Margery Mock is 28 years old and the mother to an 8-year-old girl. She is currently unemployed and battling homelessness, having spent one month in a hotel and several nights in her storage unit, where all of her belongings are kept. She was recently arrested on an alleged criminal trespassing charge from trying to visit a relative at a motel and incarcerated on a $1,256 bond that she can’t afford.

Mock is a victim of Glynn County, Georgia’s wealth-based pretrial system. The county allows those with money to walk free while they await trial, while those who can’t make bail remain locked up. It also fails to provide people who can’t afford to pay for a lawyer with a public defender to argue for their release.

Both practices are illegal. The constitutional guarantees of equal protection and due process prohibit people from being jailed simply because they cannot afford a monetary payment. The Sixth Amendment guarantees people accused of crimes will be appointed lawyers to defend them if they cannot afford to hire a private lawyer.

But Mock was incarcerated without anyone asking if she could afford to pay for her release or learning anything about her individual circumstances. It didn’t matter to the county that $1,256 is an astronomical amount for someone with no permanent address or reliable income. No one asked Mock what that bail amount — and the inability to pay it — would mean for her or her family. Rather, the Glynn County sheriff simply followed a bail schedule, a document that automatically sets money bail amounts according to the charged offense.

Even when people accused of crimes get their first court hearing, the judge usually does no more than confirm the bail amount they could not afford in the first place. To make matters worse, Glynn County only pays one lawyer to be the public defender in all misdemeanor cases. This contract defender, B. Reid Zeh, does not visit clients who are stuck in jail, file motions on their behalf, or appear at preliminary hearings to request lower bail. Instead, he usually meets clients when they plead guilty and simply signs off on their sentencing paperwork. Those with means face none of these barriers.

All in all, the Glynn County’s practices amount to one system for the poor and another system entirely for those of means. This reality was driven home on March 5 when none other than Zeh, the lone public defender in the county, was arrested after an altercation at a local bar. His bail was set at $1,256, which he immediately paid out so that he could remain free as his case moves forward.

Had Zeh not had the means to pay his bail, as was the case with Mock, he’d have remained in jail as his case moved forward, in the same desperate situation that most of his clients are forced into.

In an effort to stop this discriminatory detention of the poor, the ACLU, the ACLU of Georgia, and James A. Yancey, Jr., a local and longtime civil rights and criminal defense advocate, have sued Glynn County for jailing people like Mock, who cannot simply buy their freedom. We have also sued the county and public defender Zeh for failing to provide indigent persons with lawyers in time to fight for their release on lower or nonmonetary bail.

On any given day, Georgia county jails warehouse over 43,000 people, nearly 30,000 of whom are awaiting trial. Pretrial incarceration — locking up people who are presumed innocent and have not been convicted of a crime — is a key driver of Georgia’s exorbitant jail incarceration rate, which is the second highest in the nation. In 2013, Georgia had almost double the annual jail admissions of Illinois, which is home to 2.5 million more people.

The county’s illegal practices disproportionately affect African-Americans, which isn’t surprising giving its history of racism and government overreach. According to the 1860 census, Glynn County had Georgia’s third-highest concentration of enslaved persons, amounting to 73 percent of the population. Today, despite making up only one-fourth of the county’s population, Black people account for half of the county’s jail population.

Beyond being illegal and disproportionately harming Black people, using money bail to incarcerate has disastrous effects on an arrestee’s criminal case. It is an open secret that pretrial detention is a prosecutor’s most powerful bargaining tool. In 2013, a local news story quoted the Glynn County prosecutor acknowledging the power of incarceration on money bail to achieve convictions, saying arrestees “just want to plead guilty, get back home and resume their lives.” This attitude eviscerates the presumption of innocence and ignores the government’s due process obligation to presume release upon arrest.

National research consistently shows that being jailed before trial significantly increases your likelihood of conviction, mostly because people eventually break down and plead guilty. They do this even if their case could have been dismissed had they been able to buy their release or had a public defender to help them fight for lower bail.

And once released, there may well be further consequences. To make bail, arrestees and their loved ones often desperately scrape together money to pay bail and are then exploited by the bail industry.

Glynn County’s system of detention based on ability to pay is unconstitutional and inhumane. And the county’s failure to provide adequate public defense representation to indigent persons accused of misdemeanors only furthers the harms. Nothing personifies this more than the unfair way the system treats a Mr. Zeh and a Ms. Mock.

Ruthie Epstein, ACLU, National Political Advocacy Department & Jennie Pasquarella, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU of Southern California

Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the latest move in this administration’s increasingly desperate attempts to bully states and localities into colluding with its draconian detention and deportation agenda. Following a brief aside to blame all immigrants for violent crime, homicides, and opioid overdose deaths, he told a meeting of the California Peace Officers’ Association that the Justice Department had just filed a major lawsuit against the state of California.

The lawsuit challenges three state laws passed and signed into law in 2017: AB 450, the Immigrant Worker Protection Act; AB 103, a detention statute that was part of an omnibus bill; and SB 54, the California Values Act. The DOJ claims that these three laws “have the purpose and effect of making it more difficult for federal immigration officers to carry out their responsibilities in California.” In fact, these laws simply ensure that state actors comply with the U.S. Constitution and that local law enforcement’s limited resources are not co-opted for federal immigration enforcement purposes except in certain circumstances.

AB 103 expands state oversight of California’s local detention facilities when they hold people under contracts with ICE because federal oversight of the ICE detention system is woefully inadequate. And AB 450 reinforces the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement by requiring employers to see a judicial warrant from ICE before they allow ICE to enter a non-public part of a workplace. The Sessions' lawsuit details the federal government’s objections to these attempts to limit the harm caused by the deportation force that President Trump has unleashed.

But Sessions’ challenge to SB 54 really gets to the heart of this administration’s hostility to jurisdictions that choose to prioritize community safety by disentangling their local criminal law enforcement activities from federal immigration enforcement. SB 54 prohibits local law enforcement in California from using their already limited resources to facilitate the enforcement of federal immigration law, including by:

• inquiring into someone’s immigration status
• jailing an individual past their release date based on an ICE detainer request
• arresting someone based on a civil immigration warrant
• providing office space in local jails exclusively for immigration authorities
• using federal immigration authorities as interpreters for law enforcement matters
• entering into 287(g) agreements to deputize local law enforcement as federal immigration agents
• participating in joint task forces whose primary purpose is immigration enforcement
• providing non-public personal information about an individual, including their home or work address, to immigration authorities
• notifying immigration authorities of an individual’s release date, with a list of exceptions
• transferring an individual into the custody of immigration authorities without a judicial warrant, but with a list of exceptions.

Though SB 54’s requirements are extensive, the Sessions lawsuit challenges only the final three provisions listed above. It claims that they violate the Supremacy Clause by obstructing the federal government’s ability to enforce immigration laws and by discriminating against the federal government.

The lawsuit’s challenge to these SB 54 provisions primarily rests on its claim that, by prohibiting the sharing of release dates and personal information, SB 54 violates federal law. But the law only prohibits state policies that restrict the sharing of immigration status and citizenship information — not release dates, addresses, or any other personal information. In fact, as one federal court recently put it, “[n]othing in 8 U.S.C. § 1373(a) addresses information concerning an inmate’s release date.” And another federal court recently held that Philadelphia’s similar policies — which restrict the sharing of people’s addresses and release dates — do not violate federal law.

The government’s other objection to SB 54 is the very reason why SB 54 is constitutional. It argues that the law harms the federal government because it “requires ICE to expend greater time and recourses” to carry out its arrests. But the fact that ICE will have to work harder and expend more of its own resources if states and localities do not assist them with their every request underscores the legality of California’s position.

Under the 10th Amendment, the federal government cannot force states or localities to participate in a federal program. The Supreme Court announced that principle in 1997, in Printz v. United States, where it ruled that the federal government could not command states to conduct background checks on gun purchasers. The same principle applies here: The federal government cannot require states to participate in its deportation program. Indeed, no federal law mandates that states or localities use their own resources to aid federal immigration agents in locating and arresting people.

The federal government is furious at California. But its new lawsuit ignores longstanding Supreme Court precedent. The state’s decision to opt out of participation in Trump’s deportation agenda is sensible and legal. Lawmakers in the rest of the country who similarly adopt pro-immigrant policies should rest easy — Attorney General Sessions is on weak legal ground.

For 17 minutes on March 14, students and their supporters across the country are planning to walk out of their schools, honoring the victims of the Parkland school shooting and calling for Congress to pass meaningful gun regulation. Unfortunately, some schools view this act as a disruption and are threatening to discipline students who participate. A disciplinary response is a disservice to young people and a missed educational opportunity.

Too often, adults discipline students for expressing their opinions or simply being themselves. LGBTQ students have been sent home for expressing their sexual orientation, and girls have been disciplined when they challenge gendered uniform policies. Students of color are more likely than their white classmates to be disciplined, especially for subjective offenses like excessive noise. A hairstyle, a hoodie, or even a creative school science project can be seen as cause for disciplining Black and brown students. Punishment has even been invoked against students who attempt to speak up when they see abuse. That’s what happened to a high school student in Columbia, South Carolina, who was charged with “disturbing schools” after daring to speak up against a police officer’s violent mistreatment of a classmate.

The impulse to discipline and control young people may come from the desire to avoid a contentious conversation in the short term, but resorting to punishment doesn’t solve the problem, and it doesn’t keep kids safe. We’ve learned this lesson in other areas of school discipline. Adults too often rely on discipline and even policing to address student behavior rather than providing the resources — like school counselors, special education services, and peer mentoring for teachers — necessary for a real solution. Moreover, reliance on punitive responses creates a school environment that feels more like a prison than a safe space for all students and staff.

STUDENTS’ RIGHTS: SPEECH, WALKOUTS, AND OTHER PROTESTS

In the wake of the Parkland school shooting, and after other school shootings, there has been a rush to increase the police presence in schools. There is no evidence this approach improves safety, and in practice, students — particularly students of color and students with disabilities — often end up the targets of increased police scrutiny. Fortunately, students are taking a stand against these practices, too.

School administrators owe it to their students to examine their reaction to young peoples’ self-expression and to ask how they can help build on this moment of protest as an educational experience. As the Supreme Court observed in Brown v. Board of Education, education is “the very foundation of good citizenship.” Public school is the place where students experience and interact with government, learn through discussion and debate with other students from differing backgrounds, and build the foundation for participation in a democratic society. Rather than seeking to silence students’ political engagement and quashing their desire for conversation, schools can approach this moment as an opportunity for learning about civic action.

Several districts are planning to do just this. Local and state departments of education — in Idaho, Montana, North Carolina, and New York — as well as the School Superintendents Association have provided guidance to aid school administrators in making the March 14 actions safe and teachable moments. ACLU affiliates in multiple states, such as New Jersey, Nevada, and Texas, are urging other districts to do the same.

TELL US ABOUT YOUR WALKOUT

“Security thrives in an open, trusting environment,” as school officials from Wake County, North Carolina rightly noted. The concept of school security must include making schools places where all students are safe to be themselves and express their views.