Originally published in the spring 2018 Torch 

Relying on the generosity of strangers for your next meal is a grueling way to live. Some days you might get your fill to eat and others you might not get so much as a bite. Then there’s the weather to contend with. Standing in the cold for hours on end on a stormy day, will leave you wind-burned and raw. Blistering hot days risk exhaustion and sunstroke. But perhaps even worse than worrying about food or combatting the elements, is dealing with the constant threat of harassment by law enforcement, which antipanhandling laws across the country all but guarantee.

A recent agreement reached by the ACLU and the City of Albuquerque, offers some relief and hope for Albuquerque residents who depend on panhandling to get by, but who live in fear of being cited, cuffed, and even jailed. 

In a joint stipulation approved by the U.S. District Court in early February, the City of Albuquerque agreed not to enforce an ordinance that went into effect on December 6, 2017, that restricts speech on medians, freeway entrances, exit ramps, and other areas within the City while litigation about the ordinance is ongoing.

The ACLU of New Mexico and Goodwin Procter LLP filed a lawsuit against the City of Albuquerque in federal court on January 11, 2018, alleging that the ordinance is an unconstitutional attempt to eliminate panhandling by criminalizing speech in public areas where solicitation is common.

“This ordinance has always been about pushing homeless people and poor people out of public view,” said ACLU of New Mexico Staff Attorney, Maria Sanchez

“This ordinance has always been about pushing homeless people and poor people out of public view,” said ACLU of New Mexico Staff Attorney, Maria Sanchez. “We’re relieved that with this agreement in place Albuquerque’s most vulnerable residents will be able to exercise their constitutional rights to solicit the donations they depend on to get by from day to day.”

The joint stipulation prohibits law enforcement from arresting, charging, or prosecuting anyone pursuant to the ordinance. It further prohibits law enforcement from ordering anyone to leave any public place or refrain from panhandling, political advocacy, or similar activities or using the ordinance as a threat in an effort to convince an individual to leave a public place.  The City agreed to publicize the terms of the stipulation to its employees, departments, and officers and to ensure they abide by its terms.

“I’m very happy that the City is not enforcing this ordinance until its legality is decided in federal court,” said Mary O’Grady, one of the named plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit. “My hopes are high that it will be struck down, as it clearly restricts the speech of the people of Albuquerque unconstitutionally.”

Mary regularly hands out food and water to panhandlers in New Mexico and was homeless as a teenager in Austin, Texas. Under the ordinance she could be cited and arrested for helping people who are just struggling to survive, as she once did.

“It’s a step in the right direction for us,” said John Martin, another named plaintiff in the lawsuit.  “Anything that helps us in the meantime is a positive. It’s one less thing the cops can put us in jail for.”

With community partners, we supported a bill to remove an old, outdated state law from the 1960s that criminalizes abortion. 

Originally published in the spring 2018 Torch 

Not long after the 2016 elections, a local newspaper asked me to sum up Obama’s record on civil and human rights during his time in office. I told the reporter that, while Obama should be lauded for his stand on samesex marriage and police reform, his policy of deporting thousands of Central American unaccompanied minors and families with children back into the imminently dangerous conditions that caused them to flee would, in my view, forever stain his legacy.

While I stand by that critique, I admit it rings a little hollow when compared with the scale of callousness and cruelty we have come to expect from the current administration. There are so many examples we could cite. The Muslim ban. Ending temporary protected status for El Salvadoran refugees. Trump’s rescission of DACA.

But the Trump-era policy that gives the surest glimpse of the depths to which the Trump administration is willing to stoop came to light as a result of a recent ACLU lawsuit. Our colleagues in San Diego and at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on behalf of a woman and her 7-year-old daughter who were forcibly torn from each other’s arms and detained separately, 2,000 miles apart, after fleeing violence in their home country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Once separated, the woman could hear her daughter frantically screaming in the next room that she did not want to be parted from her mother. For nearly four months the young girl has sat alone, without her mother’s care, in a shelter for “unaccompanied” minors in Chicago.

Instead of finding aid and comfort in our country, as they hoped, the mother and child found a new version of the terror they thought they had escaped in the Congo.  The mother has since been released, and as of this writing, efforts are underway to reunite her with her daughter, but the trauma they’ve experienced cannot be undone. 

This is no isolated incident. This case and hundreds of others demonstrate that even if the Trump administration does not yet have a formal policy of separating border crossing families from their children, they are doing so as a matter of practice. The reason?  To scare others from seeking refuge in the U.S.

Yes, you read that right. The Department of Homeland Security’s deterrence plan, it seems, is to emotionally torture young children to set an example for other refugee families who might come. Because, how else does a child experience the trauma of being ripped from the arms of her mother and sent to a distant, alien place that, by all accounts, looks like prison?

As torture.

And the fact that some high-ranking ICE official in some lofty office building in Washington, D.C. may have spent time devising this plan--as if it were legitimate policy-making--is as repugnant as it is absurd.

In this edition of the Torch you will read about the case of Manuel Pérez, whom we are representing in a petition to parole out of the detention facility where he is being held so he can obtain the medical care he so desperately needs. Manuel, too, was separated from his 9-year-old son when ICE detained them on the border near San Diego. With your help, the ACLU is doing everything possible to fight against this despicable practice. Because the path to making America great again is not paved with cruelty, arrogance, and selfishness. It is lit by the same values that draw immigrants to our shores: freedom, fairness, and justice.