Every day, immigration detainees with severe mental disabilities are denied the basic legal representation they deserve. They slip through the cracks of our immigration system – unassisted, yet incapable of representing themselves. They suffer through unjust proceedings, and many of them are unlawfully deported – separated from their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, often the only people on Earth who know and love them.
In January of 2013, the government deported Martin¹, a long-time lawful permanent resident of the United States, even though Martin was incompetent to represent himself in his immigration proceedings. During a so-called "competency hearing," Martin stated that he thought it was his right to be with the president of the United States, and interrupted the judge during his proceedings to ask about the date and the month. But the immigration judge found Martin competent and ordered him deported to Mexico. He remains in Mexico to this day, separated from his family and from those who can care for him. Dozens of people like Martin remain stuck in the deportation machine every day.
A glimmer of hope appeared after a landmark ruling in April, when a federal court in the Central District of California issued a ruling that individuals who are unable to represent themselves in their immigration proceedings because of a serious mental disability must be provided legal representation. On April 22, 2013, in response to the imminent ruling the Court on Franco, the government announced plans to completely revamp their system for identifying and protecting the rights of immigrants who suffer from serious mental disabilities.
But justice for these most vulnerable individuals remains elusive. The Court ordered the government to design and implement a plan to identify individuals with serious mental disorders who should benefit from this ruling, but despite ample opportunity to develop and implement a plan, the government came back empty-handed. The so-called “plan” submitted by the government was nothing more than a series of promises – to develop a better screening system, provide forensic evaluations (in some unidentified set of cases) and give more procedural safeguards at some point in the future. But the government has been defending a lawsuit asking for those same protections for three years, and has continued to detain and deport people during that entire time.
Although the Court has already ruled that individuals unable to represent themselves must be provided legal representation, the promise of justice for immigrants with serious disabilities remains illusory, and the Court’s ruling, largely meaningless without a functioning system for identifying immigrants who suffer from serious mental disabilities.
We have submitted our own plan to screen for and identify individuals with serious mental disabilities and have asked the Court to order the government to adopt it. It is a shame that the Obama Administration has continued to resist all efforts to provide justice for the most vulnerable immigrants. Hopefully, the Court will once more force the government to do what it should have done long ago – create an immigration system that recognizes the unique needs of the most vulnerable amongst us, a system that truly reflects our nation’s values.

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¹ Pseudonyms are used to protect the identity of this individual.
Ahilan Arulanantham is Deputy Legal Director and Carmen Iguina is Equal Justice Works Fellow and Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Southern California Follow @ahilan_toolong on Twitter

Many have suggested that once a jury has spoken, that’s it. That’s true legally – an acquittal marks the end of the criminal case – but we need not treat the verdict acquitting George Zimmerman in the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin as if it were above discussion or debate.
The jury process is important in our democracy: It is at base an exercise in self-governance, and it should be promoted and protected. But veneration for the process should not blind us to outcomes we question. We may have pride in our democracy and our system of government, but we have never said, “Well, the President, or Congress, or the Supreme Court has spoken,” and just left it at that.
Though recognizing that the rule of law was upheld in this case, we can and should be able to question whether justice was in fact served and, more important, what the jury’s decision reflects about deeper societal issues implicated in this case. There’s much for us to question and debate about stand-your-ground laws, guns, concealed weapons and particularly race.
We must confront race, admit racism still exists and discuss how it plays out in our society – without being accused of playing the race card or engaging in racial demagoguery. The Supreme Court tells us repeatedly that we can’t become a color-blind society until we stop focusing on race, but we all know that to solve a problem you first have to admit you have one.
In thinking about race and racism, we need to understand the simple fact that bias can be, and often is, implicit. Some, including at least one juror, contend that race had nothing to do with Martin’s shooting. Will Saletan, for instance, concluded that Zimmerman made a series of mistakes, including “inferring that Martin was a burglar.” “Whatever its basis,” he writes, “the inference was false.”
The basis isn’t all that hard to discern: Starting in 2011, Zimmerman made several 911 calls about people he considered “suspicious” – almost all were young, black males. He reported a young, black child whom he estimated to be seven to nine years old – the police report fails to indicate what Zimmerman found suspicious about him. He then reported a black male he believed to be involved in recent burglaries, though it’s unclear what basis Zimmerman had for this belief. And again, he reported two black males he estimated to be between 20 and 30, because he didn’t recognize them or their car and was concerned about recent burglaries.
When Zimmerman called 911 to report Martin, Zimmerman said, “[T]here’s a real suspicious guy […] This guy looks like he is up to no good. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” As the questioning proceeded, Zimmerman said, “These assholes[,] they always get away.” This looks like race was right on the surface: There’s a clear pattern of people who Zimmerman perceived as suspicious, as not belonging in his neighborhood; and the pattern wouldn’t possibly hold if Zimmerman had been colorblind.
Whether Zimmerman did so consciously or unconsciously, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that race played a part in his decision-making, influencing his thoughts, attitudes and actions towards young, black males. There’s a growing body of compelling research documenting just how powerful implicit or unconscious biases can be. And we must learn to recognize discrimination in its more subtle but no less insidious forms.
What’s more, we must acknowledge that our laws can be neutral on their face – colorblind in their wording – but discriminatory in their application or impact. Take Florida’s stand-your-ground law. The jury in this case was instructed that if Zimmerman was not engaged in unlawful activity and if he was attacked in a place where he had a right to be, “he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground […].”
Stand-your-ground laws neither explicitly mention race nor intentionally target racial groups. They fundamentally alter the traditional legal principles of self-defense by eliminating the duty of a person, when confronted with a possible threat to his or her safety in a public place, to retreat as much as is practicable before using deadly force in self-defense.
Yet stand-your-ground laws affect people of different races in significantly different ways. In states that have enacted these laws, “when white shooters kill black victims, 34 percent of the resulting homicides are deemed justifiable, while only three percent of deaths are ruled justifiable when the shooter is black and the victim is white.” The same legal principles, the same burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, yet the results are vastly different depending on the race of the victim and shooter.
We cannot ignore these kinds of disparities. They reveal that we value some human lives less than others. They reflect deep and longstanding divisions in our society that we ignore at our peril because they undermine and belie the one thing that ultimately binds us all – the belief that we are all created equal.
Hector Villagra is the Executive Director of the ACLU of Southern California. Follow @HectorSoCalACLU on Twitter. This entry was re-posted from the Huffington Post

As the mother of an African-American boy, the tragic, unnecessary death of Trayvon Martin and the trial and subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman have me heartbroken and filled with unanswerable questions. Does this verdict mean that some people view my son’s (or my husband’s or my father’s) life as disposable? And how do parents like me protect our sons from people whose perceptions, unconscious or otherwise, will lead them to make incorrect assumptions based solely on skin color, while simultaneously ensuring that our children continue to be happy and hopeful instead of fearful and angry?
As I read and watch the coverage, I can’t help but think that there is an important piece of the story missing from our national conversation – the concept of implicit bias. Implicit bias is a well-established social science theory; it occurs when someone holds explicit values against, say, racial prejudice, but is unconsciously influenced by negative views of, for example, another racial group. It does not mean that the person is hiding their own negative views; it means they actually don’t know they have them.
Many social scientists at universities across the country have documented this phenomenon in a variety of arenas. In the criminal justice context, for example, studies have shown that people associate black physical features (such as dark skin and a wide nose) with criminality, and even that, in an MRI, when white people see, even subliminally, a black face, the “fear” part of their brain is more likely to light up than if they are shown a white face. My son is 4 years old, so even though he is not feared now, what happens when he is 11, 12 or 13?
What we are seeing in Trayvon Martin’s death, George Zimmerman’s trial, and our national conversation is this data playing out in real life and real time. Do the flip test: imagine the facts of this case, but with a black shooter and a white victim. What would the outcome in that case be?
Sadly, there are real-life examples to answer that question. Last fall Trevor Dooley, a 71-year-old black man who claimed to shoot his white neighbor in self-defense under the state of Florida’s stand your ground law, was found guilty of manslaughter. Dooley, who believed race played a big part in his case, claimed that if the roles were reversed things would have looked drastically different.
In another Florida case, Marissa Alexander, a 32-year-old black mother of three and a domestic violence victim, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after a jury also rejected her claim to stand your ground. Alexander, who shot a warning shot into the air to scare off her abuser, is appealing her case.
In fact, in states with “Stand Your Ground” laws, 35.9 percent of white-on-black shootings are deemed justified when self-defense is invoked. By contrast, the same result is reached in only 3.4 percent of cases in which the reverse is true. Race unquestionably infused this process at every step of the way.
What can we do? Some of the social scientists studying implicit bias have conducted trainings for police departments and judges around the country to teach them about implicit bias, and to provide tools for officers and judges to help them counteract their own implicit biases. But more needs to be done. As a society, we must learn to talk about race in a new way, one that recognizes that racism doesn’t only come with a white hood and a burning cross, but can instead seep into people’s perceptions in a much more nuanced, but no less insidious, way. Only then will we really be able to begin to ensure everyone receives fair and equitable protection under the law. Our children deserve no less.
Jory Steele is Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Northern California; This blog was cross-posted from ACLU of Northern California