Join us on September 19 at 5:30 p.m. for a film screening and panel discussion in Albuquerque of the film Racially Charged. The film exposes how our country’s history of racial injustice evolved into an enormous abuse of power within the justice system. We will watch the film, have a panel discussion with Q&A, and then discuss what our plans are for the upcoming legislative session and how you can help us end injustices in our criminal legal system.
Food and drink will be provided at the screening.
About Racially Charged
America’s Misdemeanor Problem exposes how our country’s history of racial injustice evolved into an enormous abuse of criminal justice power. 13 million people a year – most of them poor and people of color – are abused by this system.
Through first-person accounts of those charged under the Black Codes of the Reconstruction era paralleled with the outrageous stories of people trapped in the system today, the film brings to light the unfolding of a powerful engine of profits and racial inequality. With the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, this film provides historical context and examines America’s history of racist oppression.
About Our Panelists
Leon Howard
Leon Howard was raised in Albuquerque's International District. Leon has defended people’s civil rights and liberties in New Mexico for thirteen years. Leon is the Legal Director at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, where he leads the affiliate's legal department and litigation efforts.
Leon is a passionate advocate for racial equality and justice. He knows firsthand the damaging effects of racial injustice, and his strong connections in communities of color have made him a “go-to” legal resource when people in those communities experience injustice and civil rights abuses. Leon is also passionate about protecting the rights of all underrepresented populations and people who are victims of governmental/institutional abuse of power.
Barron Jones
Barron joined the ACLU of New Mexico in January 2018 after spending several years working as a journalist for the Rio Grande Sun in Española where he covered stories related to government accountability and education. He also has extensive experience writing about issues of domestic violence, poverty, and addiction, especially as they relate to the pressing need for criminal justice reform.
He earned a degree in journalism from the University of New Mexico and has worked for several news outlets in Central and Northern New Mexico. Barron entered school as a nontraditional student and credits his education for helping him to address the issues that led him to be negatively impacted by the state’s criminal justice system.
He believes his work on justice reform will have a powerful impact on his community. Barron grew up in Detroit, but has lived in New Mexico for over 20 years. He is the proud papa of two rescue dogs, Holmes and MeToo.
Maxwell Kaufman, J.D.
As an Attorney with Disability Rights New Mexico, Max Kauffman seeks to assert legal protections and advocate on behalf of those with physical and mental disabilities. He has a background as a Mental Health Attorney in the Misdemeanor Division of the Law Offices of the Public Defenders, in Albuquerque, NM. There, he represented individuals with mental illness who were pending proceedings for Competency to Stand Trial and participants in behavioral health and outreach courts.
Max Kauffman currently a co-chair of Albuquerque’s Mental Health Response Advisory Committee and is also on the board of directors of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New Mexico. Additionally, he stays active in local collaborative stakeholder groups, such as the Bernalillo County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, Diversion and Re-Entry subcommittee, and the Coalition for a Safer ABQ. He believes strongly in the community’s capacity to shape its future in the field of behavioral health through partnership with local governments, stakeholders, and those with lived-experience.
Amber Farrell
Amber Farrell is the New Mexico State Deputy Director for the Fines and Fees Justice Center, based in Albuquerque. She works alongside State Director Monica Ault to advance state and local campaigns for fines and fees reform.
Before joining FFJC, Amber was an Associate Policy Analyst at Chapin Hall where she conducted extensive policy research and qualitative and quantitative analysis in the areas of child welfare and juvenile justice. She also served as a Policy Fellow for the Office of the Mayor at the City of Chicago and began her career providing supplementary math instruction to Chicago high school students. Amber is a dedicated social justice advocate with a depth of experience organizing around Black and Brown liberation.
Amber holds a Master’s in Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a B.A. in Public Policy from Stanford University.
Katie Hoeppner, she/her/hers, Former Communications Strategist, ACLU
Naureen Shah, Senior Legislative Counsel and Advisor
The Biden administration asked the Supreme Court last month to allow it to proceed with guidelines limiting who can be arrested and deported. The guidelines, outlined in a memo by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, faced xenophobic and politically charged legal challenges brought by Texas and Louisiana. The states’ challenges blocked the enforcement guidelines nationally, with lower courts split on the issue.
The Mayorkas guidelines memo was intended to move Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) away from Trump’s indiscriminate enforcement approach of deporting as many people as possible, regardless of their family and community ties. Taking up the Obama administration’s approach, Mayorkas directed ICE agents to focus their time and resources on individuals who pose a threat to “national security, public safety, and border security.” He added that agents should exercise “discretionary authority in a way that protects civil rights and civil liberties” and be “guided by the fact that the majority of undocumented noncitizens who could be subject to removal have been contributing members of our communities for years.”
He added that agents should exercise “discretionary authority in a way that protects civil rights and civil liberties.”
Advocates, including the ACLU, were highly critical of the guidelines because they left too much discretion with ICE agents, despite their documented xenophobia. But for all its serious flaws, the memo provided attorneys a powerful tool for advocating to protect their clients from deportation.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas listens to questions from reporters.
The Supreme Court, however, declined to restore the deportation guidelines while the case proceeds, and will instead hear the case on the merits in November. For now, Mayorkas’ memo is not in force, leaving ICE agents with what they had under Trump: nearly unfettered discretion to pursue deportations.
For now, Mayorkas’ memo is not in force, leaving ICE agents with what they had under Trump: nearly unfettered discretion to pursue deportations.
While this is a major setback for Mayorkas, he can still dismantle the infrastructure that makes indiscriminate deportations a threat to the millions of people he acknowledged “work on the frontlines in the battle against COVID-19, lead our congregations of faith, teach our children, [and] do back-breaking farm work to help deliver food to our table.”
Here are two actions the Biden Administration can take:
Dismantle ICE’s “Force Multiplier” by ending partnerships with local law enforcement
For years, ICE has tapped local law enforcement agencies to help identify immigrants for deportation, enabling ICE to stretch its tentacles into communities across the country and deport more people than it would be able to on its own, under a set of partnerships known as 287(g). These partnerships expanded five-fold under President Trump, and allow sheriffs notorious for racism, xenophobia, and civil rights violations to target and attack immigrants in their communities. ICE calls 287(g) its “force multiplier.”
Recently, the ACLU released a research report that found 59 percent of 287(g) sheriffs have documented records of anti-immigrant rhetoric, and over half have expressly advocated inhumane federal immigration policies, in some cases while vowing to disobey any federal directives they disagree with. Nearly two-thirds of 287(g) partners have records of racial profiling and other civil rights abuses, while more than three-quarters operate detention facilities with documented patterns of abuse and inhumane conditions.
As a candidate, President Biden pledged to eliminate 287(g) contracts initiated under Trump, but over 140 contracts with state and local law enforcement agencies are still in effect to this day.
Now that Secretary Mayorkas’ guidelines have been stalled, it is more important than ever for the Biden administration to end these partnerships, which directly threaten the millions of people Mayrokas has acknowledged as being integral members of our communities by subjecting them to racial profiling, abuse, and separation from their families and loved ones.
Shutdown ICE detention sites
For decades, the U.S. government has overinvested in punishment and detention, and underinvested in community-based support services, even as ICE continues to amass a track record of egregious civil liberties violations. The result of this investment is an immigration detention machine that is fundamentally bloated, cruel, and inhumane.
At present, about 24,000 people are languishing in ICE detention, in sites often run by for-profit, private prison companies. They may be detained for the duration of their removal proceedings — which could last months or even years. Thousands of these people are trapped in inhumane, unsafe living conditions, where they are denied access to lawyers who could help them secure release. Many are separated from their families, including their U.S. citizen-children, even though they could be free — on bond, their own recognizance, or community-based alternatives to detention.
But there is another way. The government can shrink the infrastructure that has been used to arrest, incarcerate, abuse, and traumatize immigrants.
The Biden administration took an important step toward shrinking the infrastructure of civil immigration detention when it requested funding for 9,000 fewer detention beds in its proposed budget for next fiscal year. Secretary Mayorkas also announced plans to close or limit the use of six detention sites, five of which were on a list of 39 detention sites the ACLU asked Mayorkas to shutter in an April 2021 letter, and stopped detaining families at three family detention sites.
But ICE still maintains a sprawling detention network of about 200 detention sites around the country, and has made plans to expand privatized, for-profit immigration detention — despite outcry from dozens of congressional Democrats.
If the Biden administration stops over-investing in the infrastructure for detaining immigrants, then many of the people Secretary Mayorkas rightfully identified as providing important contributions to the country won’t have to live in daily fear of arrest or deportation. The administration should take action now.
While a memo from DHS Secretary Mayorkas is in legal limbo, the administration should still take action to protect immigrant communities.
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What you can do
Expandable cards
Tell the Biden Administration: End the Racist 287(G) Program
Across the country, local law enforcement – primarily sheriffs – are being empowered to harass immigrant communities through ICE’s 287(g) program.
An ordinary police encounter can mean deportation or families being torn apart as a result, and the majority of local agencies participating have documented records of civil rights abuses – including beatings and killings. We must put a stop to this racist program once and for all: Tell the Biden Administration to end 287(g) now.
