The Sentinel: Civil Rights

Commentary |
America can’t afford Trump’s mass deportations

For the cost of mass deportations, we could instead erase medical debt, provide universal school lunches, and end homelessness.

by Alliyah Lusuegro

OtherWords

President Trump has made it clear that he’s dead set on attacking our immigrant friends, families, and neighbors — and that the only people he’ll protect are his loyalists and billionaires.

Since day one, Trump has launched a blatantly hateful agenda against immigrants. He’s issued executive orders that would unlawfully shut down asylum at the U.S. southern border, use the military to separate families, and make it easier to detain and deport migrants — including detaining them at the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison.

Meanwhile, anti-immigrant lawmakers in Congress gave Trump a helping hand by passing a law punishing undocumented people, including minors, with deportation for minor offenses — even if they’re not convicted.

Undocumented people contributed $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022 — just one tax year, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

These attacks come at an enormous cost to the entire country. The American Immigration Council estimates that mass deportations will cost $88 billion per year over the course of a decade.

My colleagues and I calculated that this $88 billion could instead erase medical debt for 40 million Americans. Even just a fraction of it — $11 billion — could provide free lunch to all school children in the United States.

There are already 40,000 people locked up in detention centers — and Trump’s detention expansion plan would triple that capacity. Republicans in the House and Senate are proposing plans of an eye-popping $175 billion or more to detain and deport undocumented people.

That’s enough to fund affordable housing for every unhoused person and household facing eviction in this country for several years — with about enough left over to make sure uninsured people with opioid use disorder can get treatment.

Illustration: Dee/Pixabay

Nor are these the only costs. Undocumented people contributed $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022 — just one tax year, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. That’s nearly $100 billion in lost revenue a year that everyone else would end up having to cover.

But these attacks aren’t going unopposed. People are showing up for their immigrant neighbors and loved ones, making clear they simply won’t accept the nightmare of mass deportations and detentions.

The groups United We Dream, CASA, Make the Road States, and Action Lab recently pledged to build “a strong and sustainable movement to defend ourselves and our neighbors.” With their #CommunitiesNotCages campaign, Detention Watch Network is working with local communities to protest ICE actions and shut down detention centers.

And the list goes on.

On February 1, thousands of people blocked a highway in Los Angeles to protest against ICE raids. Just two days later, many gathered in solidarity for a Day Without Immigrants. On this day, students stayed home from school, employees didn’t show up to work, and over 250 businesses closed nationwide to show how important immigrants are to everyone’s day-to-day lives.

Others are using lawsuits to fight back. Five pregnant women, with the help of immigrant rights groups, sued the Trump administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship. Agreeing with the mothers, three federal judges just blocked this unconstitutional order.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union and other major legal organizations sued the administration for seeking to shut down asylum at the border — on the grounds that it’s a violation of long-time international and domestic law.

Finally, my fellow immigrants and I are also standing our ground. We’re stating the facts: Immigration is good for our country, our economy, and our culture — something 68 percent of Americans agree with. And we’re here to stay.

Immigrants are essential to this country. We bring opportunity and possibility to the United States. And not only do we contribute as students and professionals, business owners, and essential workers — we’re also human beings trying to live good and successful lives like anyone else. We’re a part of the American story.

Now and more than ever, we’ll continue to show up for each other — and we hope you will, too. Our lives and families depend on it.

Alliyah Lusuegro is the Outreach Coordinator for the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

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Viewpoint |
Think you are exempt, you're not - If they can take my rights, Republicans will take yours, too

The GOP’s attacks on trans people are setting a stage for a broader assault on rights we all enjoy.

Illustration: Gerd Altmann/Pixabay

by Robin S.C. Griffin

OtherWords

Most days in my depraved, transsexual lifestyle start the same: I wake up at 5:15 a.m. to pet my cat, have some coffee, and journal a little before I get out the door.

I bike down the street to a gym where I get to see a few friends and sweat a little before putting in my time at the office. After work, I do a few chores and relax for a while. Half the time I cook dinner, half the time my wife takes care of it.

Like you, I like to listen to music, play a game, or watch a show unless I make plans with friends. I try to write in my free time and then get to bed on time to do it all again.

The simple fact is that most trans people’s lives are pretty normal — we’re human after all.

It’s a simple life, but it’s full of joy and meaning for me. I’m not Christian anymore, but it feels like I’ve managed to find the kind of life King Solomon talked about in Ecclesiastes 5:12: “Sleep is sweet to the one who works.”

The simple fact is that most trans people’s lives are pretty normal — we’re human after all. So why is attacking us the number one priority of the incoming Republican-controlled government?

Republicans recently decided to welcome Delaware Rep.-elect Sarah McBride, who will be the first openly trans member of Congress, by introducing a resolution that would ban trans women from using restrooms at the Capitol. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has spoken in support of the measure.

Days later, Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas introduced the “Defining Male and Female Act of 2024,” which seeks to prohibit the federal government from recognizing trans people and lays the groundwork for further discrimination.

There’s a lot going wrong in our world. So why are Republicans chasing down trans people?

These cruelties come on top of a wave of anti-trans laws in statehouses across the country, a wave which continues to build in GOP-controlled states.

All this in a country where most families can’t afford surprise expenses of a few hundred dollars, where people call an Uber to the emergency room so they aren’t bankrupted by the ambulance bill, and where many workers would have to toil for decades to earn what their CEO makes in a day.

Not to mention 2024 is on track to be the hottest year in recorded human history, leaving a wake of climate-driven disasters across the country.

There’s a lot going wrong in our world. So why are Republicans chasing down trans people?

Attacks on trans people are broadly unpopular outside Trump’s base, and we make up a small fraction of the population. Policies that make our lives better and safer — or even just leave us alone — come at essentially no cost to everyone else.

The fact of the matter is that Republicans are warming up for their bigger goals. If they can wipe away two decades of progress for trans people in a few short months, they’ll have a playbook for overturning gay marriage by the end of the year.

If they can convince you to look the other way while they invade the medical history of trans people, maybe you won’t notice when they use the same authority to let insurance companies deny you coverage for a preexisting health condition.

They don’t care how normal my life is — or yours. The point is to crush anyone they don’t like and to reward their wealthy backers. I can’t say where they’ll stop, but I share Solomon’s cynicism from the back half of Ecclesiastes 5:12: “But the satiation of a wealthy man will not permit him to sleep.”

About the author:
Robin S.C. Griffin is a development associate at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

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Commentary |
Cash bail is unfair and violates the right to due process

Photo: Sasun Bughdaryan/Unsplash

Election years are a scary time for people of color in the U.S. They are marked by race-based voter suppression efforts, a rise in racist political rhetoric, and even a surge in racist hate crimes.

by Sonali Kolhatkar

Many Americans haven’t heard of cash bail. But the idea is central to an election year battle over racism, policing, and mass incarceration.

When arrested on suspicion of committing a crime, everyone in the United States has the right to due process and to defend themselves in court. But in a cash bail system, when judges set bail amounts, those who cannot pay the full amount remain jailed indefinitely — a clear violation of their due process rights — while the rich can pay their way out of jail.

A 2022 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights examined the impact of cash bail and found that between 1970 and 2015, the number of people jailed before trial increased by a whopping 433 percent.

There are currently about half a million such people stuck in jails across the nation who haven’t been tried or convicted of any crimes. The report also found “stark disparities with regards to race,” with Black and brown men most often subject to higher bail amounts.

Thankfully, many states and cities are moving to reform this unfair practice.

In 2023, Illinois became the first state to entirely abolish cash bail. Other states, such as New Mexico, New Jersey, and Kentucky, have almost entirely ended cash bail requirements in recent years. In California, Los Angeles County has also similarly eliminated cash bail for all crimes except the most serious ones.

But in this election year, Republicans are rolling back these efforts — most recently in Georgia.

The state recently passed a bill expanding cash bail for 30 new crimes, some of which appear to be aimed at protesters, such as unlawful assembly. Further, it criminalizes charitable bail funds — and even individuals — that bail out people who can’t afford to bail out themselves.

Marlon Kautz, who runs the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, called cash bail “a loophole” in the criminal justice system, allowing courts to indefinitely jail people without charges if they cannot pay exorbitant bail amounts.

“Police, prosecutors, and politicians want a bail system that allows them to punish their political enemies, poor people, and people of color without trial,” said Kautz, whose fund has bailed out people protesting a massive new police training facility opponents call “Cop City.” Kautz was one of three people affiliated with the fund to be arrested on apparently politicized charges last year.

Reversing progress on bail reform is a new flashpoint in the GOP’s culture wars. “It could be a sign that Republicans intend to bash their Democratic opponents as soft on crime,” the Associated Press reported. Alongside Georgia, Republicans in Indiana, Missouri, and Wisconsin have introduced numerous bills expanding the use of cash bail.

Expanding the racist criminal justice system is a cynical GOP election-era ploy, one that has little to do with public safety.

“It is exceedingly rare for someone who’s released pretrial to be arrested and accused of a new offense that involves violence against another person,” said Sharlyn Grace, an official at the Cook County Public Defender’s office in Illinois. “Fears about public safety are in many ways greatly overblown and misplaced.”

“National studies contradict” the claim, the AP adds, that people are any less likely to show up for a court date if they’re released without bail.

Election years are a scary time for people of color in the U.S. They are marked by race-based voter suppression efforts, a rise in racist political rhetoric, and even a surge in racist hate crimes. The expansion of cash bail laws is yet another attack on Black and brown communities — one that must be exposed and confronted.

We shouldn’t let reform efforts fall victim to election year politics.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the host of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. This commentary was produced by the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and adapted for syndication by OtherWords.org.

Commentary |
This Black History Month, fight for the freedom to learn

by Svante Myrick

A little over a year ago, the College Board unveiled its long-awaited draft AP African American Studies curriculum. What happened next was sad — and all too predictable.

Florida officials, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, howled. They claimed the course “lacks educational value” and violated state laws against teaching about race and racism. The College Board initially caved to Florida’s demands and said the course would be heavily redacted, then said it wouldn’t.

At the end of 2023, it released the final version of the course, and it’s…better. But it’s still missing some important concepts. The new course omits any discussion of “structural racism” and makes studying the Black Lives Matter movement — modern Black history by any measure — optional.

That pretty much sums up the state of the fight against censorship and book-banning in this Black History Month: better, but still problematic.

On the plus side, the last few months have brought some very good news.

School board candidates endorsed by the pro-censorship group Moms for Liberty went down to resounding defeats last fall. After Illinois became the first state to prohibit book bans, several states — including Colorado, Kansas, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Washington, and Virginia — introduced their own anti-ban bills.

In December, two Black lawmakers, Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Maxwell Frost (D-FL), introduced bills in Congress aimed at fighting book bans. And a federal judge ruled that parts of an Iowa book ban were unenforceable.

But the censorship movement isn’t going away.

Moms for Liberty plans to start its own charter school in South Carolina. In other words, if you won’t let them ban books in your school, they’ll just start their own school. With your taxpayer money.

Meanwhile, librarians nationwide are being targeted by threats and harassment. And the propaganda outfit PragerU continues to pump out the offensive, woefully inaccurate junk it calls “edutainment” for public schools that will buy it.

So there’s still work to do.

Fortunately, the public is overwhelmingly on the right side of this issue. Poll after poll shows that Americans don’t support censorship and book bans in schools. Those of us who want children to have the freedom to learn are the majority.

We understand that kids are better prepared for life — and our country is better prepared to compete globally — when education is historically accurate and reflective of the diversity of our culture. We understand that book banning is un-American and censorship is a tool of dictators.

This majority needs to mobilize and be heard at the ballot box. The defeat of pro-censorship school board candidates in 2023 was a great start. Now we have to take that momentum into the local, state, and national elections this fall.

In the meantime, we also know that public pressure works. A public outcry got the College Board to change its plans for the African American Studies course. And when publisher Scholastic said it would segregate books about the Black and LGBTQ communities at its school book fairs, the public was outraged — and Scholastic reversed course.

Together, we have the power to stop the censors who want to whitewash our history and deprive kids of facts and stories that help them to understand our world. That applies to the Black experience in America, but also the experiences of LGBTQ people, Indigenous peoples, people of diverse faiths, immigrants, people with disabilities, and more.

Civil rights activists have pushed for decades for book publishers and educators to acknowledge and teach our full history, and to awaken our consciousness as a nation. We refuse to go backwards.

Black History Month is a great time for us to commit to using the power that we have to protect the freedom to learn. Our kids, and our country, will be better for it.

About the author:
Svante Myrick serves as President and CEO of People For the American Way. Myrick garnered national media attention as the youngest-ever mayor of Ithaca, New York. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

ViewPoint | Let's make MLK's dream a reality

By Dedrick Asante-Muhammad & Chuck Collins

This January marks what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 95th birthday. Nearly a century after the late civil rights leader’s birth, it’s a good time to reflect on the work still to be done.

Just over 60 years ago, in his famous “I Have A Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, King declared: “We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

Sixty years on, as our report “Still A Dream” highlighted late last year, there’s been some progress. The African American community is experiencing record low unemployment, record highs in income and educational attainment, and has seen a massive decline in income poverty since the 1960s.

Despite all that, the check for racial economic equality is still bouncing. Without intervention, we found it will take centuries for Black wealth to catch up with white wealth in this country.

The 1960s were years of crucial economic progress for African Americans, even as the Black Freedom struggle faced assassinations and government suppression. In 1959, when King was 30, 55 percent of African Americans lived in income poverty. By what would have been his 40th birthday in 1969 (a year after his assassination), that poverty rate had dropped to 32 percent.

Yet this substantial progress still wasn’t enough to bridge the radical and ongoing racial economic divide between Blacks and whites. And since then, progress has slowed.

Library of Congress/Unsplash

Compared to the political and economic progress of the 1960s, the 21st century has been much less fruitful — even as the country saw its first African American president and a national recognition of police brutality through the Black Lives Matter protests. From 2000 to 2021, there was only a 3 percentage point decline in Black poverty (22.5 percent to 19.5 percent).

One modest area of progress: the unemployment rate for African Americans is no longer twice that of whites. Since 2018, Black unemployment has reached record lows of 5 and 6 percent, except during the 18-month recession caused by COVID-19. But as of 2021, Black unemployment was still about 1.8 times that of white unemployment.

The racial wealth divide was created by federal policies and national practices like segregation, discrimination, redlining, mass incarceration, and more. So it will require federal policy and national practices to close the divide.

And just as massive federal investment was necessary to develop the white American middle class, so too is it essential for a massive federal investment to bridge racial economic inequality.

Investing in affordable housing and programs designed to strengthen homeownership for African Americans will be essential. Other important policies include investments like a national baby bond program targeted at African Americans, national health care, and breaking up the dynastic concentration of wealth that’s made our country more unequal for all Americans.

Going 60 years without substantially narrowing the Black-white wealth and income divide is a policy failure. In this election year, policies that can finally bridge the Black-white divide should be at the forefront of our national debate.

Making a dream into a reality is challenging work, but it’s something our country has the resources to attain. The national celebration of Dr. King’s 95th birthday should be a time to rededicate ourselves to this work.

About the authors . . .

Chuck Collins

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is the chief of Race, Wealth, and Community at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

Chuck Collins directs the Program on Inequality and co-edits Inequaity.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. They are co-authors of the report, Still a Dream: Over 500 Years to Black Economic Equality. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

Viewpoint:
There is only one person that can really look out for you

By Michael Dilley, Guest Commentator

To my Law Enforcement friends,

I have always been a supporter of Law Enforcement. Having done that job, I am sympathetic and understanding to the positions officers are often put into. There are many good men and women who daily strap on their vests and stand against the wall for us. My perspective is one of experience and knowledge from being in or around the career for over 40 years.

This is meant as an encouragement and at the same time an admonition to our brothers and sisters in blue.

In a time of uncertainty, like what we are going through right now, it can be very difficult to navigate through situations and know what the proper decisions might be. It’s especially true given the pressure put recently on our Law Enforcement community.

I actually believe that the answer is clear and simple. All of us, as we began our career, in some fashion raised our right hand and swore to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. Including The Bill of Rights and our citizens’ civil rights. It’s probably one of the most guiding documents that helps give us direction on our actions and behaviors.

Our loyalty is to the citizens we serve and not to untrusted politicians who decree and dictate policies and directives, ones that may themselves violate the Constitution. There are processes in place that govern how laws are made which include checks and balances. The processes protect the Constitution and us as a Law Enforcement Officers. Local Law Enforcement is not the Governor’s personal Police Force. That’s how Socialist Dictators in other Countries operate.

We should be very cautious about our actions and how they effect our citizens. Those very citizens who live in our communities, do business here. Friends that also have children that go to school with our children. Use caution because those actions could very well violate ones Civil Rights and the Constitution. Politicians who expect you to act on these dictatived decrees do not know who you are, do not care about you, and do know have your back. They will not be there for you if you get in a jam. There is a very good acronym in our profession specifically CYA. There is only one person that can really look out for you and that is you.

One should familiarize themselves with exactly what the Constitution says as well as Title 42, Section 1983. It is the statue that many use to bring legal action against Law Enforcement. You should be familiar with case law that identifies those very costly suits, which have been won against Law Enforcement Officers for violating rights. You should know that Officers can be sued personally, putting their homes and future finances at great risk. I personally would not trust that any organization would have my back if I violated ones Constitutional rights.

As good citizens are pushing back and fighting for their Constitutional rights, there is and will continue to be numerous legal actions against politicians and public officials. Imagine what the fallout will be when courts conclude or agree that these rights have been violated.

My hope and desire for the brave men and women is to follow the Constitution, CYA, and not become one of the legal causalities that might very well occur.