By: Ana Zamora, ACLU of Northern California

Today is Juneteenth and the United States just executed three black men from three southern states in 24 hours. This is outrageous.

Here’s a "throwback Thursday" for you. June 19, 1865: African-American men, women and children in Galveston, Texas rejoiced and celebrated in the streets after hearing these words: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

June 19, or "Juneteenth" as it is known, is a day to celebrate independence, freedom and liberty. It is also a day to remember and bear witness to this country’s despicable truth that we enslaved our African-American brothers and sisters and that we still have a long way to go before we tear down the structures that allow racism to endure.

This year, however, I can’t find it in me to celebrate. In fact, I am full of outrage.

Why? Because 149 years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was officially enforced, the United States executed three black men in three Southern states in 24 hours.

Those that deny the continued existence of structural racism in this country need not look any further than our criminal justice system at large and our death penalty system in particular to be convinced.  Someone who is black – particularly black men – has a significantly higher chance of ending up arrested, locked up and on death row than someone who is white.

But how can we have a meaningful and long overdue conversation about race and our history of slavery if we continue to operate a system that disproportionately sends black men to death row? I argue that we can’t.

So this year, I honor and celebrate Juneteenth by calling for an end to the death penalty in the U.S. once and for all, and a beginning to a national dialogue about the slavery, institutionalized racism and the white privilege that some of us forget we have.

Ana Zamora is death penalty policy director at the ACLU of Northern California.

By: Jennie Pasquarella
See the list of remaining counties that have yet to provide information about whether or not they honor ICE holds.
When the federal government’s signature deportation program “Secure Communities” was green-lighted in California in 2009, county and city jails went from places that housed people accused or convicted of a crime to places that also warehoused individuals for days, weeks or sometimes months without legal cause.

How did this happen? Thanks to Secure Communities, federal immigration officials began issuing requests, also known as "detainers," to local law enforcement officials to hold individuals while U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigated whether they could be deported for civil immigration violations.
If this sounds wrong, it is. These so-called detainers violate a basic constitutional protection afforded to everyone. The Fourth Amendment prohibits law enforcement from detaining someone simply to investigate whether they’ve done something wrong; they must first have probable cause to believe the person committed a crime, or, in this case, are subject to deportation. And if they are arrested without a warrant, the Fourth Amendment requires they be brought before a judge within 48 hours for a probable cause determination. Yet, none of that happens here: they are detained for investigatory purposes, and they never get a hearing before a judge while they are held for ICE.  That’s why we brought lawsuits against Los Angeles County in 2012 and ICE in 2013 to stop these unlawful detentions.
Detaining people by the droves without justification in some of the worst jails in America, like those in L.A. County, is bad enough. But it gets worse. ICE consistently has said that it was using the Secure Communities program to identify “serious criminals” in our communities for deportation. But the federal government's own statistics call such claims into question.
Indeed, the vast majority of people for whom ICE issued holds were people who were not deportation priorities.  More than half of people in California who have received immigration holds had no criminal history at all.  And, nationally, four out of five either had no criminal history or had been convicted only of minor misdemeanor offenses, such as traffic offenses.  Many of these people have stronger ties to the U.S. than they do to their home counties and would likely have benefited from immigration reform, if and when reform comes – like my client Isaura Garcia, a domestic violence victim with a young child, who was arrested in a mix-up after calling 911 for help and detained on an immigration hold, or my client Ruth Montaño, whom Kern County Sheriff’s officers arrested and subsequently detained on an immigration hold for having a chihuahua that allegedly barked too loud.
Moreover, ICE’s misguided policy of detaining people first and investigating later, has led to the unlawful detention of U.S. citizens such as our clients Gerardo Gonzalez, Simon Chinivizyan and Antonio Montejano, or individuals who have lawful immigration status and are not subject to deportation.
Thankfully, counties throughout California and the nation are beginning to question the federal government's use of detainers.
In fact, in the past month, law enforcement agencies across the state have started to say “no” to warehousing people in their jails solely for deportation purposes.  These decisions follow in the wake of federal court rulings that held that immigration holds are voluntary and that they are not supported by probable cause. We need every law enforcement agency in the state, including county sheriff’s departments and city police departments, to stop participating in these unlawful and burdensome detentions. Check our statewide map to find out if your county has said “no," and find the list below of the remaining counties that have not yet provided information about whether or not they honor ICE holds.

Jennie Pasquarella is staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California. 

Counties Pending Response

Alpine

Amador

Colusa

Lassen

Madera

Modoc

Placer

Plumas

By James Gilliam

I still remember feeling nervous giddiness walking into Nashville's Centennial Park on that hot, humid June day 21 years ago when I attended my first LGBT Pride celebration.

In an instance, all the rainbow flags and balloons overwhelmed me. So I chose to approach the one table — the ACLU — where not everything on display included a rainbow. That decision turned out to be a formative one. I became a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union. And in the years that followed, I learned to embrace my identity.

I have developed an enduring relationship with the ACLU. I've remained a member, have served on the board, and now I have the privilege of helping to manage one of the largest of the 53 ACLU affiliates in the country.

Looking back on June 1993, it's clear the Pride organizers were hopeful (though perhaps a bit premature) when they adopted "Our Time Is Now" as the theme that year. Remember, we were still considered criminals in many states; we were prohibited from serving our country.

Though much has changed since my first Pride celebration, we still face hurdles to full equality. We lack federal protections in the workplace and for LGBTQ students.

Yet, the progress we have achieved gives us much to celebrate. It seems each day another state recognizes the rights of gay and lesbian couples to marry. And thanks to the ACLU's victory last year at the U.S. Supreme Court in the Windsor case, these couples finally have access to the more than 1,100 rights the federal government has granted to opposite-sex couples since time immortal.

As a gay man who also teaches sexual orientation law part-time, I'm sometimes asked why I don't work for a single-issue, gay rights organization. To be sure, organizations that focus exclusively on LGBT rights achieve important victories for our community. But for me, the answer to the question is simply this: I work for the ACLU for the same reasons I've been carrying that ACLU membership card for 21 years.

It's the one membership I won't let lapse — because the ACLU's docket on criminal and racial justice, on economic and disability rights, matches my commitment to social justice, which goes beyond advocacy for just my own community; because the ACLU is working around the clock to ensure that people whose skin color matches that of my partner, Lamont, don't face stricter and more frequent criminal sanctions simply because of their race; and because the ACLU's more than 75-year history of advocacy on behalf of the LGBT community means we have been doing this since before any LGBT legal rights organizations existed. We continue groundbreaking advocacy on behalf of the LGBT community in almost every state. Turns out the ACLU wears the colors of the rainbow proudly.

Moreover, because the ACLU's integrated advocacy focuses on such a broad array of issues, it means our advocacy on immigration reform also benefits "undocuqueer" individuals; our work to generally advance reproductive justice also provides access and resources for gays and lesbians who desire to become parents.

So, be on the lookout for people signing up new ACLU members as you don your rainbows, and join us in celebrating Pride. Then let's get back to the work at hand, together.

Reposted from The Tennessean. James Gilliam is deputy executive director at the ACLU of Southern California. He served as executive director of Mid-TN Nashville Pride until 1999 when he moved to Los Angeles for law school.