Ai-Jen Poo, Executive Director, National Domestic Workers Alliance & Mónica Ramírez, President, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas

At the heart of so many #MeToo disclosures is invisibility. For farmworker women like Teresa Arredondo, it’s about being isolated and silenced. Originally from Mexico, Teresa immigrated to join her family in California in the 1980s. Throughout the years that Teresa worked in the fields, she experienced exploitation and discrimination, including workplace sexual violence.

But Teresa didn’t stay silent. When she reported the harassment, she was fired. This led her to become outspoken. Now she's a crew leader at a new farm, overseeing 50 other farmworker women while encouraging them to break their silence. She is also an organizer within Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, where she speaks out so that other women can come forward too.

Now that the #MeToo movement has elevated the experiences and visibility of women like Teresa, it’s our duty to improve the laws that are supposed to protect workers from this exact behavior, like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Domestic workers and farmworkers are critical to the U.S. economy. They take care of our elderly parents and children. They pick the fruit and vegetables we eat. They are the backbone of our society, supporting our economy, our health, and our well-being. Currently, there are over 700,000 farmworker women across the United States and over 2 million domestic workers.

Domestic and agricultural work is often isolated and invisible. Taking place behind the closed doors of private residences or in fields or packing sheds in rural America, women in these workforces are particularly vulnerable to sexual assault and harassment. As many as eight out of 10 farmworker women interviewed in a recent study by Human Rights Watch reported sexual harassment. Given this vulnerability, it would be expected that Title VII, our federal antidiscrimination law, would offer strong protections for these workers.

In fact, the opposite is true.

Title VII shields certain employers from liability for failing to prevent, address, or remedy sexual harassment against certain groups of workers by excluding companies that employ fewer than 15 workers as well as independent contractors because they are not considered employees under the law’s definition. These provisions of Title VII disproportionately affect domestic workers and farmworkers, many of whom work for small businesses or are classified, at times erroneously, as independent contractors. And federal law is necessary — the few laws that protect domestic and farmworkers from workplace harassment exist in only a handful of states and localities.

This exclusion of domestic workers and farmworkers from labor protections didn’t begin with Title VII. Its roots extend back to America’s legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, particularly the refusal of Southern lawmakers to support labor rights for African-Americans. During the negotiations that brought in the labor policies of the New Deal, federal lawmakers, responding to pressure from Southern lawmakers, excluded domestic workers and farmworkers from the National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the right to organize and bargain collectively, along with the Fair Labor Standards Act, which created minimum wage and overtime protections.

Over 80 years later, women in these industries have had enough.

On April 24, over 200 women domestic workers, farmworkers, allies, and congressional leaders — and among them Teresa Arredondo — came together in Washington, D.C., to tell their stories and advocate for change.  Through chants of “Si, se puede” (“Yes, we can”) and “Mujeres imparables” (“Unstoppable women”) these women, mostly Black, Latina and immigrant women of color, solidified their kinship and unity against all forms of racism, discrimination, harassment, and abuse. United in the belief that all women, and all people, deserve safe and dignified work, they eloquently and passionately made their case for reform. They met with over sixty members of Congress and their staff, urging Congress to amend the existing anti-discrimination law so that all workers are protected, without any loopholes or exclusions. 

On April 24 these women were not invisible. As they shared their experiences of rape, sexual harassment, physical and emotional abuse with lawmakers, they were heard and — more importantly — believed. These women have planted the seeds of change in our nation’s capital for all workers who have been historically excluded. Join them — along with the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Alianza Nacional de Campesinas —  to continue building the power necessary to change the law, hold employers accountable, and ensure safety and dignity for all workers so they are invisible no more.

Ai-Jen Poo is the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and co-director of Caring Across Generations. Mónica Ramírez is the president of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas.

In 2016, Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a policy advising against the detention of pregnant women. The rationale seemed simple enough: incarceration creates serious health risks for expectant mothers, and detention facilities are not equipped to serve those unique needs.

But in December 2017, Thomas Homan, the acting director of ICE, announced that the agency would change that directive to comply with President Trump’s executive order on immigration and eliminate the presumption of release for pregnant women.  

In addition, the policy change allows ICE to remove critical reporting procedures required for oversight of the detention system, making it extremely difficult to monitor the treatment of pregnant women, despite evidence that such oversight is desperately needed.

The mistreatment of pregnant women in ICE detention is well-documented. Despite the earlier directive not to detain pregnant women, the agency frequently did anyway — as many as hundreds of pregnant women, according to its own figures. Based on reports that we and partner organizations have received, we’re concerned that many of them may not have received adequate healthcare in detention. So with aggressive enforcement practices targeting immigrants, an expansion of the detention system, and the removal of various oversight mechanisms, pregnant women in ICE detention face more danger than ever before.

When the change in ICE policy became public knowledge this spring, it prompted immediate outrage by medical associations, human rights groups, immigrants’ rights groups, and religious organizations. In response, more than 250 organizations sent a letter to ICE last month urging it to reverse this decision.

Despite the outcry, ICE remains unmoved, and appears determined to continue this cruel and unnecessary practice. That’s why on Thursday the ACLU, along with the American Immigration Council and the Women’s Refugee Commission, filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking that ICE make available all documents related to its detention of pregnant women.

The ACLU and partners have worked to document the harmful and dangerous conditions pregnant women face, including verbal and physical abuse, as well as delays in emergency care and prenatal treatment. In September 2017, the ACLU and seven other organizations filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and its Office of Inspector General detailing those conditions. The complaint included testimony from 10 women, some of whom suffered miscarriages while in detention.

Their stories are harrowing. One 31-year-old asylum seeker was detained when she was four months pregnant. Shortly after her arrest, she began to experience severe pain and bleeding. She pleaded with detention authorities for medical care, but she was ignored. Instead, she was transferred from a Border Patrol holding facility to an ICE detention center in southern California, and miscarried. 

Another 23-year-old asylum seeker was detained at a U.S. port of entry when she was 12 weeks pregnant. She was held in ICE custody for three months and transferred between facilities six times. One transfer between New Mexico and Texas took 23 hours and landed her in the hospital for exhaustion and dehydration. She experienced nausea, vomiting, weakness, headaches, and abdominal pain during her detention and did not receive sufficient prenatal vitamins or adequate medical attention.

Pregnancy is a serious medical issue that requires close monitoring and attention, which ICE is not equipped to provide. Locking up more pregnant women is cruel, and puts them needlessly at risk.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse with this Congress, a bipartisan pair of senators have teamed up to write the single most dangerous piece of unconstitutional legislation of this Congress. 

Last week, Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) introduced S. Res. 59, which is a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). An AUMF is roughly the modern equivalent of a declaration of war, and the Corker-Kaine AUMF gives President Trump and lots of future presidents the authority to take the country to war against an endless list of groups and individuals in an endless list of countries. 

The result will be true global war without end.

The two senators wanted to get a quick vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week and have the bill rocket through the Senate and House and onto the president’s desk. Fortunately for all of us, senators from both parties, from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) to Sen. Jeff Merkely (D-Ore.), forced a slowdown. But Corker and Kaine are working overtime to try to jam through their AUMF, which is a dumpster fire of bad ideas.

Here are just some of the harms packed into their proposed AUMF:

It immediately authorizes war against eight groups. With literally no strategic or operational restrictions, the Corker-Kaine AUMF authorizes immediate war against eight groups in six countries. The American military could be sent into battle in countries such as Libya, Somalia, or Yemen to fight groups that most Americans have never even heard of. This could lead to the immediate deployment of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of American military service members to fight if Congress passes and Trump signs this AUMF.

The U.S. could declare war on a person. The president — not just President Trump, but likely every president for the next generation or longer — will be able to add new groups or new countries to the AUMF by simply sending a one-paragraph note to Congress. Absurdly, the Corker-Kaine AUMF even gives the commander-in-chief the option of going to war against a “person.” The president would not even have to explain why the new group or person is an enemy or what kind of danger awaits from military action in a newly added country.

Congress abdicates its war-making powers. In a stunningly unconstitutional move, the Corker-Kaine AUMF takes the most important power that the Constitution gives to Congress alone — the power to declare war — and turns it almost entirely over to this president and every future president. The only way that Congress would be able to stop a determined president from going to war everywhere and against anyone the commander-in-chief chooses would be to get a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress to override the president's veto.

This flips the constitutional order on its head since the Constitution says a majority of both houses must agree to go to war before military action is taken. By contrast, the Corker-Kaine AUMF requires two-thirds of both houses to try to stop a president from using the war power that the AUMF would give the president.  This provision to swap the Constitution’s requirement of a majority in both houses to declare war for a two-thirds majority of both houses to stop war breaches checks and balances and the separation of powers. It can’t possibly be constitutional.

So, what more could be added to a piece of legislation that unconstitutionally sets us up for war everywhere and forever? 

How about amping up the authority for any president to use the military to lock people up with no charge or trial? And expanding this authority with no boundaries — and with no statutory prohibition in the AUMF against locking up American citizens or anyone picked up even in the United States itself?  We believe it would still be unlawful for a president to try it (again), but why risk it?

Congress went down this same road in 2011, with the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and hundreds of thousands of activists from the ACLU and our allies called and emailed their members of Congress urging its defeat. It narrowly passed, and President Obama signed it — with a promise not to use it against American citizens, but without denying that a president could have the power to order military detention.

The Intercept has an explanation of how this new detention provision could work. It is truly hard to believe that anyone in Congress would believe that it is a good idea for the legislature to head down this road again. Please sign our petition urging your senators to do everything they can do to make sure the Corker-Kaine AUMF never becomes law.  

The Corker-Kaine AUMF is beyond dangerous.  It is unconstitutional. And it is set up to never end. The Senate has a duty to kill this legislation immediately and show all members of Congress and the executive that abdicating Congress’s duty to declare war stays with the people’s representatives and no one else.