by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN
Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish
Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All
rights reserved
Kevin Keenan
Norma Chavez-Peterson
Raul Macias and Luz
Villafranca
Sean Riordan
Like them or
not, just about everyone knows what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
does. It looks for instances of government agencies or private companies that
appear to be breaking the constitutional rights of individuals, and files
lawsuits either to get them to stop or to get the courts to declare that this
is no longer acceptable behavior. But when San Diego ACLU executive director
Kevin Keenan spoke at the local chapter’s annual meeting February 28, he presented
a vision of a new ACLU that will not only file lawsuits against perceived
constitutional violations but also work with community organizers on the same
issues — including immigrants’ rights, access to marijuana, relationship
equality and opposition to capital punishment.
Keenan’s
co-presenter, ACLU associate director Norma Chavez-Peterson, exemplified the
organization’s broadening its strategies. Before she came on board at the ACLU
she was an executive at the MAAC (“Maximizing Access to Advance Our Communities”)
project and the founder of an immigrant-rights group called Justice Overcoming
Boundaries. Chavez-Peterson, who
only signed onto the ACLU staff last December, told the annual meeting, “I was
born in Michoacán, Mexico. I came here at five and I didn’t know what ‘legal’
or ‘illegal’ meant. I just knew my mom needed to make that journey to feed her
children. My immigration and separation from my family has shaped a lot of my
work.”
Chavez-Peterson
explained the ACLU’s new approach as “remembering we can’t do it alone. Part of
our focus is not only building relationships on the grass roots level but
working in coalition with organizations,” and at what she-called the
“grass-top” level. That means working with “elected officials, law enforcement officers,
registrars of voters and other non-traditional allies,” she said.
Escondido
community organizer Luz Villafranca thanked the ACLU for working in coalition
with organizations of Escondido’s Latinos to turn around the prejudices aroused
by a local ordinance forbidding landlords to rent to undocumented immigrants
and employers to hire day laborers without immigration documents. “Many people
within my community in Escondido felt oppressed,” Villafranca said. “Many of my
friends are undocumented, and essentially they made it a crime for me to pick
them up at the store. The ACLU came in and it was like a ray of light. We
organized to lobby, and it was a change from people being afraid to people
being empowered.”
Thanks to the
connections between the ACLU and the city’s community organizations,
Chavez-Peterson said, Escondido’s Latino voters mobilized to challenge the city
councilmembers who had passed that law. “The people [in Escondido] have been
encouraged to speak with their city council, their state legislators, and
hopefully their national legislators,” she explained. “The majority of people
in Escondido, who are Latino, now see that they can have a result if they get
involved. I watched the polls, and they were not intimidated from voting.”
“When I was in
Escondido in 2006, it was very different,” said the San Diego ACLU’s legal
director, David Loy. “The City Council had just passed the rental ban, and the
ordinance was an instrument of terror. Now there’s a sense of power. We got
that ordinance thrown out, but there’s only so much you can do in court.”
Raul Macias
described the efforts of his group working with the ACLU to get state agencies
in San Diego to implement the so-called “motor voter” law, which allows people
to register to vote at state government offices while they’re there for other
things, like renewing their driver’s licenses or getting social services. The
“motor voter” law was passed in Congress in 1993 but by 2007, when Macias took
up the issue, “not a lot was happening in California. In 2011 ‘motor voter’
registrations were down 90 percent from what they had been when the law was
passed. We worked with the San Diego County Registrar of Voters and found a lot
of the local [government] offices didn’t know about the law.” The result was a
major increase in the number of people registered to vote at government offices
in 2012.
What’s more,
Macias and his coalition partners lobbied the state legislature to extend what
he called the “best practices” of San Diego County’s elections officials and
mandate them statewide. “It was through this relationship we built with our local elected officials that this got passed,”
Macias explained. “The Association of California Elections Officials heard from
us, and their subcommittee recommended that they support the bill, lobby for
it, and get the governor to sign it” — which he did. Macias added that the
collaborations they had built while pushing the bill forward came in handy
after it went into effect, when they were able to get on the committees writing
the regulations that will implement it.
“We asked every
candidate for elected office in San Diego County to respond to a survey on how
they stand on civil liberties issues,” said senior policy advocate Margaret
Dooley-Sammuli. “We can now go back to them with where they stand. As our staff
grows, we have so many more opportunities to engage with elected officials.
We’re finding ways to leverage and advance our issues.”
“This has been a
watershed year in our work on the border,” said staff attorney Sean Riordan.
“The Border Patrol is the largest police force in the country. The courts and
Congress have given them extraordinary authority, and with that has come the
power for extensive abuse. You can be pulled over for secondary inspection
without any grounds for suspicion at all. Thee are border checkpoints and
so-called ‘reader inspections.’ These powers are employed without a lot of
oversight. It’s very hard, even for people in Congress, to call them to
account.”
What is to be
done? “We see a significant role for ourselves in trying to call the border
agency to account for its abuses,” Riordan said. “In the past we’ve challenged
them before the Inter-American Community on Human Rights. We’ve also taken
other steps on oversight. This is a big problem no one in D.C. seems to be
spending the time they need to make sure [Border Patrol agents] are following
the Constitution. We filed a complaint with the federal government that was
covered in the U.S. media, and it was a significant factor in the Department of
Homeland Security’s opening an investigation.”
Riordan said the
local ACLU has filed suits defending the right of individuals at the border to
take photos and video of Border Patrol agents in action without being harassed
or threatened by the agents. They’ve also filed an amicus curiae brief in the appeal of a private suit filed against
the Border Patrol by the family of a 15-year-old Mexican who was shot by a
Border Patrol agent on the Mexican
side of the border, which was thrown out at the trial level on the ground that
“the Border Patrol had no obligation to follow the Constitution.” And the local
ACLU is hiring a new attorney who will work exclusively on civil and human
rights issues involving the border.
Keenan began the
afternoon meeting with a presentation on the ACLU’s work in 2012, and in
particular on the good and bad news from last November’s election. “If you were
like me, you went to sleep on November 6 with a great deal of anxiety,” he
said. “It was probably 1 a.m. when I started to fall asleep, and I was still
worried about the elections. Obama had won, but I was worried about everything
else. There was one painful result” — California voters defeated Proposition
34, which would have set aside the state’s death penalty — but, Keenan said,
among the positive developments were the long-overdue reform of the “three
strikes” law in California, the victories for same-sex marriage equality in
four states and the repeal of state laws against marijuana possession in
Colorado.
“Right now we
have six cases as counsel or co-counsel at the U.S. Supreme Court,” Keenan
said, including the unexpectedly controversial challenge to Section 5 of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. This is the requirement that states and localities
with histories of discrimination against voters of color “pre-clear” changes in
their elections laws with the federal government so they don’t pass laws that
might have the effect of disenfranchising people of color. The meeting occurred
before the Supreme Court hearing on Section 5, in which the justices’ comments
from the bench indicated that there is a five-vote Right-wing majority ready to
strike down Section 5.
Nonetheless,
Keenan was guardedly optimistic not only about Section 5 but some of the other
Supreme Court cases the ACLU is involved with this year. “This year we could
see the end of the Defense of Marriage Act,” he said. “We could see Congress
passing an immigration reform bill with some positive and negative elements.”
He conceded that so far the ACLU has lost most of its legal challenges to the
so-called “war on terror” — generally the courts have upheld the government’s
right to keep its anti-terror programs secret and put people whose rights are
attacked in the “war on terror” in a Catch-22 situation where they can’t
challenge the anti-terror laws without being able to prove that they were
personally injured, and can’t prove they were personally injured because the
programs are allowed to operate secretly.
Still, Keenan
said, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently spoke in San Diego and
told her audience that the “war on terror” is the greatest opportunity for a
young attorney just seeking to make their mark on civil liberties issues. “I
have hope and faith that the ACLU will be there to win back those rights,”
Keenan quoted Justice Ginsburg as saying.
