This past weekend, I was in Washington D.C. where I heard dozens of heartbreaking stories around immigration, including one story about a preteen being held in jail for over two months by immigration officials.
Here at the ACLU of Maine, we’ve filed two recent suits on behalf of immigrants. The first was a challenge to a denial of MaineCare coverage for a lawful permanent resident. The second was a suit on behalf of Wilmer Racinos, who was beaten by two guards at the Cumberland County Jail in 2010. Read more about those cases here and here respectively.
Some may not understand why the ACLU prioritizes immigrant rights. In keeping with the ACLU’s mission to both protect and advance civil rights and civil liberties, the ACLU works at the forefront of civil rights, and that involves protecting the most vulnerable and least protected groups of people. Today, those groups include immigrants, prisoners, and GLBT folks.
Interestingly, areas that seem groundbreaking and important today often have been the subject of ACLU concern for decades. The ACLU brought its first LGBT rights case in 1936—well before LGBT rights were particularly popular or well understood. Today we’re working on the freedom to marry for all loving, committed couples regardless of their gender. Similarly, in 1919, Attorney General Andrew Palmer raided the homes of so-called radicals to round up and deport them. All without warrant or regard to constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure. Many of these people were held in brutal conditions and treated horribly. The ACLU was born out of a group of individuals who took a stand against these civil rights abuses. We continue to work on behalf of unlawfully detained or mistreated immigrants today.
We work to make sure that all people, not just citizens, (a distinction made in the 14th amendment) are treated humanely under the law. That’s why the ACLU opposes the unconstitutional abuses to Wilmer Racinos and a private prison industry that profits off of immigration detention facilities. That’s why the ACLU thinks lawful permanent resident Hans Bruns deserves better than to be kicked off MaineCare and left to die of a painful form of throat cancer.
The Equal protection law means everyone gets equal protection under the law, regardless of where you were born.
