A single purge can stop up to hundreds of thousands of people from voting. Often, voters only learn they’ve been purged when they show up at the polls on Election Day.
Voter purges have increased in recent years. A recent Brennan Center study found that almost 16 million voters were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016, and that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination — which are no longer subject to preclearance after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act — had significantly higher purge rates.
The most common excuses for purging voter rolls are to filter out voters who have changed their address, died, or have failed to vote in recent elections. States often conduct such purges using inaccurate data, booting voters who don’t even fall under the targeted category. In 2016, Arkansas purged thousands of voters for so-called felony convictions, even though some of the voters had never been convicted of a felony at all. And in 2013, Virginia purged 39,000 voters based on data that was later found to have an error rate of up to 17 percent.
A felony conviction can come with drastic consequences including the loss of your right to vote. But different states have different laws. Some ban voting only during incarceration. Some ban voting for life. Some ban people while on probation or parole; other ban people from voting only while incarcerated. And some states, like Maine and Vermont, don’t disenfranchise people with felony convictions at all. The fact that these laws vary so dramatically only adds to the overall confusion that voters face, which is a form of voter suppression in itself.
Due to racial bias in the criminal justice system, felony disenfranchisement laws disproportionately affect Black people, who often face harsher sentences than white people for the same offenses. It should come as no surprise that many of these laws are rooted in the Jim Crow era, when legislators tried to block Black Americans’ newly won right to vote by enforcing poll taxes, literacy tests, and other barriers that were nearly impossible to meet.
To this day, the states with the most extreme disenfranchisement laws also have long records of suppressing the rights of Black people. In Iowa, a system of permanent disenfranchisement, paired with the most disproportionate incarceration rate of Black people in the nation, has resulted in the disenfranchisement of an estimated one in four voting-age black men.
Felony disenfranchisement laws by state
A patchwork of state felony disfranchisement laws, varying in severity from state to state.
For more information on each state, click image for full display.
Every 10 years, states redraw district lines based on population data gathered in the census. Legislators use these district lines to allocate representation in Congress and state legislatures. When redistricting is conducted properly, district lines are redrawn to reflect population changes and racial diversity. But too often, states use redistricting as a political tool to manipulate the outcome of elections. That’s called gerrymandering — a widespread, undemocratic practice that’s stifling the voice of millions of voters.
How it all begins
Redistricting is front and center in 2020. In April, the Trump administration will conduct the 2020 census and states will use its results to redraw district lines across the country. Those new district lines will determine our political voice for the next decade.
It’s no coincidence that the administration — which has a lengthy track record on voter suppression and attacking immigrants — wanted to add a citizenship question to the census. The goal was to reduce census participation by immigrant communities, thereby stunting their growing political influence and depriving them of economic benefits.
Some might wonder what the problem is in adding a citizenship question to the census. But the purpose of the census is to count everybody in this country, citizens and noncitizens alike. Accurate population data is essential in apportioning representation and public funds. By trying to suppress participation, the administration made clear that it doesn’t want certain people to count — namely immigrants and even citizens who live in mixed-status households, who might have hesitated to participate if the Administration had succeeded in adding a citizenship question to the Census.
The ACLU sued the Trump administration over the citizenship question and successfully blocked it last year. In the process, we uncovered documents proving that attacking immigrants was the administration’s goal all along, and that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross lied to Congress to hide it.
The 2020 census will no longer include a citizenship question — but the administration’s attempt to add it is yet another example of how politicians can use redistricting to suppress and manipulate the vote.
The short answer is all of us. Our democracy is debased when the vote is not accessible for all. But the fact is that some groups are disproportionately affected by voter suppression tactics, including people of color, young people, the elderly, and people with disabilities. There’s proof that certain groups have been deliberately targeted — for example, the government documents uncovered in the census case proved that the citizenship question intended to harm immigrants. Other times, the proof is in the numbers.
Seventy percent of Georgia voters purged in 2018 were Black.
Across the country, one in 13 Black Americans cannot vote due to disenfranchisement laws.
One-third of voters who have a disability report difficulty voting.
Only 40 percent of polling places fully accommodate people with disabilities.
Across the country, counties with larger minority populations have fewer polling sites and poll workers per voter.
Six in ten college students come from out of state in New Hampshire, the state trying to block residents with out of state drivers’ licenses.
How To Protect Your Vote
The right to vote is the most fundamental constitutional right for good reason — democracy cannot exist without the electoral participation of citizens. We vote because it’s we, the people, who are supposed to shape our government. Not the other way around.
States can enact measures to encourage rather than suppress voting. Automatic, online, and same-day voter registration encourage participation and reduce chances of error. Early voting helps people with travel or accessibility concerns participate. And states must enforce the protections of the Voting Rights Act.
At an individual level, the best way to fight voter suppression is to vote. Here’s how to ensure your vote is protected:
Tell your senators to pass the VRAA, which would reinstate critical protections against voter suppression left behind after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
Know Your Rights before you get to the polling booth. Here’s a guide on what to do if you face registration issues, need disability or language accommodations, or come across someone who’s interfering with your right to vote. Share the guide on Facebook and Twitter to spread the word.
The ACLU is back in court today once again to stop Kentucky’s attempt to block access to abortion. We’ve been here before. Over the past three years, the Kentucky General Assembly has passed bill after bill that limits — and even bans — a person’s ability to get an abortion. And time after time, we’ve gone to court to protect people’s rights to get the care they need.
At issue this week is a law that makes it a crime for doctors at Kentucky’s last remaining abortion clinic to perform an abortion procedure that is the standard of care. In reality, the law is nothing more than a backdoor abortion ban: It would bar the only procedure available in the state after about 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Following a trial last year, a federal district court blocked the law, finding that it imposed “a substantial obstacle to a woman’s right to an abortion”—as other courts around the country similarly found. But the Commonwealth of Kentucky appealed, and we are arguing the appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit today.
The commonwealth’s opposition to this type of procedure is blatantly political, not medical. Leading medical experts such as the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists oppose these bans, saying they interfere with a doctor’s ability to provide the best possible care for their patient.
This restriction is part of a national and statewide strategy to push abortion out of reach. Since Jan. 2011, state lawmakers around the country have enacted more than 400 new restrictions on abortion that force patients to delay care, shut down clinics, and make abortion care unaffordable.
Because of regulations like these, today Kentucky has only one clinic left in the entire state. And the state is trying to force that last clinic to close its doors, leaving Kentuckians with no abortion provider at all. It’s only because we went with the clinic, EMW Women’s Surgical Center, to get a court order that the doors are still open; this case is on appeal.
Kentucky politicians have passed yet more attempts to block abortion access: a flat-out ban on abortion from the earliest weeks of pregnancy, and a ban based on the patient’s reason for deciding to have an abortion. The ACLU and the clinic went to court, and those laws are all blocked.
Kentucky politicians are determined to stop people who have decided to have an abortion from getting one. But we won’t turn from this fight. We will continue this battle so Kentuckians can get the care they need, and the right to decide what happens to their bodies.
Amber Duke, Communications Director, ACLU of Kentucky
