“Arrested. Black. Male.”

These are the words that have been pre-filled on a cover sheet to the Madison County Sheriff’s Department Narcotics Unit’s case files. All other fields have been left blank. These words tell the story of racially biased policing in the county that begins before officers even go into the community.

The internal racism of the department represented in this form is just one piece of a larger body of compelling evidence that the sheriff’s department has a culture of racism that threatens Madison County’s Black community. 

In June of, 2009, current Sheriff Randall Tucker, while a deputy under former Sheriff Toby Trowbridge, received and forwarded a racist email titled, “White Pride.” It contained the statements, “when I call you Nigger, Kike, Towel head, Sand-nigger, Camel Jockey, Beaner, Gook, or Chink . . . You call me a racist.” The email concludes by encouraging the reader to express support for its sentiments by forwarding it along, which Sheriff Tucker did.

The ACLU of Mississippi, along with its co-counsel at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP and the ACLU’s national office, uncovered these and other documents during six months of legal discovery before proceeding to file a motion for class certification on March 14, 2018, in Brown v. Madison County. In the case, we sued Madison County and its sheriff’s department for operating a policing program that targets Black people on the basis of race.

The problem, however, runs deeper — much deeper — than racist sheriff emails.

The Madison County Sheriff’s Department’s policy of racialized policing stretches back at least as far as the prior sheriff’s administration. In 2006, Black residents of Canton, Mississippi — a predominantly Black town in Madison County and the county seat — presented a petition bearing 664 signatures to the Madison County Board of Supervisors demanding an end to “frequent roadblocks in the predominantly black neighborhoods” and “racial profiling.”

The response? Former Sheriff Toby Trowbridge refused to even meet with the protestors.

Trowbridge denied using racial profiling and vowed to continue using roadblocks as a policing tactic, despite the evidence that they were disproportionately affecting Black people. His casual brushing aside of community outrage dovetails with the casual racism exhibited by the sheriff’s department. Tellingly, current Sheriff Tucker later pledged to “maintain the quality of law enforcement that we have under Sheriff Trowbridge,” and upon taking office in 2012, officially adopted all of Trowbridge’s policies.

The roadblocks and racial profiling continue to this day.

During his deposition in this case, former Sheriff Trowbridge testified about the use of racial slurs at the sheriff’s department by MCSD personnel, including by him, and a MCSD patrol supervisor testified that he has used racial slurs in the course of his duties and had not been disciplined. Far from being punished for racism, the department appears to have institutionalized it.

Other evidence and data collected during the discovery phase support the fact that MCSD has a longstanding policy of stopping and searching Black drivers and pedestrians who travel in Madison County on the basis of their race. For example, over 30 people, including the named plaintiffs, submitted declarations explaining their experiences with MCSD that reflect this racism — testimony that corroborates the existence of a racially biased policing program and the department’s abuse of authority.

Lawrence Blackmon, one of our named plaintiffs, was tackled, made to lay face down, and then handcuffed at gunpoint after he asked to see a warrant before allowing deputies to enter his home. He asked them to show the warrant. They did not. Instead, they searched his home, looking in drawers and cabinets for a full-grown man they claimed to have a warrant for.

The evidence of our plaintiff’s personal stories are supported by hard numbers.

Black individuals make up only 38 percent of Madison County’s population, but they accounted for 77 percent of all arrests made by the MCSD between 2012 and 2017. In addition, the per capita rate of roadblocks in substantially Black census tracts is nearly double that of predominantly white census tracts.

Sadly, our claim of racially biased policing in the county is not new.

MCSD’s racist and discriminatory culture has been felt in communities of color for years. The stories of our plaintiffs and the data analysis support this history of injustice. The eight named plaintiffs in our case against the county are Black men and women ages 28 to 63 who were unconstitutionally searched, detained, or arrested by the MCSD, sometimes violently. These incidents happened while our clients were going about their daily lives — walking to work, driving in their neighborhood, celebrating with family, or just spending time in their own homes.

The ACLU and Simpson Thatcher are asking the court to certify the lawsuit as a class action and put an end to MCSD’s policy and culture of racial discrimination. All residents of Madison County deserve to be treated equally regardless of their race. They deserve justice, and we intend to ensure they get it.

On Monday, the state of Mississippi banned abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. It is the most extreme abortion ban in the country today, despite stiff competition. Fortunately, this baldly unconstitutional law was almost immediately blocked in court, but it’s worth reflecting on the faulty science — that is, the lies — underlying this latest outrage.

Mississippi lawmakers enacted this draconian ban in part based on what they claim are the “significant physical and psychological risks” that abortion poses to patients. That’s nonsense, according to an independent, comprehensive review of the science on abortion released just last week.

Based on a rigorous analysis of the full body of evidence on abortion, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine confirm what many reproductive health, rights, and justices advocates have been saying for decades: Abortion care in the United States is highly safe and effective, and the procedure can be safely provided in a variety of healthcare settings by a range of trained healthcare professionals.

The new study bolsters the ACLU’s position in numerous federal and state lawsuits challenging medically unjustified restrictions on abortion. These include challenges to targeted regulations of abortion providers, or “TRAP” laws; mandatory abortion delay laws; biased counseling requirements; and the Food and Drug Administration’s needless restrictions on the abortion pill.

According to the National Academies’ report, abortion care in the United States is extremely safe and rarely involves serious complications. Medication abortion has a particularly low complication rate, similar to other common prescription and over-the-counter medications. The study also confirmed that abortion can be offered safely in an office setting, without special equipment or arrangements, and that advanced practice clinicians — such as nurse practitioners, nurse-midwives, and physician assistants — can provide medication and aspiration abortion safely and effectively.

In particular, the study gives strong support to recent lawsuits in Maine, Montana, and Hawaii. Together with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU of Maine, we’re challenging a Maine law that blocks qualified advanced practice registered nurses, or APRNs, from providing abortions, despite their rigorous post-graduate training and extensive clinical experience. The law severely restricts access to abortion care in the rural and medically underserved state, forcing some patients to travel more than six hours for care that they could safely get from an experienced APRN in their own community. The Center for Reproductive Rights and the ACLU of Montana are challenging a similar law in Montana.

A third case filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii on behalf of a Hawaii doctor and several professional healthcare associations challenges federal restrictions on where a patient can fill a prescription for the abortion pill. As the National Academies’ report emphasizes, the abortion pill is a safe and effective method of ending an early pregnancy. But the FDA’s restrictions on this medication often add insurmountable hurdles to a patient’s ability to actually receive this care — for no medical reason.

Leading medical authorities, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, have concluded that the restrictions we’re challenging in all three of these cases are medically unfounded. The National Academies’ study reinforces those conclusions.

The report also finds that medically unjustified restrictions on abortion can actually harm patients’ health and well-being. They interfere with the ability of healthcare providers to provide care in accordance with their patients’ needs and their own medical judgment. They can delay patients’ care, which increases costs and the potential for complications. Some restrictions prevent qualified clinicians from providing abortion care at all, which forces patients seeking to end a pregnancy to travel further — imposing additional delays.

And, according to the report, more than 15 states force clinicians to provide medically inaccurate information to patients, like that abortion increases the risk of depression or breast cancer. Such claims, the report confirms, are false.

The Supreme Court has held that states cannot burden patient access to abortion without a valid health justification. Laws restricting qualified clinicians from providing abortion care or limiting where patients can fill a prescription for the abortion pill simply cannot survive that constitutional test. They do nothing to protect patients’ health, only serving to push abortion care out of reach. And the notion that a law banning a patient from ending her pregnancy after 15 weeks — and forcing her to remain pregnant and give birth against her will — is based on science would be laughable if it weren’t so upsetting.

We look forward to the day when lawmakers stop trampling on people’s rights and bodies in the name of false science. Until then, we’ll continue to reveal these lies for what they are in court.

Last week I visited our client Ms. L, a Congolese mother whose 7-year-old daughter was taken away from her by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials shortly after she entered the United States last year.

She was now at a shelter for formerly detained immigrants in Chicago, awaiting reunification with her daughter, whom she had not seen in over four months.

Ms. L, whose name we are withholding to preserve her privacy, showed me several photographs of her beautiful little girl. In one, the little girl was sitting on a staircase next to a woman, both of them grinning into the camera.  I asked who the woman was, and Ms. L looked at me with surprise.

“It’s me,” she said.

The smiling woman in the photo didn’t look anything like the distraught, gaunt woman with the empty stare whom I first met at a San Diego detention facility in February. It was taken a few months ago, before ICE took her daughter away.  Because of her distress, Ms. L hadn’t slept or eaten well in weeks.

Ms. L and daughter fled the Democratic Republic of Congo in grave danger, and when they reached the United States on Nov.1, they immediately asked for political asylum.

They were taken into custody together. But four days later, Ms. L said ICE officials handcuffed her, put a restraint around her waist and ankles and took her daughter away. Ms. L was locked up in the Otay Mesa Detention Center near San Diego. Her daughter was taken to Chicago and put in a facility for “unaccompanied” immigrant minors.    

The two would still be on opposite sides of the country if we hadn’t filed a lawsuit on Feb. 26. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, announced in December that it was considering separating children from their parents when they came to the United States to deter others from coming. Evidence suggests it had already begun doing so.

Learn more about the case

According to organizations that monitor detention facilities and provide services to asylum-seekers, there are hundreds of other children who have been separated from their parents. On March 9, the ACLU filed a motion expanding our lawsuit on behalf of Ms. L. into a nationwide class action suit on behalf of the hundreds of other unnamed families who have been torn apart.

Ms. L and her daughter were given no explanation for the separation, had no lawyers and knew no one in the United States. Days after our lawsuit, and the media coverage and outrage that followed, the government abruptly released Ms. L.

Concerned citizens across the country began contacting the ACLU asking what they could do to help. Among them was a couple in San Marcos, a suburb of San Diego, who heard about Ms. L and her daughter on NPR and offered to take her in. The couple had no connection to the Congo. She is a retired nurse, and her husband had been a banker.

Ms. L speaks Lingala and a little bit of Spanish. This couple spoke neither, but pantomimed their way through five days together.

Ms. L and her daughter are Catholic and a church had helped them flee the Congo.  So, on the evening of March 13, the night before she was to fly to Chicago, where she would eventually be reunited with her daughter, the couple and Ms. L sat down to dinner, held hands and said grace.

The government agency in charge of “unaccompanied” immigrant minors, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, had said it would take at least a week to release the daughter.

“I thank God if I can be with her in a week,” Ms. L said.

The next morning, Ms. L boarded a flight for Chicago. Once there, she went to a shelter for immigrants newly released from immigration detention where the staff welcomed her with open arms. They introduced her to a couple of other residents — there are 12 living there – and showed Ms. L her room. One of the shelter volunteers had left a basket with a card and a stuffed animal for Ms. L’s daughter. The staff asked her if there was anything she needed. She said simply that she needed her daughter.

On Thursday, in Chicago’s Federal Plaza, people gathered to protest ICE’s practice of separating families. It was during the protest that I received a message saying that Ms. L would likely be reunited with her daughter the following day, Friday, March 16.

At 9 p.m., on March 16, Ms. L’s daughter walked through the door. Mother and daughter fell into each other’s arms and lay on the floor sobbing. Ms. L said something to her daughter in Lingala and pointed at me and the daughter came and hugged me. It is a moment I will never forget.

We were able to reunite Ms. L and her daughter, but there are hundreds of other children in the United States who are still separated from their parents in immigration detention. Our hope is that we can reunite them all and that ICE will stop the practice so no other family must endure what Ms. L and her daughter went through. 

Tell Homeland Security to stop separating children from their families