Donald Trump just announced executive action that threatens any city that seeks to protect immigrant residents from his deportation machine. What he’s trying to do is roll back the leaps forward we’ve made in recent years but we won’t let him. In 2017, it’s the efforts to defend Black lives and protect migrant rights that make our cities safer, not Trump’s extra enforcement promises. To keep us safe, we need to evolve our local policies to make our cities real sanctuaries for all residents, not cancel them because of the illegitimate President's latest actions. That means a commitment to separating police from federal immigration enforcement AND addressing the policing that funnels Black and other residents to jail and places criminal charges on immigrant residents, making them a target for ICE agents. Tell our mayor and city council to stand up to Trump and take action that doesn't just symbolically defend immigrants, but transforms our city's policies to stop targeting us for imprisonment, risk of removal, and state violence at the hands of police and aggressive immigration agents. The illegitimate President's threats should be cause to embolden our city leaders, not an excuse to abandon our potential progress.

Last spring, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) took comments from the public on its proposed Criminal Enterprise Database (CED), beginning on April 11 through May 11, 2019. The comments obtained through the use of the Freedom of Information Act show major discontent with CPD’s plan to implement a new gang database. Alternatively, an overwhelming number of suggestions point to the need for solutions that center investment in public education and mental health resources instead of more systems of biased surveillance and criminalization. According to a memo prepared by the campaign to Erase the Gang Database, approximately 86% of the people who submitted comments opposed the creation of any database, including the Criminal Enterprise Database. A remaining 11% of the comments opposed the CED, but appeared open to the creation of a different database and 3% supported the CED as proposed by the law enforcement agency last year. Last spring the Chicago Office of Inspector General published a partial audit of the Chicago Gang Database, confirming the information that community organizations have been highlighting for years: That it mostly targets Black and Latinx people (at 95% of the list), that it shares information with over 500 agencies, and that instead of being a tool to make communities safer, it is used to criminalize, intimidate, and denigrate Chicagoans. In response, the Chicago Police Department stated that they will only comply with a partial list of the recommendations, by creating a new gang database that is supposed to follow the guidelines but ignoring any grievances of people for the current gang database, with plans of continuing to share the inaccurate data with over 500 agencies indefinitely. Read the public comments here: http://bit.ly/CEDPublicComments Read memo here: http://bit.ly/MemoCEDPublic Find full OIG report here in English and Spanish: https://igchicago.org/2019/04/11/review-of-the-chicago-police-departments-gang-database/

Luis has lived in East Austin since he was a baby; English is his first language. After Luis’s abusive father left the family, Luis’s mother raised him and his siblings as a single-mother. Luis struggled as a teenager, but after meeting his wife Ana Marie, he fell in love and became a father to her two little girls. They built a stable and loving home, and in 2017, Luis was overjoyed to learn that his wife was pregnant and their family would grow. Last year ICE began monitoring Luis on social media and asked the Austin Police Department for help surveilling him without a warrant. Instead of following their own protocols as a Freedom City, the Austin Police Department decided to proactively collaborate with ICE and used a mental health call at a wrong address in the neighborhood to get information on Luis and his family. APD’s unethical behavior helped ICE arrest Luis and he now faces prosecution for “illegal reentry.” If found guilty, Luis could face up to 20 years in prison. Luis is part of a growing trend. Currently, more than 63% of all federal prosecutions are for immigration related charges. Many immigrants facing prosecution feel like they have no support or options, so they plead guilty. But Luis has said “I was unjustly arrested in front of my 8-month pregnant wife. She had a seizure as I was being taken, and I haven’t met my son. I want people to know what APD is doing and how they are helping ICE separate families. I am fighting because I want nothing more than to go to my home in East Austin and hold my wife and son.” Please stand with him so that he knows he is not alone. Luis is a part of our community; he should be allowed to stay in the United States to meet his son and help raise him. Sign here to demand Assistant US Attorney Grant Sparks drop all charges against him, and call on the Austin Police Department to demand they stop doing ICE’s dirty work.

Last week members of the coalition to Erase the Cook County Gang Database known as RGID (Regional Gang Intelligence Database) learned of the Sheriff's Office plans to destroy the database before the Cook County Board of Commissioners holds a mandatory public hearing required by the Ordinance approved last month. This expedited approval and comments by the Sheriff's Office should raise red flags to anyone that believes in transparency and processes of accountability of law enforcement. Just because the RGID is destroyed doesn’t mean the harm stops to exist and the Sheriff’s department should follow the proper steps to dismantle the database. For criminalized communities, such as in the case of people included in RGID without due process, having knowledge of which agencies accessed their information can be instrumental to defend their rights in front of agencies such as ICE, FBI, DHS, and State’s Attorney among others. Check out the new report on the Regional Gang Intelligence Database (LINK). Sign and share the petition today.

On Tuesday, February 5, 2019, the Council narrowly approved a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) agreeing to a pay increase for officers in the Santa Ana Police Department amounting to more than $25 million over the course of three years. At that meeting, council members were implored by members of the community to reject this MOU given uncertainty over Santa Ana’s current financial health; however, the majority of the Council disregarded the public’s input and moved forward with approving the MOU. As justification for approving this agreement, members of the Council majority offered explanations that ranged from incomprehensible to downright untruthful. Mayor Pulido was characteristically dismissive of members of the public and his colleagues. Councilmember Sarmiento spoke many words without making a cogent point or offering an explanation for why he felt that such a generous pay increase is warranted at this time or a legitimate use of Measure X revenue. Councilmember Solorio assured residents that these raises will not leverage Measure X tax revenue, despite the fact that the Staff Report accompanying the agenda item specifically identified this revenue as a source of funding. And Councilmember Penaloza was primarily concerned with where Santa Ana Police Department salaries will fall when ranked against other municipalities after the pay increase, indicating he is comfortable with the mark of distinction for our police department being how highly officers are paid rather than how well they serve our community. Given the lack of thoughtful discussion and public debate on this issue, residents of Santa Ana are rightfully displeased with the outcome of your decision to approve this MOU. We are also concerned that this decision was made without the benefit of an accurate understanding of our city’s current fiscal situation. The fact that the Council recently dismissed our City Manager, whose responsibility it was to provide an objective and fact-based assessment of our finances to enable the Council to make prudent and sustainable fiscal decisions, further erodes the public’s confidence that this MOU was approved based on a comprehensive understanding of its short- and long-term impacts to Santa Ana’s finances. As Santa Ana’s elected officials, they have an obligation to act in a manner that is aligned with the needs and values of the community they serve. Execution of the MOU to increase officer pay was not consistent with their obligations to our community, but they have an opportunity to make that right. For the sake of Santa Ana’s financial health and the well-being of its residents,they should move to restore the public’s trust by rescinding the current MOU and going back to the drawing board.

Mr. Washington claimed in his filing that the corrections agency was actively refusing to give him medication for his medical conditions, including “diabetes, liver conditions, and blood pressure issues. Six weeks after he filed a court document claiming that he was “being killed” due to inadequate medical care he died of health complications. Mistreatment inside Arizona prisons must not be ignored our people are suffering inside these cages. We must denounce this treatment and demand an independent investigation into Mr. Washington’s death and medical care inside the Department of Corrections. “Prisons don't disappear problems they disappear people.” - Angela Davis

In December of 2018, Commissioner Alma Anaya introduced an ordinance to protect the rights of Cook County residents by prohibiting the use of the county's gang database until the completion of the Inspector General's investigation into the use and impact of the database. In January, the Cook County Sheriff's office announced it decommissioned the Regional Gang Intelligence Database (RGID) but failed to answer questions of how the information was handled since the inception of the database. If passed, ordinance #19-0687 would: (a) Prohibit the Sheriff from recommissioning RGID (b) Stop the Sheriff's office from adding new information to RGID (c) Stop the office of the Sheriff from sharing information previously kept in the RGID system (d) Set up public hearings to review how RGID has been used in the past In Cook County, the sheriff's department has managed this database of at least 25,000 people since the early 2000s. According to a ProPublica investigation, the list includes “hundreds whose gangs aren’t known and hundreds who are dead.” Authorities from 371 different agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have access to the data, and could potentially use it to target individuals. The inclusion of a person's name on the database can adversely affect employment, housing, bail/bond and parole decisions, and lead to false arrest, deportation, citizenship, and other life devastating consequences. Individuals are never notified when their names have been placed in the database and therefore never have an opportunity to challenge the charges or provide evidence in their defense. The lack of notification, judicial process, or opportunity for self-defense and review, create an environment ripe for civil rights violations and abuse of power. Join us in asking the Cook County Board of Commissioners to hold Tom Dart, Cook County Sheriff, accountable by passing Ordinance #19-0687 at the next Criminal Justice committee meeting on February 20, 2019. Read the Ordinance #19-0687 here: https://cook-county.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3775860&GUID=49C64AF7-4FDB-4F89-B53F-80214E7E68C7&Options=&Search=&FullText=1

Santa Ana Police Chief, David Valentin requested the Santa Ana City Council to give the Police Department permission to destroy eight boxes of police records related to officers’ use of force, in-custody injuries, and employee misconduct. This request to the Council comes in response to a new state law that gives the public access to police records after years of secrecy. Chief Valentin made this request at the January 15th city council meeting before it was pulled from the meeting’s agenda. Based on other departments’ attempts to destroy their records across the state, we can expect the issue to return before the city council. Santa Ana residents have a right to know the full scope of police misconduct within their communities. Destroying these records decreases transparency, undermines accountability of local government, and harms public safety. We have the fundamental right to know how police use -- and abuse -- their powers. Join us in demanding that the City Council uphold accountability and transparency, by voting to preserve police misconduct and brutality records!

Silvia retweeted a headline that said, ‘Doing nothing is not acceptable’. She has continued to be silent on the murder of Antonio Arce. Police continue to murder us, just within the first 16 days of 2019, there have been four shootings involving law-enforcement officers in Maricopa County. In each case, the person shot by an officer was a teenager. We can not allow for more police to continue to murder and criminalize our communities. We must start by fighting for justice for Antonio Arce and make sure no more deaths happen at the violent hands of Police. "If they want to tarnish my son, they are wrong. Apart from the fact that they killed him, they want to destroy him. No. I won't allow it; I want justice," the teen's mother, Sandra Gonzalez

On June 8, 2018 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced the transfer of approximately 1,600 people detained under their custody in immigrant detention centers to federal prisons operated by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). These transfers affected prisons in California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, and Texas with ICE officials stating that the transfers were to last up to 120 days. These transfers effectively served as a way for ICE to increase its detention capacity by close to 4% overnight without any oversight or prior notice. In doing this, ICE circumvented the existing channels for detention expansion, instead making use of another agency’s resources to carry out its work. These massive transfers have been disastrous for those detained as these BOP facilities have provided them with even less access to legal representation and pastoral care and have not failed to ensure those detained have communication with their loved ones. At the same time, the transfers have also signaled worsening conditions for workers inside the prisons which has had an impact on those detained as well. Given the hiring freeze within the Department of Justice (which oversees BOP), these facilities have turned to the practice of ‘augmentation’, forcing civilian prison workers (teachers, nurses, cooks, etc.) to take on the duties of guards. The combination of a lack of proper staffing and the abusive conditions detained immigrants are subjected to have resulted in cases like Victorville, where an outbreak of chickenpox and scabies took place that was exacerbated by the lack of proper medical staff to address the issues. Along with this, there are reports of Sikh men being held at the Sheridan Prison, having their turbans confiscated and being forced to purchase beanies as a replacement for their religious garb. These two salient examples are just some of many instances that prove that these overnight transfers have only resulted in those detained being subjected to mounting human rights abuses as BOP takes on the work and resulting liability from performing ICE’s work for them.

Across the country, activists are coalescing around the demand to #AbolishICE, a fundamentally racist agency which exists in order to terrorize, incarcerate, and deport immigrants and people of color as well as political opponents of the administration. This cruel reality has only become more clear in recent weeks, as the President has released an Executive Order that sets up a network of military-run internment camps to indefinitely detain immigrant families on the border, including families caught up in raids here in the interior of the country. In Nashville, doing our part means no longer offering our local institutions as resources for ICE's ethnic cleansing and family separation campaigns. CoreCivic is the largest private prison company in the world, and uses its influence and fortune to lobby for longer prison sentences, fewer rules governing the treatment of detainees, and anti-immigrant laws that have forced tens of thousands more immigrant parents into prison, such as the racist “show me your papers” law (SB1070) in Arizona in 2010. CoreCivic has publicly stated that any reduction in the prison population will hurt its profits and hurt its business model, and spends tremendous amounts of money lobbying for increased prison budgets and giving campaign contributions to politicians, political action committees, and nonprofit organizations with influence over prison policy. CoreCivic currently operates dozens of private prison facilities for adult immigrants, including the Otay Mesa Detention Center and the T Don Hutto Family Detention Center, where many mothers whose children were taken from them at the border have been imprisoned. A group of those mothers released a public letter to our movement in late May asking for our support in seeking their freedom from the CoreCivic prison in San Diego and in holding those responsible for their incarceration accountable. CoreCivic also operates the largest family detention center in the country, the “baby jail” in Dilley, Texas opened in 2014, which CCA intended to make the first of many government-funded, privately-run internment camps on the border for immigrant families. In their prisons, CoreCivic is notorious for two particularly heinous practices. The first is intentionally cutting corners on emergency medical care for detainees, which has resulted in numerous deaths in detention, most recently of a trans woman who died of pneumonia after spending time in CoreCivic’s Cibola Detention Center in New Mexico. Here in Nashville, detainees know all about CoreCivic's medical negligence, and the public found out about it through the scabies epidemic in CoreCivic's Harding facility last year. CoreCivic also uses threats to force detainees to participate in a supposedly voluntary work program, in which detainees are paid $.25 an hour for six-hour shifts doing maintenance and other work inside the prison. The company has been sued by thousands of detainees for forced labor and trafficking in the last several years.Doing our part in Nashville means cutting off the spigot and refusing to allow CoreCivic to use Nashville's public funds and local jail as a gold mine off of which to get rich and to continue abusing immigrant families and other people in their custody. ----------------------- Español------------------------------------------------------- En todo el pais, activistas están juntando para exigir la abolición de ICE, una agencia racista que existe para terrorizar, encarcelar, y deportar a inmigrantes y gente de color y los que se oponen a la administración. La realidad cruel se ha revelado más claramente en semanas recientes, con el Orden Ejecutivo del Presidente que pretende formar una red de campamentos de concentración manejados por el ejército para detener a familias migrantes sin límite en la frontera, incluso familias que son atrapadas en redadas aquí en el interior del país. En Nashville, necesitamos rechazar el uso de nuestros recursos locales para las campañas de ICE de limpieza étnica y separación familiar. CoreCivic es la compañía más grande de cárceles privados en el mundo, y utiliza su influencia y riqueza para pasar leyes que mantienen la gente encerrada con sentencias más largas, menos reglas contra el maltrato de detenidos, y leyes contra inmigrantes como lo de Arizona (SB1070) en 2010. CoreCivic ha pronunciado públicamente de que cualquier disminución de la población encarcelada va a bajar sus ganancias y dañar su modelo de negocio, y ellos gastan cantidades tremendas de dinero donando a políticos y organizaciones comunitarias que tienen influencia sobre políticas de encarcelación. Actualmente CoreCivic está manejando docenas de cárceles privados para inmigrantes adultos, incluso el Centro de Detención Otay Mesa (San Diego) y el Centro de Detención Familiar Hutto (Tejas), donde muchas mamás cuyos hijos les fueron quitados en la frontera actualmente se encuentran encarceladas. Un grupo de estas mamás publicaron una carta a nuestro movimiento en Mayo, pidiendo nuestro apoyo en su lucha buscando libertad de la cárcel de CoreCivic en San Diego y denunciando los responsables. CoreCivic también maneja el centro de detención para familias mas grande en el país, la “cárcel de bebés” en Dilley, Tejas, construido en 2014, lo cuál CCA pensaba hacer el primero de muchos campamentos de concentración, pagados por el gobierno y manejados por compañías privadas, en la frontera sur. En Nashville, tenemos que cortar los fondos públicos de que CoreCivic sigue aprovechando, y rechazar que esta corporación sigue usando la cárcel local como una mina de oro con lo cual pueden enriquecerse y seguir abusando de las familias migrantes y otros bajo su control.

The Young People's Resistance Committee has discovered that Anselmo Villarreal, CEO of La Casa de Esperanza, one of Wisconsin’s most important Latino community organizations, sits on the Board of Directors of the Southwest Key Program, the non-profit running child internment camps on the U.S.-Mexico border. La Casa de Esperanza is an important resource hub for the Waukesha Latino and immigrant community. We find it disturbing that Mr. Villareal would associate himself in any way with an organization that is complicit in the inhumane act of separating children from their families. Several organizations, including the American Psychological Association, the American College of Physicians, and the American Public Health Association have denounced this policy. Mr. Villareal, there is no humane way of separating children from their families. Southwest Key Programs is complicit in this violation of rights; we urge you to step down from its board and renew your commitment to the humane treatment of immigrants everywhere. ---EN ESPAÑOL--- Recientemente, el Comite de Resistencia Juvenil ha descubierto que Anselmo Villarreal, director ejecutivo de La Casa de Esperanza, una de las organizaciones de la comunidad latina más importantes de Wisconsin, forma parte de la Junta Directiva del Southwest Key Program, el cual mantiene campos de internamiento sin fines de lucro en la frontera EEUU-México. La Casa de Esperanza es un importante centro de recursos para la comunidad inmigrante y latina de Waukesha. Nos resulta inquietante que el Sr. Villareal se asocie de alguna manera con una organización que es cómplice en el acto inhumano de separar a los niños de sus familias. Varias organizaciones, incluyendo la Asociación Estadounidense de Psicología, el Colegio Americano de Médicos y la Asociación Estadounidense de Salud Pública, han denunciado esta política. Sr. Villareal, no hay una forma humana de separar a los niños de sus familias. Southwest Key Programs es cómplice de esta violación de derechos; le exigimos que renuncie a su puesto en esta junta directiva y renueve su compromiso con el trato verdaderamente humano de los inmigrantes en todas partes.