In an act of senseless cruelty, U.S. immigration authorities separated a Congolese mother and six-year-old daughter who had come to the United States last November seeking asylum. But this isn't an isolated incident. 

The mother, Ms. L, has said that after four days in detention, authorities came and took her daughter away with no explanation and flew the child 2,000 miles away to a shelter for “unaccompanied” minors in Chicago. Ms. L could hear her screaming from the other room.

Sign the petition to reunite families

The daughter, S.S., has been in a government-contracted shelter for the past four months. She turned seven scared and alone and has been able to talk to her mother only a handful of times.  

On Wednesday, in response to pressure from an ACLU lawsuit, Immigration and Customs Enforcement abruptly released Ms. L, giving her only a few hours notice before sending her into the detention center parking lot with a plastic bag containing her few belongings and nowhere to go.

Efforts are currently underway to have Ms. L’s daughter released from custody in Chicago so the two can be reunited. In media reports, the Department of Homeland Security claimed their separation was a “mistake.” It was no mistake.

In December, the Trump administration announced that it was considering a plan to separate parents from their children when families came here seeking asylum or other relief. In fact, ICE had already begun doing so. 

The ACLU has learned that there are many more parents and children who have been separated by ICE. On Friday, the ACLU filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit on behalf of the estimated hundreds of other families that have been torn apart by ICE.

While ICE has said it does not have a formal “policy” of separating parents from their children, it is doing it as a matter of practice. The agency has not said how many children it has separated from parents, but according to Michelle Brane, director of the Migrants Rights and Justice Program at the Women’s Refugee Commission, which monitors U.S. immigration detention facilities, there are at least 429 cases. Asylum lawyers who represent people in immigration detention as well as groups that contract with the government to provide services have also reported numerous cases of children being separated from their parents.

In addition to Ms. L. and S.S. — Catholics who fled the Democratic Republic of Congo with help from a church — the suit includes Ms. C., a Brazilian and her 14-year-old son, J. They entered the United States in Texas last August. Although Ms. C told border guards that she was seeking asylum, she was convicted of a misdemeanor for entering the country illegally and put into jail. Her son was transferred to custody of the Office of Refugee Services, which is charged with caring for “unaccompanied” immigrant minors, and like S.S., was flown across the country to Chicago.

After serving 25 days for her misdemeanor, Ms. C was transferred to immigration detention in El Paso, and then to the West Texas Detention Facility. Yet after being placed into immigration detention, she was not reunited with her son. That was late September. Since then, she has only spoken to him a handful of times.

Both mothers say that on the few occasions that they have been able to speak to their children, it is clear to them that the children are having a very difficult time.

“I worry about J constantly and I don’t know when I will see him,” Ms. C. said in an affidavit to the court. “We have talked on the phone only five or six times since he was taken away from me. I know that J. is having a very hard time detained all by himself.  He is only a 14-year-old boy in a strange country and needs his parent.”

In neither case did the government allege that there was abuse or neglect or that the mothers were unfit. Nor did it provide hearings of any kind or any rationale for separating these children from their parents. Instead the government has acted with gratuitous cruelty by separating parents from their children without a reasonable justification. The result has only been to severely traumatize parents and their children who have already suffered the terrifying ordeal of fleeing persecution in their home countries — all in the hope of finding shelter on American shores.   

UPDATE: On March 10, 2018, Marina Goocher won her third collegiate national championship and seventh national title overall, defeating Kendal Davis of Colorado State University at the NCWA National Wrestling Championships in Texas.  

Marina Goocher just wants an equal opportunity to wrestle in the National Collegiate Wrestling Association. The NCWA’s response: Build your own women’s team.

Goocher, a national champion college wrestler in her junior year, is a favorite to win another national championship in a few days. Yet she has been benched for the entire last three regular seasons in her wrestling league, the National Collegiate Wrestling Association (NCWA). Despite the male team at University of Michigan-Dearborn having abundant opportunities to train and attend NCWA competitions throughout the season, NCWA rules prohibit Marina from wrestling.

The problem: Not only are there no other women on Marina’s college team, there are also no other women wrestlers in the entire Midwest conference. The NCWA says women in Marina’s position can’t compete or practice with men on her team — even if it means she has to sit out the entire season.

All Marina wants is a chance on the mat. So she called on the ACLU and its partners for help. Along with the National Women’s Law Center and the Women’s Sports Foundation, the ACLU wrote a letter in October last year to the NCWA urging it “to change the rules of the college-level club wrestling association” so Goocher can compete against male wrestlers during the regular club wrestling season.

The letter explains that the NCWA deprives Marina of an equal opportunity to wrestle, which is both discriminatory and opens up NCWA member schools to liability. The NCWA’s response: too bad. It then NCWA accused Marina of laziness.

“It seems as though Ms. Goocher has been content to do nothing,” the NCWA wrote in November, “instead expecting the competition to come to her, and demanding other individuals do the hard work it takes to build a competitive clubs team program.”

The NCWA’s response to Marina deflects attention away from its mission as a national organization founded to create equitable opportunities for all of its wrestlers regardless of their gender. Instead, it blames one of its star athletes for her predicament. It is simply unfair to say women collegiate wrestlers bear the sole burden of ensuring women have equal opportunities as men in a wrestling association with such broad reach and resources.

And even if Marina could recruit, train, and develop a full women’s team at her university, who would this hypothetical women’s team compete against? There are no other women’s teams in their conference, and the NCWA rules prohibit them from wrestling male teams.

To be clear, Marina’s case is not about women wanting to wrestle men. It is about having an equal opportunity to compete against the competition available to you. None of the opportunities the NCWA puts forth as alternatives for Marina is actually equivalent.

For example, the NCWA listed nine events which Marina could have chosen to attend. None of them are NCWA competitions. Rather they are open competitions where anyone can attend regardless of age or ability. Marina, remember, is a national champion.

Furthermore, only two of the open tournaments are located in Michigan and the remaining tournaments would require her to travel as far as Minnesota, South Dakota, or Wisconsin. Essentially, if Marina were forced to pursue these alternative “opportunities,” as the NCWA puts it, she would have to expend exponentially more resources and time than her male teammates to travel across the country every weekend. This is not exactly the definition of equal.

The NCWA has even gone so far as to criticize Marina for choosing to attend UM-Dearborn instead of other institutions that may have larger women’s teams. Again, the NCWA can’t wiggle out of its obligation to provide equal opportunities to both men and women by putting the onus on individual students to attend schools that have women’s teams. Marina had plenty of reasons to attend U-M Dearborn, like its engineering program, and the NCWA should ensure that female athletes have equal opportunities to wrestle no matter where they choose to attend college.

As the ACLU, WSF, and NWLC have explained in response, Marina’s objective is to ensure that women and men have equal time on the mat until the sport of wrestling recruits and engages more women. But until there are enough women’s teams to create equal opportunities for women wrestlers, Marina, and women like her, must be given a chance to compete against men for a spot on the school wrestling team and compete in matches against men during the regular season. Anything less is discriminatory and wrong.

You can stand up for Marina and the rights of all women athletes by telling the NCWA to change its discriminatory policies. Join us in telling the NCWA to update its antiquated, gendered rules and stop denying Marina Goocher her right to compete in wrestling this season.

Over the weekend, two senators introduced changes to the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which would criminalize participation in certain political boycotts targeting Israel. The changes attempt to address the civil liberties concerns raised by the ACLU and other groups.

Unfortunately, the revised bill still violates the First Amendment. It does so by unconstitutionally penalizing Americans who participate in political boycotts of companies doing business in Israel and its settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, if those boycotts were called for by international governmental organizations like the United Nations.

This is impermissible. Political boycotts are fully protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court made that clear when it recognized, in a landmark 1982 decision called NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, that the Constitution protected a 1960s boycott of white-owned businesses in Mississippi. If the Israel Anti-Boycott Act were to pass and take effect, we would strongly consider challenging it in court.

The Israel Anti-Boycott Act seeks to amend a 1970s law known as the Export Administration Act. That law was passed in response to the Arab League’s boycott of Israel, which required U.S. businesses to boycott Israel as a condition of doing business with Arab League countries. To prevent foreign countries from bullying U.S. businesses into these compulsory boycotts, the EAA prohibited U.S. companies from entering into agreements with foreign governments to boycott countries friendly to the United States. Whereas the EAA was meant to protect U.S. companies from these compulsory boycotts, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act seeks to dictate the political activities Americans can and can’t engage in. It does so by imposing civil and criminal penalties on American organizations that participate in political boycotts called for by international organizations.

The revised Israel Anti-Boycott Act, amended by Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio), does contain several significant improvements from the original draft. For example, the bill now makes clear that Americans cannot be imprisoned for their boycott participation. It also provides that speech critical of Israel cannot be used to open an investigation against an individual or as evidence that the person violated the law. These changes alleviate some of the gravest dangers posed by the bill.

But this latest version would still allow people who boycott to be slapped with criminal financial penalties. It suffers from the same fundamental flaw as the original draft by criminalizing participation in constitutionally protected boycotts. In fact, the bill’s sponsors openly admit that it was designed for this purpose. In the press release accompanying its announcement, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) described the bill as an attempt to “combat Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) efforts targeting Israel.” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) also characterized the bill as “anti-BDS legislation.” Although the bill states that “[n]othing in this Act . . . shall be construed to diminish or infringe upon any right protected under the First Amendment,” these words rings hollow in light of the bill’s obvious purpose.

The Israel Anti-Boycott Act cannot be viewed in isolation. It is part of a sustained legislative campaign in the state and federal governments to suppress boycotts of Israel. Just a few weeks ago, a federal court in Kansas agreed with the ACLU’s First Amendment challenge to a law requiring state contractors to certify that they are not participating in boycotts of Israel. The court recognized that the Kansas state government could not constitutionally suppress our client’s boycott to silence one side in the public debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  In halting enforcement of the law, the court held that our client’s boycott of Israel:

“is protected for the same reason as the boycotters’ conduct in [NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware] was protected. . . . Namely, its organizers have banded together to express collectively their dissatisfaction with the injustice and violence they perceive, as experienced by both Palestinian and Israeli citizens.”

From the campaign to divest from apartheid South Africa to the recent boycott against the National Rifle Association, boycotts have always been a key feature of American politics. If state and federal governments could outlaw boycotts they don’t like, all sorts of social movements would suffer. Whatever their views are on Israel and Palestine, members of Congress should recognize that the Israel Anti-Boycott Act threatens fundamental First Amendment values. We urge them to oppose it.