Peter Montgomery is a Senior Fellow at People for the American Way. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
