The federal program that delegates immigration enforcement duties to local police is about to expand to as many as 24 additional jurisdictions across the country. The program, known as 287(g), deputizes state and local police to carry out federal immigration enforcement orders. After several years of decline, these arrangements are growing again under the Trump Administration.

Sixty jurisdictions in 18 states have existing agreements under 287(g). This week Immigration and Customs Enforcement began the process of reviewing applications for 24 more jurisdictions, most of which have troubling civil rights records.

One of the jurisdictions that submitted an application is Alamance County in North Carolina. In 2012, the Department of Justice filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson. Following a two-year investigation and interviews with more than 100 witnesses, the department found widespread evidence that the Alamance County Sheriff’s Office was systematically and unlawfully targeting Latino residents for investigation, traffic stops, arrests, seizures, and other enforcement actions.

An expert’s statistical analysis found in Alamance County some of the highest rates of racial profiling ever documented in the United States. The expert, whose work was commissioned by the Justice Department, found that along three major Alamance County highways, Johnson’s deputies were up to 10 times more likely to stop Latino drivers than similarly situated non-Latino drivers.

Witnesses testified about numerous incidents in which Johnson and other sheriff’s office employees used racial epithets and expressed extreme prejudice toward Latino residents. For instance, Johnson allegedly ordered deputies to “bring me some Mexicans,” “put heat on” predominantly Latino neighborhoods, and “go out there and get me some of those taco eaters.” Deputies were accused of sharing links to what the Associated Press described as “a bloody video game where players shoot people entering the country illegally, including children and pregnant women.”

Perhaps what was most disturbing was that until the federal government announced the findings of its investigation in 2012, Sheriff Johnson’s office was among six counties in North Carolina receiving funds through the federal 287(g) program. Under that agreement, Johnson’s deputies were empowered to arrest and detain people suspected of immigration violations and hold them in custody for potential deportation. Witnesses reported times when Johnson told subordinates, “if you stop a Mexican, don’t write a citation, arrest him.”

Under the law, police cannot question and arrest someone based on the way they look or their background. We live in a country in which the Constitution guarantees all people equal protection and fair treatment under the law regardless of their skin color or accent. Discriminatory profiling does not make us safer. It is illegal and erodes trust between law enforcement officers and the communities they are supposed to serve and protect.

After the department’s egregious civil rights abuses were exposed, the federal government terminated its 287(g) agreement with Alamance County in 2012, and the sheriff’s office was stripped of its authority to investigate potential immigration violations by individuals detained in the county jail.

Despite a mountain of evidence about the department’s discriminatory practices, in 2015 a federal judge ultimately dismissed the case against Sheriff Johnson but still admonished his office for some of its behavior, including the frequent use of anti-immigrant epithets and slurs during official department business. The sheriff’s office later signed a settlement agreement with the Justice Department to mandate better training and policies for bias-free policing, though it is unclear what, if any, reforms have been implemented.

Now, five years later, Sheriff Johnson is still in office, and there is a new administration in Washington. If the applications to Alamance and the other jurisdictions with troubling records are granted, these sheriffs and deputies will spend local funds to subsidize federal immigration enforcement and receive taxpayer money to participate in the Trump administration’s deportation force. And in the case of Alamance, it will happen with virtually no restraints or consequences suffered after a well-documented history of civil rights abuses against Latinos.

The Department of Homeland Security must reject Alamance and other applicants with dangerous civil rights track records. The federal government should never partner or fund law enforcement departments that have such records of constitutional violations and anti-immigrant animus.

For more than three decades, the state of Georgia has charged anyone who wants to see its official state law hundreds of dollars for that privilege. Now the state is suing the non-profit website that purchased a copy of that official compilation and put it on the internet for the public to see.

The problem with all of this? Knowing the law is a right, not a privilege.

We are in court today to argue that a state cannot put a copyright paywall between you and the law that governs you. Georgia takes the troubling position that it can claim a private property right in its entire legal code. The state concedes that it cannot claim a copyright in its statutory language or the text of court opinions. But it somehow believes that because the “Official Code of Georgia Annotated” — which it considers its official law — combines those two sources of public law, it can copyright the result and charge the public a hefty price to see it.

In 2013, a nonprofit called Public Resource paid for the OCGA and posted it online to make Georgia’s state law freely available to the public. In response, the state sued Public Resource. The ACLU, along with a number of other groups, filed an amicus brief in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals defending the public’s right to access its own laws.

The OCGA is the law that the Georgia Legislature editorially controls and publishes. It is the law that the state’s executive agencies enforce. And it is the official state law that courts apply and interpret. Most fundamentally, it is the law that an individual must read to know what behavior is legal and what isn’t. While an unannotated version of the code is available online for free, that version does not constitute the law as enforced today. For example, a person reading the free version might believe that an “offense of sodomy” is punishable by one to 20 years in prison. That individual would also be led to believe that private possession of pornography is illegal. Only by paying more than $400 would she learn that courts have held both of those statutes to be unconstitutional, and the state enforces neither.

In our view, Georgia’s attempt to profit by limiting public access to the law harms at least three fundamental constitutional principles. First, it ignores the public’s role as the true author of the law. Second, without free access to the law, you lack the ability to figure out what is legal and what isn’t. Finally, you have a fundamental First Amendment right to see what your government is up to.

Georgia asserts that such knowledge is a privilege for which people should pay. We believe it is a constitutional right. We hope the court agrees.

Dolores Huerta, the legendary civil rights icon and farmworker activist, had it right: “Organized labor is a necessary part of democracy.” Day in and day out, unions struggle to make sure that farmworkers have a voice in in their workplace and in their communities, but they face enormous obstacles.

Farmworkers, most of whom are people of color and many of whom are in this country on temporary visas, have long been excluded from federal and state labor laws. That means they don’t enjoy many of the key protections under the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and numerous state minimum wage, workers’ compensation, and youth employment laws. As a result, they face high risks to their health and safety, substandard living conditions, and abuse and exploitation by their employers.

Now North Carolina has mounted a direct assault on the state’s only farmworkers union, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), which works tirelessly to protect those workers. A new state law, sponsored and supported by legislators who have a financial interest in suppressing farmworker organizing, would make it all but impossible for the union to operate effectively in the state. Together with a coalition of civil rights groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center and the North Carolina Justice Center, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the law violates farmworkers’ constitutional and civil rights. We have also asked the court for a preliminary injunction, which would suspend the law’s operation during the course of the litigation.

The lawsuit challenges the North Carolina Farm Act of 2017, which attacks FLOC in two different ways. First, the law invalidates contracts guaranteeing that employers will honor their employees’ requests to deduct union dues from their paychecks, otherwise known as union dues checkoffs. Farmworkers, many of whom lack access to basic banking services, rely on these checkoffs to make timely and regular contributions to the union. Without checkoffs, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the union to collect the money it needs to operate. Second, the law invalidates settlement agreements negotiated by the union to advance farmworkers’ rights, fatally undermining lawsuits meant to improve the working conditions of farmworkers throughout North Carolina.

North Carolina’s law clearly violates farmworkers’ First Amendment rights to association and expression. As the Supreme Court has long recognized, “The practice of persons sharing common views banding together to achieve a common end is deeply embedded in the American political process.” That’s why the First Amendment prohibits the government from adopting measures that are directly intended to burden expressive associations like labor unions. Thus, for example, the Supreme Court rejected state government attempts to attack the NAACP by forcing the organization to disclose its membership lists and preventing it from assisting in litigation. As the court recognized, groups like FLOC and the NAACP serve to empower marginalized voices. If the government is allowed to destroy these groups, those voices will be effectively silenced.

North Carolina’s law also violates other important constitutional and statutory civil rights protections, including the Equal Protection Clause. By targeting FLOC alone, the law intentionally discriminates against the state’s farmworkers, a group largely composed of noncitizen migrant workers from Mexico. It’s worth mentioning that the law was sponsored by state Sen. Brent Jackson, the owner of Jackson Farming Company, which was recently sued by Latino farmworkers with FLOC’s assistance. State Rep. Jimmy Dixon, the only legislator to speak in support of the law’s anti-worker provisions on the statehouse floor, said that the law was necessary “because there seems to be a growing of folks that are interested in farm labor.”

Whatever North Carolina legislators might think, the Constitution does not give them the authority to suppress labor movements. We’re fighting to make sure that FLOC and its members can continue to advocate, loudly and proudly, for farmworkers’ interests.