Last night, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) deported an Iranian student with a valid visa, despite a federal court order prohibiting his removal.

Shahab Dehghani arrived at Boston Logan Airport on Sunday, January 19 to study at Northeastern University, where he was enrolled. Customs officials detained him and questioned him for hours, abruptly revoking his student visa, which the State Department granted after a year of intense vetting.

As CBP tried to put Shahab on the next available flight, supporters and friends gathered at night in the arrivals hall at Logan to demand that CBP stop deporting students with valid visas while attorneys filed an emergency lawsuit to halt his removal.

https://twitter.com/ACLU_Mass/statuses/1219417527203368961

Within hours, a federal judge ordered that Shahab’s deportation be delayed for 48 hours, pending a hearing scheduled for the following morning. The crowd’s chants of “Students’ dreams matter!” and “Do the right thing!” dissolved into cheers as we heard the news, and we went home with hope in our hearts that Shahab would receive due process.

Sadly, we were mistaken. We awoke to the news that CBP had deported Shahab, putting him on an Air France flight despite the judge’s order. I wish I could say we were surprised, but we’ve seen this kind of flagrant defiance of the law from immigration officials before. In 2017, CBP sowed chaos by enforcing President Trump’s unlawful Muslim ban, flaunting court orders and deporting travelers at will. Last night, as we waited eagerly for news of Shahab’s fate, I was reminded of the heroic efforts of those ACLU lawyers who worked relentlessly in 2017 to ensure that Muslim travelers could avail of their constitutional rights.

The Trump administration’s recent targeting of Iranians and Iranian Americans is shameful, and CBP must be held accountable for its actions. Shahab is only the most recent victim — according to one report, at least 10 Iranian students with valid visas have been sent back since August 2019, with over seven of those travelling through Boston’s Logan Airport.

When dozens of Iranian Americans were unlawfully detained at a border crossing in Washington state, the ACLU made it clear: Military action abroad does not justify discrimination at home. Iranians and Iranian Americans have rights, and we will not stand by while CBP and other government agencies inflict their arbitrary and cruel policies without the slightest regard for the rule of law.

Students deserve to follow their dreams. Many of the people turned away by our government were admitted to some of the most prestigious higher education institutions in the country. These are some of the best and brightest, and their presence here enriches us all. Even after they’re admitted to schools, Iranian students endure months of intense scrutiny and spend large sums to apply for visas. To upend their lives and their future careers so cruelly at the last minute does more than dehumanize them — it dehumanizes us. It says to the world that we are not a welcoming nation, but a mean and capricious one, and that our laws are nothing but pretexts for wanton discrimination.

Since Shahab has already been removed, a federal judge today ruled the case moot. But, in the United States, nobody is above the law — not even CBP. We will continue to fight in legislatures, in courtrooms, and on the streets to defend against the whims of a racist administration, and to hold CPB and other immigration agencies accountable for their deplorable and illegal behavior.

Carol Rose, Executive Director, ACLU of Massachusetts

Liberty and equality are everywhere under attack. And that’s why the work of the American Civil Liberties Union feels more precious to us than ever before. The ACLU lawyers and staff are the brave souls who suit up, blast off, and do what they can to divert and repel all those incoming meteors, or blow them right out of the sky. We admire them. We admire them the way you must admire people who devote themselves to doing, to the utmost of their ability, any thankless, impossible, and absolutely essential job.

Liberty and justice for all. We used to stand up with our classmates every morning and timelessly pledge liberty and justice for all, even and especially for those (as the Supreme Court, agreeing with the ACLU, ruled in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette) whose consciences rebel at being compelled to pledge allegiance to a flag or to a country “under God.” The Bill of Rights protects pledgers and nonpledgers alike, but of course it is only the nonpledgers—the contrarians, the cranks, the nonconformists, the radicals and fanatics, the outsiders and the ostracized, the powerless and unpopular and imprisoned—who ever really need its protections. They also tend to be the ones least likely to receive those protections—not without a fight, anyway. That’s where the ACLU comes in.

The history of the ACLU is one of struggle, combat, of marginalized people and unpopular causes, of troublemakers and conscientious objectors, a history of battle and strife. But it is also the history of the very best our country has to offer to its citizens and, by way of example, to the rest of the world: the strong, golden strand of the Bill of Rights and the ideals it embodies, often frayed, occasionally snarled, stretched at times to the breaking point, but shining and unbroken down all the years since 1789. The ACLU holds the government, the courts, and the nation to their avowed and highest standard, insisting on the recognition of the protections the Constitution affords to every American, no matter how marginalized, no matter how unpopular the cause, even if the people it protects sometimes despise the freedom it represents.

As American Jews in our fifties, we both remember, powerfully, the moment we each first understood the austere and lonely fight of the ACLU, the thankless road to freedom on which it plies its trade. It was 1977, when the ACLU took on the case of the local branch of the American National Socialist Party, whose members wanted to hold a march along the main street of Skokie, a predominantly Jewish suburb outside Chicago. We remember wrestling with the difficult idea that the ACLU could be on the side of good (the First Amendment) and evil (Nazis) at the same time. To understand the vital role that the ACLU plays in American society requires a nuanced understanding of the absolute value of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from unwarranted search and seizure, of the right to due process and equal justice under the law, even—again, especially—when those rights protect people we find abhorrent or speech that offends us.

Nuance unfortunately seems to be in very short supply nowadays. In the pages of Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases, we have collected essays by some of our country’s finest writers (ranging from Marlon James and Ann Pachett to Elizabeth Strout and Viet Thanh Nguyen, and many more)—not just because writers are and have long been among the principal beneficiaries and guardians of the First Amendment but also because they traffic, by temperament and trade, in nuance and its elucidation, in ambiguity and shades of gray. We turn to writers, here and in general, to help us understand and, even more, grasp both ends of ambiguities, to expand the scope of our vision to encompass the whole gray spectrum of human existence, in all its messy human detail.

Enjoy.

Ayelet Waldman, Author,
& Michael Chabon, Author

This piece originally appeared on Fast Company.

In 2019, we proved face recognition surveillance isn’t inevitable. Now, it’s time for Congress to rein in the technology once and for all.

Last year, communities banded together to prove that they can — and will — defend their privacy rights. As part of ACLU-led campaigns, three California cities — San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland — as well as three Massachusetts municipalities — Somerville, Northhampton, and Brookline — banned the government’s use of face recognition from their communities. Following another ACLU effort, the state of California blocked police body cam use of the technology — forcing San Diego’s police department to shutter its massive face surveillance flop. And in New York City, tenants successfully fended off their landlord’s efforts to install face surveillance.

Even the private sector demonstrated it had a responsibility to act in the face of the growing threat of face surveillance. Axon, the country’s largest body camera supplier, announced it would ban face recognition on its products for the foreseeable future. 

With Congress today holding its first hearing of 2020 on face recognition, it’s critical that lawmakers heed this unmistakable message from constituents: Face recognition surveillance has no place in our communities.

Face recognition offers governments a surveillance capability unlike any other technology in the past. The powerful capability can enable the government to identify who attends protests, political rallies, church, or AA meetings on an unprecedented scale. In China, the government is already using face recognition surveillance to track and control ethnic minorities, including Uighurs. Protesters in Hong Kong have had to resort to wearing masks to trick Big Brother’s ever-watchful eye.

In the United States, federal and local law enforcement agencies have been eagerly adopting this technology too, often in secret, at the urging of private companies, and despite widespread evidence that the technology is biased.

In 2018, an ACLU report revealed Amazon was actively helping multiple police departments deploy the technology in communities. A Georgetown University report revealed that the NYPD used altered photos, artist sketches, and celebrity look-alikes when trying to find criminal suspects using face recognition. And just a few months ago, a massive government study of nearly 200 face recognition algorithms further confirmed that the technology is flawed and biased. For instance, false positives were found to be between two and five times higher for women than men.

One false match can lead to missed flights, lengthy interrogations, tense police encounters, false arrests, or worse. But the technology’s flaws are only one concern. Accurate or not, face recognition technology threatens to forever alter our free society, eroding the little remaining semblance of privacy guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment and turning us all into subjects to be monitored, tracked, and scrutinized wherever we go.

As Congress continues to hear from experts on face recognition, it is critical that it move fast to put the brakes on this technology. It must also press government agencies to disclose when, where, and how law enforcement agencies are using the technology, and what safeguards, if any, are in place to protect our rights.

At the same time, Congress must investigate the technology companies arming law enforcement with this surveillance technology. They should have hearings forcing companies who continue to stonewall Congress to disclose how they are marketing their technology, who they are selling it to, and the representations they have made about its efficacy. As part of these hearings, they should request and make public documents revealing which government agencies use face recognition and from which companies the agencies have purchased this technology. It is unacceptable that many of these companies tout transparency on one end but then on the other end stonewall Congress and continue to secretly do business with law enforcement agencies, often under secrecy agreements.

There can be no accountability if there is no transparency. And communities are demanding action.

In 2019, we proved a face surveillance dystopia isn’t inevitable. Congress can — and must — make 2020 the year we rein this technology in once and for all.

Abdullah Hasan, Communications Strategist, ACLU