Trump Administration Detains Citizens in Texas

The Trump administration has begun confiscating the passports of some US citizens who were born to midwives on the Texas-Mexico border almost 30 years ago.  The government has detained some of these Latinx citizens in US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) prisons and initiated deportation hearings for others.  A few have already been deported.  Initially, the media investigated and reported on this unconstitutional practice, but within several days the story dropped from the media and has disappeared from public view.

Here’s the story:

Unlike most industrialized countries in the world, the United States automatically grants citizenship to those born in the country, regardless of their parents’ immigrant status.  Their birth certificate is automatically proof of citizenship.

For decades along the Texas-Mexico border, midwives delivered babies to the many people who could not afford a doctor.  The midwives filled out birth certificates, and the babies became US citizens.  In the early 1990s, however, there were reports of some midwives accepting bribes to issue fraudulent birth certificates to babies who had actually been born in Mexico.  Some fifteen of the midwives practicing in southern Texas were investigated and ten were convicted; officials at the time made attempts to identify which birth certificates were legitimate and which weren’t.  Since even the convicted midwives had also delivered many babies in the US and the hundreds of other midwives had issued countless legitimate birth certificates, it was virtually impossible, even then, to determine which were legitimate and which were not.  Some of the babies were nevertheless deported.

In order to resolve the issue, the ACLU sued the government in 2009 and came to an agreement with the State Department: “Citizens will no longer be denied a passport solely because of their race, ancestry or because they happened to be born at home with a midwife."  After that 2009 decision, the George W. Bush administration quickly began winding the policy down, and the Obama Administration ended it completely.  (It is not true—as has been argued by the State Department and reported in recent news accounts—that Obama continued the policy of deportations; rather, he and Bush inherited the problem from fifteen years previously and stopped it almost immediately after the 2009 agreement.) 

In the past months, however, the Trump administration re-initiated the process of confiscating Latinx passports and issuing deportation orders.  As a result, some citizens with official US birth certificates or passports are being held in immigration detention centers and are subject to deportation proceedings.

The government has not yet issued any criteria for identifying people who were actually born in the US nor has it given reasons to suspect that any these individuals were in fact born in Mexico.  So far, the only criterion seems to be that the person is Latinx and delivered by a midwife along the border.  The government has insisted on further proof, such as hospital records, evidence of their mother’s prenatal care, baptismal certificates, family Bibles, school records, rental agreements and so on.  Lacking that, confiscated passports and, in some cases, initiated deportation proceedings.  Some of these citizens are 40 years old or more.  Some have served in the military.  There is no rationale offered.  The bottom line is that some US citizens who have legitimate passports must prove that they are citizens, by criteria few of the rest of us could fulfill either.  Even for those who are not detained, important civil rights are no longer protected:

• voting,
• foreign travel (even to visit relatives in their home country),
• public assistance benefits,
• freedom from arrest as undocumented immigrants,
• even the right to return to the US after a trip away,
• and others.

The State Department has so far refused to report how widespread the detentions are, but lawyers along the border have reported a marked increase in deportation proceedings of both citizens and documented immigrants.  Despite trampling on the due process clauses in the 4th and 15th Amendments to our Constitution, the Administration plows ahead. 

The impact of this new policy will be felt in several areas:

• Although the Supreme Court will undoubtedly rule the practice unconstitutional, the real impact on other immigrants—both documented and undocumented as well as on naturalized citizens—will be profound.  Even after the Supreme Court determines the policy unconstitutional, the damage will have been done and the fear will persist.  The reluctance to have contact with government agencies will sharpen.  The food-stamp program, other important benefit programs for naturalized and other citizens—voluntary contact with law enforcement, and perhaps even emergency room visits and school education for children—will almost certainly be affected, making life in the immigrant community even more painful than it already is.
• In the long run, and even more important to our democracy, this unconstitutional attack will undoubtedly be popular among Trump’s supporters.  The commitment to our Constitution and to the balance of powers within our government will be weakened.  Even among Trump’s critics, the notion that he can so easily subvert the democratic process will weaken our commitment to peaceful change and the constitutional process.
• When the basic constitutional right of due process has been trampled on, we can only imagine what will be next as the administration tries to stifle dissent,

The silence within the media after the first reports is also very concerning.  I will examine this and other impacts of Trump’s actions on the media in my next post. 
The power of this one man’s ability to damage our democracy becomes more and more frightening.

Taking Their Votes Away - Part 2

As I explained in the previous post, voter suppression in the United States is as old as the country.  At the very founding of our country, the vote was withheld from women, African Americans and other people of color, non-property owners and others; slavery legally prohibited African Americans from the vote; during Jim Crow, violence, threats of violence, poll taxes, and other techniques kept most people of color from voting.  Those kinds of obvious voter suppression are pretty much (but not completely) over. 

Voter suppression and attempts at voter suppression, however, are still very real, just more sophisticated than before Jim Crow. 

“Voter ID”

“Voter ID” laws allow people to vote only if they provide certain forms of government-issued ID, usually with picture identification.  Voter ID laws discourage classes of people from voting, especially people of color and the poor.  These laws (and, especially, legislative attempts to create these laws) have become increasingly common over the past several years, predominantly in the states where the legislature and/or the governor are Republican.  (Wikipedia has a comprehensive [although I think somewhat confusing] entry on voter ID laws from which much of the following is taken.)

The stated rationale for voter ID laws) is to prevent voter-impersonation fraud, ie, people voting twice, undocumented immigrants voting, and people voting for another person.  (Even citizen-immigrants can be scared off for fear of attracting law-enforcement attention.)  Not surprisingly, these methods disproportionately target groups that mostly vote for Democrats:

• the poor,
• the less educated,
• immigrants,
• the elderly,
• those with prison records,
• non-car-owners,
• and those who find it more difficult or less necessary to acquire such identification.
• Cost can be a significant barrier: a Harvard study determined that the expenses for documentation, travel, and waiting time for obtaining voter identification cards typically range from $75-$175.  When legal fees are added in, the costs range as high as $1500, a not insignificant sum for low-income voters or some in minority groups.

While both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have used gerrymandering (see Part 1) for their own purposes, it’s been the Republican Party that has led efforts to create more stringent voter ID laws for their stated objective of preventing voter impersonation.  Not surprisingly, it’s been an extremely conservative organization, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that prepared model legislation to impose photo ID requirements; these have then been circulated to conservative state legislators.

It must be stated clearly that in the United States there is absolutely no evidence for significant voter impersonation fraud (the only type of fraud that a picture ID would prevent); it is extraordinarily rare, never coming close to being an actual problem in an election, certainly not one that would influence the results of a real-world election.  As The Washington Post found in a study of one billion ballots (local, state and federal elections), there were only 31 credible (not proven) claims of individual voter fraud (considerably less than the chance of being hit by lightning.)  There are multiple such studies with then same results.  Anyone who looks at the data can see that voter ID laws do far more damage to the electoral system by suppressing votes than good by preventing the minuscule number of fraudulent votes.

Other forms of suppression

Other states have laws that appear bipartisan and fair but actually affect primarily the poor and minorities.  States have

• drastically limited early voting and voting by mail;
• disseminated misinformation about voting, especially in poor or minority areas; and
• reduced voting resources (such as polling booths) in certain areas. 
• After the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, over 850 voting centers closed, especially in the South, mostly in immigrant, minority, and other poor counties, leading to long voting lines and voters dropping out. 
• In Arizona the legislature prohibited people and organizations (like the League of Women Voters) from collecting other people’s ballots and handing them in.  This made it more difficult for people without transportation to vote.  The courts let the law stand.
• In the 2000 election, the state of Florida purged from their voting list all felons since they were not eligible to vote.  Unfortunately, their information was incomplete, so they also purged thousands of people with no criminal record based solely on things like having the same name as another person who was a felon or a similar address.  Since convicted felons are disproportionately people of color and poor, the improper purging removed thousands of voters who would have had been much more likely to vote Democratic. Bush won Florida (and thus the US presidential election) by less than 600 votes; without the purging, Gore would have been elected president.
• Other disincentives to voting include having voting day on a weekday and
• during business hours,
• not allowing automatic voter registration upon getting an official ID or
• refusing to allow same-day registration.
• Across the United State voting always takes place on a single day in the middle of the work day, mostly during workhours when blue- and pink-collar works are less able get time to vote.

As I mentioned in the last post, political gerrymandering has been used by both parties, although more broadly by Republicans.   Otherwise, voter suppression tactics exist mostly in Republican states (almost 2/3 of the states).  As in Florida in 2000, the impact on our democracy has been overwhelming.

We have become used to most of these tactics. But we should remember that they are yet another piece of a movement to prevent millions of people—most of whom are poor, minorities, or legal immigrants—from participating in our country’s selection of leaders, another direct attack on democracy in America.

Taking Their Votes Away - Part 1

The United States has a long and debasing history of disenfranchising entire classes of its people.  Most egregious, of course, were the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans and its long-term aftermath: Jim Crow, segregation, and most recently mass incarceration of African Americans.  But even at the very founding of our country, the vote was withheld not only from Native Americans and African Americans—both enslaved and free—but also from all women and white men who didn’t own land.

This is the first of two posts examining the United States’ different current uses of voter suppression.  In  this first post, I’ll look at:

1.    incarceration and the related felony disenfranchisement and
2.    gerrymandering

In the next post I will explore direct voter suppression.

Mass Incarceration and Felony Disenfranchisement

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 removed national legal obstacles to universal suffrage.  While the state Jim Crow laws were now no longer formally enforced,  however, their practices often remained.

Beginning in the 1970s, however, legislators found a new way of disenfranchising voters.  Lawmakers—both federal and state—began the process of mass incarceration, aimed disproportionately at people of color.  Between 1972 and 2010, the number of white people incarcerated grew from approximately 150 per 100,000 people in the population to 450 per 100,000, but for people of color the number increased from 500 per 100,000 to 2207 per 100,000.   The rate of black incarceration is thus more than five time the rate of white incarceration even though there is little difference in most crime rates.
After discharge from prison, the ex-offenders’ right to vote varies wildly from state to state.

1. Two states (Maine and Vermont) actually allow inmates to vote from prison. 
2. Fourteen states allow parolees to vote immediately upon discharge from prison. 
3. Twenty-one states prohibit felons from voting until the end of their parole. 
4. The other states don’t allow voting rights until after the entire sentence is completed and then require additional steps that are different from state-to-state.  Some of these conditions, such as a specific pardon from a governor, make restoration of voting rights highly unlikely … ever.

Since mass incarceration was intended primarily for the poor and especially people of color,  its impact is to disproportionately disenfranchise those same people, who are, not surprisingly, those who would vote primarily Democratic.

Gerrymandering
 
Gerrymandering is a method of drawing state voting districts to disadvantage some class(es) of people, usually members of a certain political party or color.  Although the Supreme Court has declared gerrymandering for racial reasons unconstitutional, in practice it still happens.  However, gerrymandering for political reasons is still considered constitutional.  It works like this:

• Every ten years the total population of the United States is divided by the number of seats in the House of Representatives to give the approximate number of people that should be in each congressional voting district, currently about 10,000. Districts are allotted to states based on their populations.  States then draw their own district boundaries for their allocation.  The residents of each district will elect one congressperson to the House of Representatives. So far all is fair.
• But states themselves draw the boundaries for each of their districts and the committees that determine boundaries are generally chosen by the majority party.  With a few exceptions, these committees determine the boundaries to the advantage of their parties, ie gerrymandering.  The following graph from the Washington Post offers a greatly simplified example of the process. 
• Let’s suppose you have a small state with fifty voters and five districts with ten voters each, four Red (40%) and six Blue (60%).  For simplicity’s sake, imagine that the districts are laid out as below. 

•     The simplest and fairest way to divide up the state into five district would to divide the voters by rows (see below).  The voters in each district would be completely Blue or Red.  The state would have 2 Red congresspeople and the Blue 3, exactly in proportion to their population.

• But if the Red controlled the state legislature, they could draw the boundaries as in the middle column where—despite being the minority—they would have 3 (60%) of the districts while the Blue would have only 2 (40%). 
• Or if the Blue controlled the legislature, they could divide the districts as in the right column giving them all of the districts and the Red none.
• Put simply, the idea is to pack as many voters from one party into one or two districts so that the other party can easily win the remaining districts.

Maryland’s Third District (in purple) is an extreme example of the extent to which a party will go to gerrymander the districts to their advantage.  In this case, the purple is all one mostly Democratic district.

While Democratic Maryland wins the prize for most bizarre gerrymandering, it’s the Republican gerrymandering that has the greatest impact on partisan voting.  Republicans win the gerrymandering battle by a large margin.  Gerrymandering is perhaps the most powerful method of reducing the impact of any person on an election.

What’s in the Next Post
 
In the next post I’ll look at other forms of overt suppression: voter ID laws, limiting voting times eliminating voting by mail, reducing resources in certain voting districts, and so on.