This piece was originally published in Washington Post. The header photo is of a Resistencia VA protest.

The administration of President-elect Joe Biden must do more than reverse the cruel immigration policies of the Trump administration. While the Trump administration’s policies have been particularly egregious, they are just the latest manifestation of a system that is fundamentally flawed. It is not enough to just turn back the clock on the past four years.

It is time to put an end to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention machine.

Over the past several decades, immigration detention — in essence, incarcerating those awaiting a determination of their immigration status or potential deportation — has become our nation’s newest system of mass incarceration for Black and Brown people. Rather than perpetuating this costly and cruel system, the Biden administration can immediately take action to curtail it — without any new laws from Congress, with the goal of phasing out mass detention.

Specifically, the new administration should immediately close all family detention centers. It should terminate existing contracts with private prisons and local and state jails by the end of the year, beginning with those that have an egregious history of abuse. It should also refrain from entering into new ones.

During the first 100 days, the new administration’s budget proposal can signal changed priorities, including an immediate reduction of at least 75 percent in the detention budget of ICE.

The Biden administration should eliminate bond for those otherwise eligible for release, and operate under a presumption of liberty, not detention. Under current law, ICE could immediately release tens of thousands of people from custody, but it routinely ignores its own internal standards to deny liberty to immigrants. The administration should simultaneously work with Congress to eliminate any circumstances in which detention is mandatory.

Incarceration of immigrants used to be the exception, not the rule. Under the law, we aren’t supposed to incarcerate people to punish them for lacking immigration status — that is a civil matter — or to deter others from coming to the United States. But that’s precisely what we now do, and on a massive scale. Decades of racist “tough on crime” policies, new detention policies seeking to punish and discourage people from coming to the United States, and the expansion of the detention infrastructure in the aftermath of 9/11 have pushed us in this unwise, expensive and inhumane direction.

The numbers are staggering. In just over six decades, the United States has completely upended its 1954 goal of ending the use of detention in “all but a few cases.” The detention of immigrants on any given day has gone from just under 6,800 in 1994, to nearly 34,000 in 2013, to an all-time high of more than 52,000 in 2019. In short, in just 25 years, the average daily population of immigrant detainees has increased more than sevenfold. We have all but normalized a system that abuses and traumatizes immigrants as a matter of practice.

Although other agencies detain immigrants, ICE is responsible for the vast majority of detentions and holds people the longest — for months or even years. The cruelty of its vast network — more than 200 sites nationwide — is by design: Detain people in the middle of nowhere, without lawyers and with no support network nearby. Pressure the people who are still fighting their cases into giving up their legal claims. Deport people covertly, and repeat.

ICE detention is a critical piece of our country’s mass deportation conveyor belt, propping up a system that tolerates racist practices, harms families and children, and denies basic due process and human rights to hundreds of thousands of people each year — costing taxpayers more than $3 billion this past fiscal year alone. Detained individuals have suffered severe pain and medical neglect culminating in sometimes months-long hunger strikes, deaths, amputations and suicides. Recently, numerous women bravely came forward to report invasive and unnecessary surgeries, including hysterectomies, while in ICE detention.

Those caught up in this system include pregnant women and families — some with babies and toddlers. Many are longtime lawful residents with deep ties to our community; some are ripped from their children’s arms by armed ICE officers or arrested on church grounds. ICE has even detained U.S. citizens.

This year, covid-19 has laid bare the ultimate costs of immigration detention. ICE has refused to provide even basics like masks or soap, denied testing to keep infection numbers artificially low, recklessly transferred people between facilities with coronavirus outbreaks, and failed to provide urgent medical care. ICE’s neglect during a pandemic is killing people and spreading the virus.

In part because of litigation and advocacy, ICE detention levels declined significantly this year, demonstrating that people are needlessly detained. These lower levels of detention, coupled with a presumption of release, enable a new administration to make urgently needed changes.

These recommendations are the minimum of what the Biden administration must do. But implementing them would move us toward a reimagined system — without the systemic trauma and cruelty stemming from immigrant detention — that embodies our nation’s values of fairness, justice and human rights.

By David Carlson, Smart Justice Regional Organizer

It takes willingness and collaboration to begin undoing generations of voter disenfranchisement.  As an ACLU of Wisconsin’s Rights for All Campaign regional organizer in Eau Claire County, I had the privilege of seeing these principles at work when the Rights for All Campaign connected with Captain Dave Riewestahl, of  the Eau Claire County Sheriff’s Department and an Army veteran, and Karen Voss of Chippewa Valley Votes, an electoral advocacy organization in western Wisconsin. Our shared objective was to see civil liberties expand in the carceral setting, because in Wisconsin, people serving misdemeanor jail sentences, or who are awaiting trial, are eligible to vote, and they are allowed to vote absentee by mail if they are unable to vote in person.

“The vote is the most powerful non-violent tool we have.” This quote by John Lewis speaks true to the heart of our American democracy.  Yet we have generations of people who are being denied access to electoral engagement. , “It wasn’t until the end of the Civil War and the expansion of suffrage to Black men that felony disenfranchisement became a significant barrier to U.S. ballot boxes,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Political socialization, the process by which a person forms their political identity, is greatly hindered when lawmaker’s actions place nearly insurmountable barriers between individuals and the ballot box.  This suppression and disenfranchisement disproportionately target People of Color and poorer communities.   

In June, the ACLU of Wisconsin’s Jail Voting Report was sent to every county sheriff’s department in Wisconsin .  Rights for All-Eau Claire County re-sent this information to jail administrators in the Chippewa Valley in August.  That month, I gave a virtual presentation to the Eau Claire County Judiciary and Law Enforcement Committee detailing the steps that we could take to provide effective access to the ballot in jail.  It was at this presentation that Chippewa Valley Votes became aware of this initiative and asked if they could help lead this critical work.  Captain Riewestahl, who had already shown dedication to expanding ballot access to people in  jail, met with Karen Voss and I to discuss how to move forward with making this voter registration and absentee ballot request opportunity happen.   

Weeks before the event, Captain Riewestahl worked with their technology vendor, and together they collaborated on how informative voting content could be shared with the incarcerated population via the electronic cellblock kiosks.  Having a voter registration and absentee ballot event without access to candidate information would have been ineffectual, which is exactly the appropriate word to describe most other Wisconsin county jail’s voting procedures.  Kenosha County was the only county in Wisconsin at the beginning of the year that submitted a relatively detailed voting policy that was already in effect after 61 of the 72 counties in Wisconsin replied to the ACLU of Wisconsin’s public records request for this information.  52.5 percent of these 61 counties had no identified voting process, and 45.9 percent had insufficient and vague language denoting an impracticable jail voting process.

Many important lessons were learned in carrying out this event.  Chippewa Valley Votes representatives and volunteers, bearing their laptops and procedural knowledge on how to register voters and request absentee ballots, entered the jail, and used the attorney visitation rooms—small booths with Plexiglas separating the voters from the volunteers—to carry out this initiative.  Karen Voss, leading the Chippewa Valley Votes group, stated that the largest barrier to eligible voters in the Eau Claire County Jail was lack of approved voter identification that the people currently held in jail could access.  Captain Riewestahl echoed Ms. Voss’s observation.  Efforts had been employed earlier in this process to mitigate this hurdle by allowing eligible voters to have a family member bring in their identification to be scanned and stored with the jail’s re-entry social worker.     

Voting is a right that is being denied to a substantial portion of approximately 12,500 individuals incarcerated in county jails in Wisconsin.  To build off the work that was accomplished in Eau Claire County, and across Wisconsin this election cycle, there are two long-term steps that would expand access to the ballot for eligible incarcerated voters:

1.  Amend Wisconsin’s voter ID legislation to allow jails to print a valid form of voter identification for incarcerated eligible voters.Or as Captain Riewestahl so pointedly stated, “We know beyond a doubt who we have in our jails.”

2.  Change the language of Wis. Stat. 6.86 (3), the statute granting authority to the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s “Hospitalized Elector” protocol. This protocol allows those who are indefinitely confined due to illness to receive their absentee ballot and have it returned by a designated courier.  If you have doubts about how practical this would be, it was implemented on the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s campus for those students with COVID-19 who were quarantined in their dorm rooms. The same process could easily be carried out for those individuals in county jails—a remedy brought to our attention by Captain Riewestahl.

Through collaboration and willingness, we took a major step in ensuring no civil liberties will be unjustly denied in Eau Claire County.  But it does not end here.  Take a look at the ACLU of Wisconsin’s Jail Voting Toolkit to understand the issue and how people in your community can work with your local sheriff’s department to make voting accessible to eligible incarcerated populations.  Contact the ACLU of Wisconsin if you need help with this process. Thank you for being defenders of civil liberties!