Last month's shooting at a Florida High School has spurred young people across the United States into action.

Teenagers have rallied state capitals and Congress and demanded gun control legislation to prevent school shootings. Student walkouts and marches are coming together across the U.S.

DEAR STUDENTS: ACLU OF NEVADA SUPPORTS YOUR RIGHT TO PROTEST

The ACLU of Nevada supports students' rights to free speech, and we want every kid in Nevada to know that they are afforded some protections under the First Amendment, although schools can legally place restrictions on students' free speech to prevent disruptions at school.

We put together this handbill for student organizers, and the ACLU of Nevada is available to do in-person trainings as well. We also ask that any Nevada students who have been threatened by their school with inappropriate punishments just for participating in this historic movement contact us at [email protected]. 

In March 2017, President Trump appointed Scott Lloyd to run a federal agency called the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Lloyd has almost no background in helping refugees. Instead, his main qualification for the job is that he spent his legal career furthering his anti-abortion ideology based on his religious beliefs.

So it should have been no surprise that when Lloyd took office he began imposing his religious views about abortion on the marginalized population that he is supposed help. That population includes unaccompanied immigrant minors. These are young people who come to the United States without their parents, often fleeing unspeakable abuse or torture in their home countries. Many experience sexual assault as they make the journey. Our government is legally obligated to care for these young people while they await reunification with family in the U.S., seek asylum, or are deported. That care includes access to medical treatment.

But the only way a pregnant minor in ORR custody can obtain access to an abortion, or even objective counseling about her options, is if Lloyd himself personally approves the abortion request. But as Lloyd told me when I deposed him recently, he believes that “abortion is the destruction of human life,” and has never approved an abortion request. He even denied an abortion request from a young woman who had been raped and said she would rather kill herself than carry her pregnancy to term. In fact, Lloyd believes that he has the power to override a young woman’s decision to have an abortion. He also said that he believes that immigrant minors have no constitutional right to abortion.

So instead of providing access to abortion, as required by the law, Lloyd subjects minors to various coercion tactics to try to force them to carry their pregnancy to term. This includes demanding that minors go to so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” from a list “approved” by ORR. Those lists were developed by two anti-abortion entities, CareNet and Heartbeat International. These are anti-abortion, religiously affiliated centers, with the sole purpose of discouraging women from obtaining abortion. One young woman, Jane Doe, who challenged ORR’s policy in court, said staff at the center “prayed for her.” Ms. Doe, and others like her, were forced to have medically unnecessary ultrasounds because of Lloyd’s policy.

Lloyd also forces minors, or the government-contracted shelter where the minor resides, to tell her parents in her home country about the pregnancy and her abortion decision, even where the minor objects and even where doing so would be dangerous for her or other family members.

Lloyd has also gone so far as to personally speak with at least one pregnant minor who was considering abortion to talk with her about her “options.” When these coercion attempts fail, and the minor persists in asking for an abortion, Lloyd simply orders the shelter not to allow her to travel to a clinic.

Lloyd has wreaked havoc on young women’s lives. The young women we represent – the “Janes” – were able to have abortions only after waging legal challenges. But by that time, Lloyd’s policy pushed them further into their pregnancy. For example, Jane Doe was held hostage for four weeks, and was forced to remain pregnant against her will until she finally obtained a court order.

In another particularly egregious situation, Lloyd attempted to intervene after a woman began the process of getting a medication abortion. After she took the first of two pills, demanded that she be taken to an emergency room to assess whether the pregnancy could be continued, including forcing her to have an unnecessary ultrasound. ORR even considered trying to “reverse” the medication abortion through an untested medical protocol against the young woman’s wishes to “save the life of the baby.”

The ACLU has been successful on behalf of the individual Janes so far, but the battle is far from over. There are hundreds of pregnant young women in ORR’s custody each year and Lloyd is still applying his policy to them. We will do everything we can to strike it down to prevent Lloyd from inflicting further harm on marginalized young women.

By Eric C. Williams

If you’ve been to Detroit recently, you may have seen flashing green lights outside liquor stores, gas stations, and other businesses. The lights, according to police, are supposed to act as a deterrent, warning criminals that cameras are present, streaming real-time images of everyone entering or leaving the premises straight into police headquarters. This is the Motor City’s two-year-old surveillance program, Project Green Light, which its evangelists argue reduces crime at minimal expense to the city’s taxpayers.

The problem with that optimistic prediction is that study after study has shown that there is little evidence, if any, that programs like this work. But there is something we do know for sure: Programs like these violate our constitutional right to privacy by allowing police to peer into our lives without having to bother to get a search warrant.

Constant video streaming to the authorities amounts to an open-ended warrant without probable cause, enabling Detroit police as well as state and federal law enforcement agencies — including the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — to view and record the comings and goings of innocent Americans. This means that even when not open to the public, cameras would capture the inside and outside of restaurants, book stores, and coffee shops, which are common meeting places for many organizations, such as unions, immigrant rights advocates, and religious congregations.

Under Project Green Light, participating local businesses pay about $5,000 to purchase a minimum of four high-definition surveillance cameras and other recording equipment installed. Business owners then shell out $150 or so a month to store the recordings. The police, however, are not very forthcoming about how they position the cameras. It’s uncertain whether they place the cameras to capture footage of the street surrounding the business or of neighboring lots.

In return, police patrol the area, meet with business owners, and gain the ability — though not the obligation — to monitor the live video stream, complete with facial recognition technology, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Police also promise that any business joining Project Green Light gets first priority when they dial 911. In Detroit, all 911 calls aren’t treated equally — and if business owners want quality service, they’ll have to subsidize the construction of the police’s surveillance apparatus to get it.

Priority service, however, may be an empty promise. It might have been feasible in 2016, when there were only eight participating businesses. But that seems increasingly unlikely. Today there are about 250 members of Project Green Light, which the city hopes to increase to 400 by the end of the year.

Proponents like Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan say Project Green Light reduces crime. “Crime at and adjacent to Project Green Light businesses has gone down 23% since the program began two years ago and carjackings citywide have seen a 44% reduction,” the city website states.

Although there are many reasons to distrust these statistics, the primary reason is that the city hasn’t compared the crime rates at Project Green Light businesses with crime rates at nonparticipating businesses. The city also fails to acknowledge that other factors, such as added police patrols and extra lighting, could play a role in falling crime rates around Green Light properties. Until a comparative study is done and these other variables are taken into account, the city’s numbers are a statistical sleight of hand.

These numbers also seem suspect given that several studies done on surveillance programs show they are far from successful. The ACLU evaluated a similar police surveillance program used in Lansing, Michigan. In 2009 and 2010, we found that major crime actually increased within the 500-foot viewing range at five of the 12 cameras posted around the city.

An exhaustive analysis just published in National Geographic on expanding surveillance networks around the globe concluded that there is no evidence that live feed surveillance camera networks prevent crimes. Many places, including China, London, and New Orleans, have live surveillance networks, but National Geographic found that there is no proof they protect anyone.

You would think Detroit leaders would know all this given our history. Twenty years ago, the city spent $600,000 to install 20 rotating cameras on buildings in busy areas. The cameras, which had a 2,000-foot range and could zoom in on cars and people, were monitored by officers at police headquarters. The program, however, was scrapped 14 years later because the city could not justify the cost of maintenance and resources given the minimal results.

City leaders did learn that around-the-clock police surveillance programs aren’t cheap. That may be why they require businesses to pay for it. In fact, officials are considering making Project Green Light mandatory for businesses open after 10 p.m. But that’s not all. City officials want to expand the program to multi-family dwellings, mixed-use developments, schools, and churches.

Maybe Assistant Detroit Police Chief James White was right when he said, “This isn’t Big Brother, and we’re not trying to covertly monitor people.” The city isn’t secretly watching us. They’re doing it openly — and for no good reason.

Eric C. Williams is a Detroit attorney leading the ACLU of Michigan’s committee that opposes Project Green Light. Williams also is the proud son of a retired Detroit police officer, who served the city 20 years.