Last year, Anadith Reyes Alvarez, a medically vulnerable 8-year-old girl, died in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention after contract medical staff failed to review her medical records or consult with a physician and refused her emergency medical transport and care. As a court monitor concluded, Anadith’s death was a “preventable tragedy” pointing to an “urgent need” to improve “CBP medical oversight.” Sadly, this kind of medical abuse and neglect is not an anomaly in CBP facilities. Last month, CBP employees blew the whistle, indicating that CBP’s contract oversight office has long been aware of serious violations in the provision of medical care at CBP detention facilities, including significant understaffing, and providing medical services without appropriate medical licenses.

In the midst of these disturbing developments, CBP has requested permission from the National Archives and Records Administration to destroy “medical case files of persons in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection” after 20 years.

The medical records slated for destruction by CBP have long-term value for legal, research, historical, and accountability purposes. That’s why the ACLU and 71 organizations, including the American Immigration Council and the Texas Civil Rights Project, as well as 165 academic scholars, filed a regulatory comment today to challenge CBP’s proposed destruction of these records.

The medical records in question are often the primary evidence of medical care (or lack thereof) received by people in CBP custody, and are key to government accountability efforts to address systemic medical neglect in CBP detention. These records are also critical to legal claims by individuals or their surviving family members — including people who may still have live legal challenges long after the incidents occurred, such as people with disabilities or those who were minors when the abuse or neglect occurred.

These medical records are also of significant historical importance: Historians have frequently turned to the National Archives for primary sources regarding the treatment of immigrants, including the use of health-based criteria as a basis for entry or exclusion, and access to medical care by migrants at the border. Scholars have also examined records from government agencies that provided medical care to immigrants, including the U.S. Public Health Service — a precursor to CBP’s current medical care providers.

Destruction of CBP’s medical records would eliminate an important primary source developed during CBP’s nascent period as an agency — from its establishment in 2003, to a time marked by policies of family separation, and the use of Title 42, a purported public health measure to expel millions of immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic.

CBP’s plans to destroy medical records will only serve to obscure its tragic record of medical neglect and inhibit efforts to hold the agency accountable. Each day, CBP holds approximately 15,000 migrants in short-term detention facilities while processing them at the border. CBP policy maintains that people should not be detained for longer than 72 hours in these facilities, often small, frigid holding cells commonly referred to as hieleras (“freezers” in Spanish). CBP, however, regularly detains people for as long as 10 days, and in many cases, for over 30 days. Government oversight agencies and advocates have detailed numerous incidents of negligent medical care to people in CBP custody, including denial of care to people with broken bones, a damaged testicle due to injury by a Border Patrol officer, and a ruptured appendix.

An ACLU investigation also highlighted multiple cases of medical neglect in CBP detention, including the denial of care to a pregnant person, which preceded a stillbirth; and withholding of prescription medication for a child detained after undergoing spinal surgery resulting from a car accident. At least five people died in CBP custody in FY 2021 after having a medical emergency.

CBP’s treatment of migrants in its custody needs more transparency and documentation — not less. Like former challenges to the destruction of documents related to immigration detention, government agencies should not be allowed to destroy the paper trail of their incompetence and wrongdoing.

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For deaf people, language deprivation during early childhood represents the most significant threat to the exercise of their civil rights and liberties.

Not having adequate exposure to a language early in life has profound, lifelong consequences. Deaf students nationally graduate from high school and college at lower rates. They are among the many youth with disabilities who are disproportionately funneled into the criminal legal system. Long term negative outcomes span educational and employment contexts, and are especially bleak for deaf and hard of hearing children who also share marginalized racial identities, such as those who are Black.

In the ACLU’s ongoing work to affirm the civil rights of Deaf, DeafBlind, DeafDisabled, and Hard of Hearing people in prison and on supervision, including their right to access effective communication, many of our clients share one common trait: they experienced the permanent, detrimental effects of language deprivation in their early years.

Nearly all of our clients in these cases were among the 96 percent of deaf children born to hearing parents who did not know sign language. These parents love their children, but struggle to provide them with full access to language, signed or spoken.

Despite improvements in early intervention approaches, newborn hearing screenings, and advances in hearing technology, current research shows that deaf children often do not develop age-expected spoken language skills when they are only provided with spoken language. When kids don’t have full access to language, especially during the crucial years for early childhood development, they develop language deprivation syndrome — a neurodevelopmental disorder with negative and long-lasting effects on the deaf child’s language, cognitive, and socioemotional development.

Deaf education in the United States has historically been framed as a false dichotomy between bilingual Deaf schools where deaf children learn both American Sign Language (ASL) and English (spoken and/or written), and “mainstreamed” schools using an auditory-oral approach where deaf children only learn English (i.e., withholding ASL and other visual cues like lipreading).

The families of deaf children have, for generations, shared similar experiences: an overwhelming barrage of information, frequently biased towards the auditory-oral approach — giving their child auditory input while completely excluding signed language. Too often this is incorrectly presented as the most effective approach. But clear evidence demonstrates that deaf and hard of hearing children, even those with hearing parents, can effectively learn a sign language, and that doing so supports subsequent learning of spoken language.

• Education plans for deaf and hard of hearing children that meet the specific needs of the child.
• Education plans that include access to the full range of evidence-based instructional approaches and tools that can be used in various combinations to support language development and communication, including ASL-English bilingual education, Protactile, tactile signing systems, Cued Speech, augmentative and alternative communication, and auditory-oral education.
• Education plans that are accompanied by empirical evidence listing all possible outcomes, being clear which options will reliably lead to complete acquisition of at least one language, and which will not.
• Choice — and meaningful access to those choices — with the goal of successfully acquiring a language.

The ACLU considers the evidence-based “gold standard” approach to be providing access to a natural signed language during early infancy, in addition to support for learning English and other heritage languages desired by the family. Doing so positively impacts their language, cognition, socialization, and learning.

• The explicit withholding of access to sign language during early childhood, given the heightened risk of language deprivation that comes with such approaches.
• The false idea that learning sign language might harm a child’s ability to learn to speak and should be prohibited in the household.

In recent years, evidence-based grassroots legislative efforts to aid parents of deaf children in tracking their child’s language development during the first five years have made significant gains.

LEAD-K is a bill that has been passed in more than 20 states — some with the ACLU’s support. It empowers parents with balanced information about the languages, communication modes, and instructional approaches available to their deaf children. It also empowers states to track children’s progress with reliable data, identify when children are not getting sufficient support, and provide appropriate interventions as needed.

At the same time, we recognize a long history of choices being made for people with disabilities instead of by people with disabilities. Those choices can be rooted in eugenics, the medicalization of disability, or a parent’s desire to share their language with their child.

One argument often used to defend the choice to withhold ASL is that it should be the parents’ choice. The ACLU recognizes that sometimes arguments about parents’ right to choose can be weaponized in ways that endanger children — such as outing transgender students. Parents who choose only “listening and spoken language” options for their deaf or hard of hearing children choose that option because they want their child to function easily in society. But the science shows that exposing these children to only this form of communication can make it much harder for them to learn any language.

Arguments around parental choice can be used to deprive a child of a fully accessible language, despite risks of permanent cognitive and socioemotional harm, in hopes that the child will “overcome” their hearing disability. To that end, we encourage parents to learn about evidence-based language acquisition approaches and to be mindful of the legacies of ableism and audism when making choices for their children.

All students have the right to an equal and accessible education. We do not support the restriction of educational opportunities for deaf children, including the closure of schools for the deaf, which can be the best environment for some deaf children to learn in and support their language acquisition. The question of which setting is the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) is an individualized question, and the U.S. Department of Education confirms that the LRE is not automatically the provision of mainstream schools for deaf children. The primary goal of deaf education is to ensure deaf children can learn language, and learning language is easiest in immersive social environments with other language users.

We recognize that mainstream schools can often be under-resourced, lacking the full continuum of language supports that deaf schools can provide. The ACLU strongly supports increased resources for deaf children to acquire a signed language and for deaf adults to access services in their primary language.

At the ACLU, we’ve seen firsthand the adverse impacts of language deprivation. Access to language — through LEAD-K and through the availability of all educational methodologies as options individualized for each child — is a fundamental stepping stone to vindicating the civil rights and civil liberties of deaf and hard of hearing people and enabling the next generation of deaf children to become full, participating members of our democracy.

In case after case, we’ve seen the government remove people from the No Fly List and prevent their legal challenges from being heard. Now, the Supreme Court has the chance to ensure Americans wrongly placed on this list are actually given their day in court. Today, the Supreme Court will hear FBI v. Fikre, a case that will determine whether a U.S. citizen can continue to challenge his placement on the No Fly List, after the government removed him from it and sought to end his case.

FBI v. Fikre

The ACLU and partners filed an amicus brief in support of Yonas Fikre, a U.S. citizen who alleges that he was wrongly placed on the No Fly List.

To understand what’s at stake, it helps to know how the No Fly List program functions. Since 2003, the U.S. government has operated a No Fly List that indefinitely bars U.S. citizens and residents from flying to, from, or over the United States. Using vague criteria and a low evidentiary standard, the government exercises virtually unfettered discretion and secrecy in making its No Fly List decisions. Claiming national security, the government says it can keep its reasons and evidence for putting people on the list — or taking them off it — entirely or almost entirely secret. We know that Americans on the No Fly List are disproportionately Muslim and those of Arab, Middle Eastern, or South Asian heritage.

In 2014, in a case filed by ACLU clients, a district court found that the administrative process the government provides to challenge placement on the No Fly List violated due process and required the government to change it. But the process the government then put in place is little better — it still does not provide people with the government’s reasons and evidence for placing them on the list or a fair process to challenge error.

Mr. Yonas Fikre, the respondent in the Supreme Court case, discovered he was on the No Fly List in 2010 and subsequently filed a lawsuit to challenge his placement. Although Mr. Fikre completed the government’s redress process, he was still not given any reasons for his placement on the No Fly List. Six years later, after he filed a federal court challenge, the government removed Mr. Fikre from the list and argued his case could not go forward because it was moot. It also told him that he “will not be placed on the No Fly List in the future based on the currently available information.” But this is not good enough.

In the friend-of-the-court brief submitted by the ACLU, ACLU of Oregon, and Goodwin Procter in support of Mr. Fikre, we identified 40 U.S. citizens and residents who challenged their placement in court and found that the government kept secret the full reasons — or any reason — for placing each of them on the list. We found that the government has repeatedly acted to prevent judicial review by taking people off the list at strategic points in litigation. As a result, a government statement that a plaintiff like Mr. Fikre will not be relisted “based on currently available information” provides no assurance that the government will not wrongly put him back on the list in the future. And as we argued to the Supreme Court, because the government has not made it absolutely clear that its allegedly wrongful behavior will not recur, Mr. Fikre’s court challenge is not moot and the courts should hear and decide his case.

Mr. Fikre’s experience is not an isolated one. We and others have repeatedly documented that placement on the No Fly List has devastating consequences for people’s personal and professional lives — and the government has used the list as a tool of coercion. For example, in 2018, Ahmad Chebli, a Michigan-based father of two, was pressured by FBI agents to become an informant in his own community. When he refused, the FBI agents falsely accused him of being affiliated with a terrorist group, and made threats of investigation, arrest, and immigration consequences for his family. Despite terrible anxiety and stress as a result, Mr. Chebli still refused to become an informant. He sent his wife and children to Lebanon for safety and later joined them — hoping that his government would back off. But when he tried to return home to Michigan, he learned that it had instead put him on the No Fly list.

I Refused to Become an FBI Informant, and the Government Put Me on the No Fly List

With the help of the ACLU, I’m bringing a lawsuit to challenge the government’s actions.

For two years Mr. Chebli tried to use the government’s redress process to seek removal from the list — but that process was a black box of secrecy and unfairness. The government only took him off the list in 2021, 10 days after we sued on his behalf. Unfortunately, this experience is not unusual for Americans placed on the list. Many spend years seeking information about how to be removed, without even learning why the government put them on the list in the first place.

At its core, both the No Fly List and the government’s watchlisting program perpetuates unfairness, secrecy, and discriminatory profiling. The categories of people who are watchlisted seem ever-expanding, never constricting — which is exactly what happens when you have a vague, overbroad system of government surveillance and sanction based on suspicion and without due process. Mr. Fikre, and those like him, should have their day in court. We hope the Supreme Court agrees.

If you are an American citizen or lawful permanent resident concerned that you’re on the No Fly List, please fill out this form.