Research & Publications

The U.S. has turned away from addressing the complex causes of immigration and smuggling, and a careful consideration of the most effective ways to respond to these issues, and instead has focused myopically on enforcement and militarizing our borders. Building walls along the southwest border has become a centerpiece of this trend. Like the overemphasis on enforcement, the border wall project is not grounded in facts. But existing border walls blight border communities, tear apart delicate border ecosystems, and redirect crossings into the most remote and treacherous areas where thousands of men, women, and children have lost their lives attempting to enter the United States in search of safety or economic opportunity. In this report, we analyze the rationale behind border barriers, discuss the effectiveness of border walls in regards to unauthorized migration, smuggling, and national security, and illustrate the wide-ranging damages that existing walls have inflicted upon border communities, the environment, and the lives of border crossers.

There are more than 96,000 public schools in America. The U.S. Department of Education recently released data that was collected from all of them. The data, based on the 2015-2016 school year, reveals the extent of police presence in schools, the lack of basic services, and the growing racial disparities in public school systems serving 50 million students. In many communities, all of these conditions are worsening.

The ACLU partnered with the UCLA Civil Rights Project to publish a series of reports and data tools to enhance the public’s understanding of the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC). Some data are being reported publicly for the first time, including the number of days lost to suspension; the number of police officers in stationed in schools; and the number of school shootings reported nationwide.

A careful examination of this data also calls into question how the Department of Education under Secretary Betsy DeVos is interpreting it. In a recent publication highlighting the data on “school climate and safety,” the administration reported on the number of school shootings without checking for errors, potentially inflating the number of school shootings by the hundreds. Instead of proceeding with care, the administration is now using the flawed data on school shootings to emphasize a need for more school discipline -- which has turned schools into militarized places that deprive students of color of an equal education, as previously reported by earlier administrations.

Here are four big takeaways revealed in our series of reports.

By studying the records kept by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) about the people who have died in immigration detention, the authors of this report found deep, systemic problems with the medical care in those facilities—failures that contributed to death in more than half of the cases reported by ICE for the 16 months between December 2015 and April 2017.

Coauthored by the American Civil Liberties Union, Detention Watch Network, Human Rights Watch, and the National Immigrant Justice Center, “Code Red” contains timelines of the symptoms shown by people who died in ICE detention and the treatment they received from medical staff, along with medical experts’ commentary on the care and its deviations from common medical practice. The cases expose dangerous lapses in basic medical procedures; botched responses to emergencies; and medical neglect that becomes cruel, then fatal.

Since President Trump took office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have dramatically expanded their presence at courthouses across the country. The report presents new data from a national survey of law enforcement officers, judges, prosecutors and others, conducted jointly by the ACLU and the National Immigrant Women’s Advocacy Project, which documents how reports of courthouse arrests across the county and heightened immigration enforcement generally are stopping immigrants from seeking justice. It provides recommendations on how to minimize courthouse arrests by federal immigration enforcement officers and how to protect the fundamental due process rights of immigrants as they access important services at courthouses.

One in three adults in this country has a debt that has been turned over to a private collection agency. Thousands of debtors are arrested and jailed each year because they owe money. Millions more are threatened with jail. The debts owed can be as small as a few dollars and can involve every kind of consumer debt, from medical bills to car payments to student loans. Arrests stemming from private debt are devastating communities across the country, and amount to a silent financial crisis that, due to longstanding racial and economic inequalities, is disproportionately affecting people of color and low-income communities.