By Arli Christian, Campaign Strategist, ACLU National Political Advocacy Department

The federal government has not been kind to transgender people over the last four years. Trans students were put at risk when the Department of Education withdrew critical guidance explaining how schools must protect transgender students. Trans people facing housing instability were left in the cold when the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled back rules protecting trans and gender non-conforming people from discrimination at homeless shelters and other housing services receiving federal funds. Trans military members were devastated by a single tweet from the president that put their careers and livelihoods at stake. And the list of attacks goes on.

The government is supposed to support and serve all of us, but trans folks have been intentionally and cruelly cut out these last four years, along with so many other communities. Of course, we are still here, and will continue to take care of each other no matter who is in the White House. We’ve heard Biden and Harris pledge to repeal the trans military ban and pass the Equality Act, and assure us that their administration will work to undo the harms of the last four years. Now we must must hold this administration accountable and ensure that they make a meaningful difference in the day-to-day lives of trans and non-binary people around the country.

There’s one important action this administration can take right away to show transgender people that they respect and support us: give us identification that reflects who we are. That’s why one of the ACLU’s top priorities for the Biden-Harris administration is an executive order updating the process by which federal agencies change gender markers on IDs.  This order will ensure that all transgender people have access to an accurate ID. Currently,  to update a gender marker in the social security system, on a passport, on immigration documents, or on any other federal ID or record, an applicant must submit a letter from a medical doctor attesting to appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition. This executive order would remove those burdensome medical documentation requirements so that everyone has access to the appropriate gender marker, and add an “X” option so that non-binary, intersex, and other folks have an accurate designation.

Access to accurate IDs is personally meaningful for trans folks but also practical, ensuring we can travel, apply for jobs, and enter public establishments with less risk of harassment or harm. But this update is not just about us, it’s a sensible solution for the federal government. IDs are intended to identify people, and are useless when they don’t match the applicant. Requiring trans folks to jump through hoops with doctor’s visits and medical letters to obtain updated IDs is costly, complicated, an invasion of privacy, and entirely unnecessary — and prevents many people from getting an updated ID to move through the world.

Accurate IDs are not possible without appropriate options for non-binary folks, intersex people, and anyone else for whom an “M” or “F” is not suitable. An “X” designation is used throughout the world to indicate a sex or gender other than male or female, and must be available on our federal documents. Nearly 20 states already have self-attestation and an “X” designation on driver’s licenses and state IDs, so this update is also important to ensure that people can have consistent state and federal documents.

The ACLU is excited to encourage this important step forward. In 2021, we’ll be sharing stories from trans and non-binary folks about the importance of accurate IDs, meeting with White House officials, and pushing the administration to follow through on their promises to the trans community. With one stroke of the pen, President-elect Biden can issue this order to not only provide a common-sense solution to access accurate IDs, but send a critical message to transgender people across the country: Our government sees you as exactly who you say you are, and we want you to be supported and included in this country.

Building trust between the government and trans communities is a long and hard process, but it starts with recognition. 

By Madhuri Grewal, ACLU Federal Immigration Policy Counsel

This piece was originally published in Washington Post. The header photo is of a Resistencia VA protest.

The administration of President-elect Joe Biden must do more than reverse the cruel immigration policies of the Trump administration. While the Trump administration’s policies have been particularly egregious, they are just the latest manifestation of a system that is fundamentally flawed. It is not enough to just turn back the clock on the past four years.
 
It is time to put an end to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention machine.
 
Over the past several decades, immigration detention — in essence, incarcerating those awaiting a determination of their immigration status or potential deportation — has become our nation’s newest system of mass incarceration for Black and Brown people. Rather than perpetuating this costly and cruel system, the Biden administration can immediately take action to curtail it — without any new laws from Congress, with the goal of phasing out mass detention.
 
Specifically, the new administration should immediately close all family detention centers. It should terminate existing contracts with private prisons and local and state jails by the end of the year, beginning with those that have an egregious history of abuse. It should also refrain from entering into new ones.
 
During the first 100 days, the new administration’s budget proposal can signal changed priorities, including an immediate reduction of at least 75 percent in the detention budget of ICE.
 
The Biden administration should eliminate bond for those otherwise eligible for release, and operate under a presumption of liberty, not detention. Under current law, ICE could immediately release tens of thousands of people from custody, but it routinely ignores its own internal standards to deny liberty to immigrants. The administration should simultaneously work with Congress to eliminate any circumstances in which detention is mandatory.
 
Incarceration of immigrants used to be the exception, not the rule. Under the law, we aren’t supposed to incarcerate people to punish them for lacking immigration status — that is a civil matter — or to deter others from coming to the United States. But that’s precisely what we now do, and on a massive scale. Decades of racist “tough on crime” policies, new detention policies seeking to punish and discourage people from coming to the United States, and the expansion of the detention infrastructure in the aftermath of 9/11 have pushed us in this unwise, expensive and inhumane direction.
 
The numbers are staggering. In just over six decades, the United States has completely upended its 1954 goal of ending the use of detention in “all but a few cases.” The detention of immigrants on any given day has gone from just under 6,800 in 1994, to nearly 34,000 in 2013, to an all-time high of more than 52,000 in 2019. In short, in just 25 years, the average daily population of immigrant detainees has increased more than sevenfold. We have all but normalized a system that abuses and traumatizes immigrants as a matter of practice.
 
Although other agencies detain immigrants, ICE is responsible for the vast majority of detentions and holds people the longest — for months or even years. The cruelty of its vast network — more than 200 sites nationwide — is by design: Detain people in the middle of nowhere, without lawyers and with no support network nearby. Pressure the people who are still fighting their cases into giving up their legal claims. Deport people covertly, and repeat.
 
ICE detention is a critical piece of our country’s mass deportation conveyor belt, propping up a system that tolerates racist practices, harms families and children, and denies basic due process and human rights to hundreds of thousands of people each year — costing taxpayers more than $3 billion this past fiscal year alone. Detained individuals have suffered severe pain and medical neglect culminating in sometimes months-long hunger strikes, deaths, amputations and suicides. Recently, numerous women bravely came forward to report invasive and unnecessary surgeries, including hysterectomies, while in ICE detention.
 
Those caught up in this system include pregnant women and families — some with babies and toddlers. Many are longtime lawful residents with deep ties to our community; some are ripped from their children’s arms by armed ICE officers or arrested on church grounds. ICE has even detained U.S. citizens.
 
This year, covid-19 has laid bare the ultimate costs of immigration detention. ICE has refused to provide even basics like masks or soap, denied testing to keep infection numbers artificially low, recklessly transferred people between facilities with coronavirus outbreaks, and failed to provide urgent medical care. ICE’s neglect during a pandemic is killing people and spreading the virus.
 
In part because of litigation and advocacy, ICE detention levels declined significantly this year, demonstrating that people are needlessly detained. These lower levels of detention, coupled with a presumption of release, enable a new administration to make urgently needed changes.
 
These recommendations are the minimum of what the Biden administration must do. But implementing them would move us toward a reimagined system — without the systemic trauma and cruelty stemming from immigrant detention — that embodies our nation’s values of fairness, justice and human rights.

By Vania Leveille, ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel & West Resendes, Skadden Fellow & Zoe Brennan-Krohn, ACLU Staff Attorney & Brian Dimmick, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Disability Rights Program

People with disabilities face enormous barriers in the United States today — from a pandemic that is killing disabled people, especially those in institutions, at staggering rates; to schools that too often fail, traumatize, and criminalize students with disabilities; to a criminal legal system that unnecessarily targets, incarcerates, and kills Black and Brown people with mental disabilities. The administration must make disability rights a priority from day one, with a commitment to addressing head-on these harms and the intersection of discrimination and marginalization around disability, race, and poverty.

Here are just a few of the many items that should top the Biden-Harris administration’s to-do list:

Ensure that people with disabilities can live in their communities, not in institutions, and support the direct care workforce:

• People with disabilities have a right to live in the community as independently as possible, and to receive necessary services and support in their homes. But for  many people with disabilities, especially people of color, that right is far from a reality as they are segregated in institutions like nursing homes, intermediate care facilities, and psychiatric facilities — even though they could live in integrated community settings with appropriate supports. As COVID-19 ravages congregate care settings, killing people who live in these institutions at extraordinary rates, the dangers of living in institutions have been laid bare. The incoming Biden-Harris administration must implement a national strategy to expand access to Medicaid’s home and community based services (HCBS). HCBS funds the in-home support and services that let people with disabilities live safely in their communities. Long waiting lists for HCBS hinder many disabled people’s goals of getting out of institutions and living self-directed lives. The administration must end the long waiting lists for HCBS by providing more funding for these services, and must increase enforcement of laws that prohibit the unnecessary segregation of people with disabilities in institutions.
• Along with eliminating HCBS waiting lists, the new administration must also push Congress to reauthorize and fully fund the Money Follows the Person program, which assists states to provide services and supports to disabled people in their communities. Money Follows the Person is critical for ensuring that people with disabilities can live self-directed, integrated, safe lives in their communities.
• The administration must work with Congress to ensure that the safety and needs of the direct care workforce (e.g., home care workers, direct support professionals, residential care workers, nursing assistants) that provides services and supports to people with disabilities are prioritized during and after the pandemic. These workers, who are overwhelmingly women and disproportionately women of color, have labored in the shadows for far too long and must have access to PPE, sick leave, hazard pay, and other workplace protections.

Stop law enforcement’s disproportionate targeting of people with mental health disabilities, and the entrapment of people with disabilities in the criminal legal system:

• As the recent killings of Walter Wallace Jr. and too many others have made clear, urgent action is needed to end the overreliance on police response to mental health crises that leave far too many Black and Brown disabled people injured, traumatized, or dead. The administration must encourage federal support for robust community-based programs that provide mental health professionals and peer supports — rather than law enforcement — to respond to mental health crises. 
• Even if people with disabilities survive an initial encounter with police, the criminal legal system is stacked against them at every stage. Pretrial release, supervision, jails, and prisons all impose burdensome requirements that pose special challenges for many people with disabilities. People with disabilities are excluded from classes and programs in incarceration and find themselves unable to break free from the criminal legal system, which fails to take disability into account. The incoming administration must champion changes to the criminal legal system that reduce incarceration rates nationwide, lessen the risk of harm to people with disabilities, and provide the accommodations disabled people need to avoid incarceration and live safe, productive lives free of the criminal legal system.

Ensure that students with disabilities have access to effective and safe education:

• Now more than ever, the administration needs to make sure that states and school districts continue to meet their obligation to provide appropriate educational services and assessments to students with disabilities. This includes helping them make up for instructional time and services lost during distance learning and school closures due to COVID-19. To support students with disabilities who have been left behind during the pandemic, the administration must make targeted Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funding a priority for the next congressional COVID-19 relief package. The Department of Education must also provide robust guidance that highlights best practices that school districts have adopted during the pandemic and ensures students with disabilities are not unnecessarily pushed into alternative schools during the pandemic.  
• The administration also must stop the unnecessary and harmful restraint and seclusion of students with disabilities in schools by executive action and supporting appropriate legislation. Mechanical or physical restraints harm children and inflict lasting psychological trauma, yet their use still happens far too often in schools. Action is needed now to end these draconian practices and ensure that our schools are places where children feel safe to learn.
• The overuse of police, known as school resource officers, in our nation’s schools disproportionately harms students of color with disabilities, criminalizes normal childhood behavior, and funnels students into the school-to-prison pipeline. The administration must take executive action and pursue legislative opportunities to eliminate federal funding that puts police in schools and reinvest those funds to hire school counselors, psychologists, and other supportive mental health personnel for our students. The administration must also investigate school districts where the data show disproportionate rates of law enforcement referrals and arrests for students with disabilities, and hold those school districts accountable.