Last Thursday, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan sharply criticized the government for deporting two ACLU clients — a woman and her child who had fled rape and other brutality by her husband and a gang in El Salvador — who are challenging the Trump administration’s draconian new policies applicable to the initial “credible fear” asylum screening system.   

“This is pretty outrageous,” Sullivan said. “Somebody in pursuit of justice who has alleged a credible fear in her mind and is seeking justice in a United States court is just spirited away?” 

Carmen (a pseudonym) and her young daughter were returned to the United States that same day after the judge threatened to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt if they were not. But they are not alone in facing deportation while requesting protection from domestic violence. In its crackdown on immigrants at the border and in the United States, the Trump administration has endangered countless asylum seekers and immigrants pursuing justice under U.S. laws. 

This summer, Sessions issued a disturbing decision that departed from decades of asylum law and especially harms women. He established a general rule against asylum for victims of domestic violence and gang brutality despite the numerous courts and other authorities that have held otherwise, and specified that those claims should be denied even in credible fear screenings. “Generally,” Sessions wrote, “claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum.” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services subsequently published guidance to asylum officers conducting credible fear interviews, emphasizing this restrictive view in bold print.  

Sessions further misconstrued the legal standards applicable to asylum and credible fear, making it much more difficult for asylum seekers to show they have a credible fear of persecution during their initial interview. These changes mean that people who would have qualified for asylum if they had arrived just a few months earlier are now likely to be deported, deprived of a fair chance to show they qualify for relief at the agency and through the courts. 

These new policies align with other immigration changes that particularly impact vulnerable survivors of domestic violence. They follow, for example, a dramatic increase in immigration enforcement by officers from ICE and Customs and Border Protection at courts across the country since 2017. These arrests have swept up victims of crime or witnesses who are appearing in family, landlord-tenant, or traffic courts. 

A survey by the Immigrant Defense Project found that ICE arrests at courthouses in New York swelled by an astonishing 1,200 percent in 2017. Overall, federal arrests of undocumented immigrants with no criminal records have more than tripled under the Trump administration. 

Increased immigration enforcement has ensnared domestic violence victims who looked to the courts to protect their rights. They include a woman in Charlotte, North Carolina, and another in El Paso, Texas, who petitioned for protective orders and were detained by ICE when they appeared in court. In both cases, it is believed that their abusive ex-partners filed reports that led to the women’s arrests. 

The administration’s single-minded focus on arresting undocumented immigrants severely undermines law enforcement efforts to address and prevent violence. A survey of law enforcement officers released in May by the National Immigrant Women’s Advocacy Project and the ACLU shows that immigration arrests in courthouses during the Trump administration have created a culture of fear that impacts community safety. 

Sixty-nine percent of surveyed police officers reported that it was more difficult to investigate domestic violence cases involving immigrants in 2017 compared with the year before. Likewise, 82 percent of prosecutors said that since President Trump took office, domestic violence has become increasingly underreported and harder to investigate and prosecute. The survey also determined that more than half of the judges reported that court cases were interrupted due to an immigrant crime survivor’s fear of appearing in court. 

The #MeToo movement vividly illustrated that far too many survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, in the face of serious retaliation, were and are silenced about their experiences. For immigrant survivors of violence, the hurdles are that much higher, as they navigate new deportation and asylum policies that concentrate on punishing — rather than defending — them. 

When U.S. officials distort asylum protections to slam the door on women escaping persecution, they force victims to endure continued violence and the potential loss of their lives. When U.S. officials arrest victims of domestic violence pleading for aid at courthouses, they thwart survivors’ fundamental rights to due process and to request law enforcement assistance. 

People are fighting back. Along with Carmen and her daughter, 10 other people fleeing domestic and gang violence in Central America brought the lawsuit challenging the rollback in asylum protections in the credible fear process, represented by the ACLU and the University of California Hastings’ Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. The case moves forward before Judge Sullivan and builds on widespread condemnation of Sessions’ attempts to change asylum law. Across the country, law enforcement officials, advocates, ACLU state affiliates, and members of the public are speaking out against ICE’s aggressive enforcement at courthouses and its impact on immigrant survivors, witnesses, and communities.

The Trump administration has sent a clear message. It values the deportation of immigrant domestic violence survivors over the laws and policies we have adopted to shield victims and their rights. Using the courts, advocacy, and our own voices, we must ensure that these immigrants can secure justice before they are “spirited away” to life-threatening danger.   

On January 21, 2017, the day after Trump took office, women throughout the country (and indeed the world) took part in the largest protest march in U.S. history. They protested the election of a man who had demonstrated his disdain for women throughout the campaign and demanded policy change on numerous fronts necessary to ensure gender justice.  

That march embraced a diverse movement focused on issues of concern to a broad range of women, people of varied gender identities and sexualities, people with disabilities, poor women struggling to raise their families with dignity, women impacted by the criminal justice system, immigrants seeking a better life, and millions more who face myriad forms of oppression based on their intersecting identities. 

The ACLU has been fighting gender discrimination since its founding. Under the leadership of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the 1970s, the Women’s Rights Project was instrumental in knocking down the vast majority of laws that explicitly treated women differently from men and in establishing constitutional protections against discrimination on the basis of sex.

But as is evident by what we see today, gender discrimination persists. Last fall, we saw the explosion of the #MeToo Movement. On a daily basis, women began sharing their stories of sexual harassment and assault and insisting on systemic change to end the era of impunity. Transgender people continue to be subject to rampant discrimination, and women’s wages, particularly for women of color, still fall well below men’s. 

The ACLU is committed to eradicating gender discrimination in all its forms. For the next year, we commit to filing a lawsuit or taking other action each month to address an ongoing form of gender injustice. Our 12 Months, 12 Faces of Gender Discrimination Initiative will highlight an area of discrimination and the steps we are taking to eradicate it. With each effort, we pledge to achieve a victory or make progress toward one of the 12 goals set forth in the new ACLU Vision for Achieving Gender Justice.

This month, we filed Grace v. Sessions, a case challenging Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ new policies making it more difficult for victims of domestic violence and gang brutality to seek asylum in the U.S. For decades, the U.S. has recognized that individuals could state a credible fear of persecution based on these grounds. With the new policies, the Trump administration threatens to undo a long line of precedent and jeopardize the safety and lives of some of the world’s most vulnerable people. This case lies at the intersection of gender justice and immigrants’ rights, making clear that due to our multiple intersecting identities, many of us suffer from overlapping forms of discrimination.

In the coming months, we will highlight work to address digital discrimination and the difficulties faced by incarcerated mothers. We will showcase the persistence of pregnancy discrimination 40 years after the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. And we will shine a light on the low numbers of women in leadership positions in organizations, corporations, legislatures, and governors’ mansions – and some striking successes of women running for office in record numbers, particularly women of color.

So watch this space for updates on our progress.

The idea of facial recognition technology conjures up scenes from books and films set in dystopian futures in which freedom and liberty have been forfeited in exchange for the illusion of security. From "1984" to "Minority Report," these are worlds where everyone is suspect, and no one is safe. 

Today, you don’t need to look to fiction to imagine these consequences. Facial recognition technology — unregulated, prone to error, and poorly understood — is being rapidly rolled out in the institutions where we should place the most trust: our schools. 

In recent weeks, the NYCLU sounded the alarm after the Lockport City School District received $4 million in state funds to purchase facial recognition technology. More recently, RealNetworks announced that it is offering its facial recognition technology to any K-12 school in the country for free, claiming it’ll make schools safer. 

This is a dangerous path that schools should think twice about. 

We will do just about anything to protect our children. Promises of an omnipotent machine correctly identifying and stopping potential perpetrators make facial recognition technology alluring to parents and educators. And from the perspective of cash-strapped school districts, obtaining this technology for free can seem like a no-brainer. 

But facial recognition technology does not make our schools safer. In fact, facial recognition technology is especially prone to sabotage: For 22 cents, you can purchase a pair of cardboard glasses to fool it. 

Millions of students in the United States have invasive security measures imposed on them each day in order to attend school. Metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, pat downs and strip searches, and, now, digital scans of their faces. In order to receive an education, many students have no choice but to surrender to these measures. 

But we must engage in a serious conversation about the steep costs of all of this. Out of fear, we are rushing to solutions that have real consequences for kids. Here are five of them: 

1. Loss of Privacy

Schools should be safe environments for students to learn and play. They should be places where students can test out and practice ideas, interactions, and activities and be supported to make their own (safe) choices. Pervasive monitoring and collection of children’s most sensitive information — including their biometric data — can turn students into perpetual suspects. It exposes every aspect of a child’s life to unfair scrutiny. 

2. False Matches

ACLU of Northern California tested Amazon’s Rekognition facial recognition system by loading it with photos of members of Congress and letting it run comparisons to arrest photos. The test resulted in 28 false matches, of which nearly 40 percent were of people of color, even though they make up only 20 percent of Congress. For children, whose appearances change rapidly as they grow, the accuracy of this technology is even more questionable. False positives for a student entering school or going about their day can result in traumatic interactions with law enforcement, loss of class time, disciplinary action, and potentially a criminal record. 

3. Discrimination

It is widely known and well documented that police stop, detain, frisk, and arrest Black and brown people at disproportionate rates. As a result, the databases that facial recognition systems search are overpopulated with people of color. In schools, facial recognition technology will necessarily mean Black and brown students, who are already more likely to be punished for perceived misbehavior, are more commonly misidentified, reinforcing the criminalization of Black and brown people. That will happen even as facial recognition algorithms get better at correctly recognizing people’s faces. As long as our law enforcement systems are poisoned by systemic racism, technology can only serve to amplify it. 

4. Ineffectiveness

While the current call for increased safety against school shooters has fueled a wave of increased surveillance, this technology does not mitigate the risk. The vast majority of school shooters are first-time offenders and would not be included in any database to prevent them from entering a school. Indeed, perpetrators who are themselves students would easily gain access to school facilities. 

5. Fewer Graduates

The effects of the school-to-prison pipeline are well-documented. As we have increasingly relied on law enforcement to maintain school discipline, more of our children are exposed to the criminal justice system. Kids who are arrested in school are four times as likely to drop out as their peers. Communities should be looking for ways to keep the criminal justice system out of classrooms, not bring it in-house. 

Are we willing to forfeit our children's freedom in pursuit of an illusion of security? 

Normalizing mechanisms of surveillance and control catalyzes the criminalization of the school environment and could make school hallways feel more like jails. It facilitates the tracking of everyone's movements and social interactions and reinforces the school-to-prison pipeline. 

The solution is not improved technology, nor more training, higher resolution imagery, or more sophisticated artificial intelligence systems. Instead, we need to re-imagine what kind of society we want our children to inherit and what our schools must provide in order to create such a society. 

For starters, we must refuse the premise that our children need to be surveilled in order to be protected. We must rethink policing and safety in schools and in our communities at large. The desire to never let anything happen to our children is strong. But we strive to protect them so they can learn, thrive, and grow into strong individuals. 

If they can’t, there is nothing left worth protecting.