Our immigration detention system locks up hundreds of thousands of immigrants unnecessarily every year, exposing detainees to brutal and inhumane conditions of confinement at massive costs to American taxpayers. Recently, mothers and children, who are mainly asylum seekers fleeing violence in Central America, have been detained in family detention centers.

In recent years, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained and deported record numbers of people from the United States. Many of ICE’s removal tactics take away even the right to a fair hearing in court, as the government rushes to judgment and tries to ram people through a rubber-stamp system that ignores individual circumstances. These enforcement programs pose a variety of threats to civil liberties: They implicate the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the constitutional guarantee of due process, and the constitutional guarantee of equal protection and freedom from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and national origin.

The ACLU believes that all immigration reform must create a welcoming roadmap to citizenship for aspiring Americans living in and contributing to the United States. Fundamental fairness as guaranteed by the Constitution requires that these individuals be brought within the legal embrace of U.S. citizenship. The United States must protect the rights of workers vulnerable to abuse, including temporary workers (or guest workers) and unauthorized workers; end state and local intrusions into immigration policy and enforcement; and ban racial profiling at all levels of government.

The immigration system contains an unnecessary and unconstitutional lack of rights that is unheard of in the criminal justice system. No one should be in immigration detention without a constitutionally adequate bond hearing in which the government bears the burden of showing that detention is necessary—to protect against danger to the community or flight risk—and that no alternative release conditions would suffice.

The ACLU and its partners have prevailed at getting discriminatory laws in states, cities, and towns across the country overturned and will keep fighting to ensure that such laws stay off the books. These laws, inspired by Arizona’s SB 1070, invite rampant racial profiling against Latinos, Asian-Americans, and others presumed to be “foreign” based on how they look or sound. These laws also authorize police to demand papers proving citizenship or immigration status from anyone they stop and suspect of being in the country unlawfully.