Reconstruction gave citizenship and the right to vote to Black men in the state, and it was power that they knew for only a few short years. Following the enactment of Florida’s 1868 constitution, the state would install a Black secretary of state and elect a Black congressman to the United States Congress. It would take a century for another Black person to be seated in a statehouse or congressional office.

Some who read this may ask, “Why make this a ‘race’ thing?” Race was the institution on which America was founded. Yes, the Founding Fathers intended to create a government free from monarchical rule. But, the business that America sold for the first century of the constitutional republic was primarily in crops and textiles harvested and manufactured for free by the forced enslavement and labor of Africans.

These facts matter particularly because of the recency with which many of us view the lens of history in our fractious and fast-paced media environment.

It’s easy to forget after President Barack Obama became the first African American to hold the nation’s most powerful position, that African Americans have only experienced the full rights and protections of citizenship in this country since the 1968 Civil Rights Act also known as the Fair Housing Act. That was the last of the 1960s civil rights legislation to be enacted, a week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. This historic legislation was only passed a generation or two ago, part of our living memory.

It is easy to forget that African Americans in Florida were not represented in Florida’s statehouse after Reconstruction and the Great Nadir until the election of Gwendolyn Sawyer Cherry from Miami to the Florida Legislature in 1970. Florida also did not have any African American representatives in Congress in the years after Reconstruction until the general election of 1992. Several generations of Floridians never knew a local Black policymaker in state or national government.

We simply cannot “move on” or “get over it.”

As Americans and as Floridians, this is our shared history, mired in the uncomfortable topic of the normalized social construct of race that many of us may feel is impolite to discuss. But how can we heal the divisions in this country and acknowledge the impact of this period of legal racialized terror if we cannot address the issue and how it has impacted generations of Black people and the subsequent harms it has wrought? We simply cannot “move on” or “get over it.”

Black History Month reminds us that Americans of African descent have played a central role in the progress of this state and our country from the start, even if history books do not emphasize it.

Issues like voter suppression and disenfranchisement and economic immobility and the wealth gap remind us that, though we have achieved progress in leveling the playing field in access to life, housing, and employment, the work to achieve true equality was never completely won, nor will it ever really be in any of our lifetimes.

The work of securing full rights and true equality for not just Black Floridians, but all Floridians, is ongoing work to which each and every one of us is tasked. We cannot afford to defer creating an integrated society where everyone feels a true sense of belonging.

We must continue to work together to achieve true equality. It is our duty to each other if we are to really make this republic work for “we the people.”

The federal government recently proposed a rule that would strip graduate student workers of their ability to organize under the National Labor Relations Act, the law that grants most private sector employees the right to engage in collective bargaining. In justifying its proposed rule, the National Labor Relations Board, a government agency, asserted that allowing graduate student assistants to bargain collectively would “uniquely imperil[ ] the protection of academic freedoms.”

The government is wrong.

Like any other employee, student workers seek to organize to improve their working conditions — not to exert control over academic matters. “Protecting academic freedom” is just the government’s phony justification for limiting workers’ ability to unionize, and, as an organization deeply devoted to both academic freedom and free association, we won’t stand by it. That’s why we’re opposing the proposed rule.

Academic freedom is undoubtedly crucial to the spread of ideas on university campuses. The role of a university is to teach and encourage its students to freely engage with new topics, constantly inquiring, questioning, and evaluating different perspectives and perceptions. The ability to do so independently and freely is critical not only for students, but also for professors and other members of the campus community. An infringement on this essential aspect of education would be cause for concern, but there is no reason to believe that collective bargaining over employment conditions will have any effect on the academic freedom of schools.

To the contrary, student workers are seeking to bargain over their wages, hours, and health care — not over what topics will and will not be covered in a biology class. In recent collective bargaining agreements reached between universities like NYU, Tufts, Brandeis, and their student employees, the heart of the bargaining has focused on core economic issues and conditions of employment.

If anything, rather than requiring the exclusion of graduate student workers from the NLRA, the principles the First Amendment rest upon suggest just the opposite. The role of the First Amendment is to protect our ability to speak out, to join together on the issues we care about, and to rally for change. As the Supreme Court has long recognized, “The practice of persons sharing common views banding together to achieve a common end is deeply embedded in the American political process.” When employees form a union, they are doing just that: banding together over issues of mutual interest to guarantee their ability to communicate serious workplace concerns, and elevate their voices so these concerns are heard.

The ACLU has defended the associational rights of workers throughout the last century and continues to do so now. For example, in Farm Labor Organizing Committee v. Stein, we are fighting to protect the ability of North Carolina’s farmworkers to organize and join collective bargaining agreements with their employers. From farmworkers to graduate student assistants, all workers should be able to advocate for better working conditions, pay, and benefits for themselves and their families.

If particular schools remain concerned about the preservation of their academic freedom despite the fact that First Amendment principles actually weigh against this rule, there are precautionary measures they could take. Schools could explicitly exclude all academic decision making from the scope of bargaining, or state that the sole authority over all academic matters rests with the university. While by no means required by the First Amendment, provisions like these should reassure institutions that their academic freedom will be preserved through the bargaining process.

As the agency “vested with the power to safeguard employees’ rights to organize,” the National Labor Relations Board should be supporting — not undercutting — student workers’ ability to effect change in the workplace. Reconsidering this proposed rule would be a start.

Arianna Demas, Brennan Fellow, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project

In late November, U.S. immigration authorities began deporting some Central American asylum-seekers to Guatemala under a new policy that makes it nearly impossible for them to seek asylum in the U.S.

But Guatemalan human rights workers say that their country’s asylum system isn’t capable of handling even the relatively small numbers that have been sent there so far, and that asylum seekers’ precarious status in the country has already pushed many to leave.

“They’re preferring to move on rather than staying here in a dangerous country,” said Rebeca Sanchez-Ralda, a Guatemalan attorney working with the U.S.-based organization Justice in Motion.

According to Sanchez-Ralda, insecurity in Guatemala and the low capacity of the government to process an influx of asylum applications means the new arrivals are faced with an impossible choice: stay, and face a new set of risks, or set off towards more familiar ones.

“They don’t have all the personnel to do the interviews or the shelters to put people,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to be possible at all.”

The policy is the latest of the Trump administration’s attempts to block asylum at the Southern U.S. border. Now, people who show up looking for protection in the U.S. can be shipped to Guatemala and told to apply for asylum there instead. But the U.N. has called Guatemala’s asylum process “nascent,” and advocates familiar with it say that nearly all the applications in the system right now have been stuck in a bureaucratic limbo for years.

“Over 500 asylum petitions have been pending for more than two years now,” said Amílcar Vásquez, a Project Director with Pastoral de Movilidad Humana, a Catholic group that works with the UN to provide services to migrants.

Vásquez says that asylum-seekers are given no support from the Guatemalan government while their applications are being processed.

“They’re going to become desperate without any guarantee of help or assistance from the state.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that as of mid-January 158 people had been sent to Guatemala under the new policy. So far, only Honduran and El Salvadoran nationals have been subjected to the new policy, including families with young children.

The three countries — collectively known as the Northern Triangle — are struggling with record levels of violence and instability. Decades of civil conflicts that were inflamed by covert U.S. involvement in the region, along with a street gang crisis that traces its origins to a wave of deportations from Los Angeles in the 1990s, have made them some of the most dangerous in the world.

Guatemala had the twenty-sixth-highest overall homicide rate in the world in 2017, along with the seventh-highest for females. Honduras has struggled with political violence since a 2009 military coup, and El Salvador now has the highest murder rate in the world, driven primarily by street gangs that have spread to neighboring countries.

“Violence is common here, including extortion and other types of crimes that exist in El Salvador and Honduras as well,” said Sanchez-Ralda. “We have kidnappings, killing of women, and hatred towards LGBTQ people.”

To enable the new deportations, the Trump administration signed an Asylum Cooperative Agreement (ACA) with former Guatemalan president Jimmy Morales last July. Similar agreements have also been signed with the governments of Honduras and El Salvador. U.S. officials have indicated that the program will soon be expanded to include asylum-seekers from other countries.

This means people fleeing persecution from any country in the world could be sent to Central America rather than have the opportunity to seek asylum in the U.S.

Upon arrival in Guatemala, disoriented asylum-seekers encounter a rushed and confusing process where they have only 72 hours to decide whether to apply for asylum there. One Guatemalan official described the policy’s implementation thus far as a “total disaster.”

The ACLU filed suit on Jan. 15 in U.T. vs. Barr challenging the changes to asylum regulations that allow the ACAs — also known as “safe third country” agreements — to go into effect. The suit claims the policy violates U.S. and international law by failing to protect asylum-seekers from being exposed to harm in the three countries, which are among the most dangerous in the world.

One of the plaintiffs in the ACLU’s suit, identified as U.T., is a gay man from El Salvador who was disowned by his parents and threatened by an MS-13 gang member who solicited sex from him. After fleeing to the U.S. to claim asylum, he was instead deported to Guatemala, where he says officials told him it wasn’t safe for gay people and advised him to go to Mexico.

The ACLU’s complaint details how it is now nearly impossible for anyone subjected to an ACA to have their asylum claims heard in a U.S. court. The Trump administration has issued new rules that govern how someone is treated when they show up at the border and ask for asylum. Now, rather than being given a chance to convince an immigration judge that they should be given asylum in the U.S., they can be funneled into a separate process designed to quickly remove them to one of the countries that has signed an ACA.

In 2017, 3,741 El Salvadorans and 2,048 Hondurans won asylum in the U.S. The new rules make it all but certain that number will plummet as removals under the Guatemala ACA continue.

For those deported to Guatemala so far, the combination of danger and the prospect of navigating a confusing process with little help has already forced many to take their chances elsewhere. There are no restrictions on movement between the three countries, meaning that asylum-seekers who fled persecution in one can be easily reached by a person or group that tracks them down in another.

The ACLU’s suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

“The United States has an obligation to ensure asylum seekers have access to a safe haven from persecution,” said Katrina Eiland of the ACLU. “This policy does the exact opposite, sending them to a country that can’t adequately protect them through an absurd and illegal process.”

Ashoka Mukpo, Staff Reporter, ACLU