News & Commentary

Just when we thought U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s record of abuse couldn’t get much worse, a nurse at Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia provided testimony showing the agency is capable of more cruelty than we knew.

Common Cause New Mexico is teaming up with the ACLU of New Mexico to run a nonpartisan voter protection program this year to assist voters who encounter problems in voting, either by mail or in person.

During the recent special legislative session, the ACLU and its allies achieved something that six months ago seemed like an absolute long-shot: passing a law that requires every law enforcement agency in the state to adopt body-worn cameras. While the law does give us a new tool to strengthen police accountability in the state, it is by no means a cure-all for police excessive use of force. If we’re ever going to put an end to police violence, we will need to use every tool at our disposal to reform police culture and reduce the potential harm of police-citizen interactions.

In fact, instead of improving public safety, COVID-19 has shown us that our addiction to incarceration is an urgent threat to public health. There is a clear path forward.

Police brutality is not new, nor is systemic racism in policing. Police forces in the United States were used to catch runaway slaves and later to enact a campaign of terror against Black people during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. Police were employed to brutally suppress striking factory and farm workers in the 20th century. Police were used to violently disperse protesters during the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements. Police are the front line soldiers in the ongoing “War on Drugs” that has led to the over policing of communities of color, mass incarceration, and the highest rate of officer-involved shootings in the developed world.

Operation Legend is just another pixel in the increasingly clear image of a criminal legal system that is irreparably broken and fundamentally unable to fulfill its basic function: keeping us safe.

When the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin as the first Postmaster General, our nation had not yet been founded. The Bill of Rights would not be drafted for another 16 years. Yet nearly two and a half centuries later, the United States Postal Service’s ability to provide every person in America with a private, affordable, and reliable means to exchange information transformed it from a mail delivery service into a baseline for the exercise of American constitutional rights.Recent news that the Postal Service’s financial condition is being used as a pretext for degrading its service – including allowing mail to go undelivered for days and scaling back the hours of or closing post offices – threatens to degrade that constitutional baseline as well.In an early response to novel coronavirus, Congress allocated $10 billion to help shore up the Postal Service’s finances, but the Treasury Department has held up those funds without explanation. Instead, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is preparing to make dramatic service cuts, treating the USPS like a private business facing bankruptcy. This should draw universal condemnation.The U.S. Postal Service was never a business. It is an essential government service guaranteed to the American people by the U.S. Constitution and it should be preserved accordingly.To understand how the Postal Service became so central to America’s national identity and the actualization of our constitutional rights, one needs to examine its history.

Election day is November 3, 2020. To vote in New Mexico, you must be registered to vote by October 6.

Our client, D’Andre, should have been able to stand on his own street corner and exercise his constitutional right to film police from a safe distance without retaliation. Instead, he wound up handcuffed and detained for four days.