In recent months, at least seven children have either died in custody or died after being detained by federal immigration agencies at the border. These children came to the United States desperate for shelter and safety, but found inhumanity and suffering, under our government’s care, instead.
Their deaths reveal just how dire the conditions are under which U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) are holding hundreds of children. Detention facilities are dangerously overcrowded, where migrants are forced to wear soiled clothes for days at a time. To make matters worse, CBP also appears to be holding children for extended periods of time in direct conflict with the Flores agreement, a set of legal guidelines that provide humane conditions for immigrant children in detention — guidelines the Trump administration is now attempting to dismantle, arguing in court that it doesn’t require CBP to provide basic toiletries to keep children clean.
The government may argue that their hands are tied by a lack of resources, but the truth is that these horrors are simply the latest attempt to dehumanize asylum-seekers and migrants, including children, and deny them basic care and dignity.
U.S. Border Patrol, the law enforcement arm of CBP, has more than doubled in staff and funding since 2003. CBP has dealt with even higher levels of border crossers arrivals in the past and has 17 times the budget it did in 1990.
And yet, the department continues to have a heinous track record of rampant reported abuses in detention facilities, with adults dying on their watch as well as children, all with almost no accountability standards. There have been 97 fatalities at the hands of CBP agents since 2004, including the murder of Claudia Gomez Gonzalez, an unarmed, indigenous 20-year-old woman who was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent in May 2018.
The department has had ample time and resources to figure out their processes and be more forthcoming with a plan to address influxes of asylum seekers, particularly families, at the U.S.-Mexico border. Yet, they continue to be opaque in their answers to members of Congress and push misleading data about border crossings.
DHS’ campaign of deflecting and wearing down the American people’s standards for humane treatment of immigrants must stop now. It is unconscionable for our society to continue in this direction with the memory of preventable deaths now forever emblazoned on our history.
We cannot continue believing the falsehoods of the Department of Homeland Security and its agencies. Congress must demand transparency from DHS, so that real solutions to prevent these deaths can be enacted. Appropriators are currently deciding the next budget for DHS, including ICE and CBP, and they should ensure the agencies are not granted any more funding while children and adults continue to be abused and die while in custody.
The ACLU will continue its fight to ensure that immigrants are treated with justice and humanity. Our lawsuit to reunite families — which includes some of the children enduring these horrific CBP conditions — is ongoing. At the Border Rights Center, we are monitoring CBP’s actions to ensure that their actions no longer go unnoticed. And in Washington, we will fight to ensure that these agencies’ budgets do not increase, so that our taxpayer dollars do not fund the abuse of human beings.
The United States must provide dignified shelter and care to all people, including those accessing their legal right to seek asylum and refuge — period. We cannot afford any more lives lost.
Blog by Cynthia Pompa, Advocacy Manager, ACLU Border Rights Center. Originally published on ACLU's Speak Freely.
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Monday, June 24, 2019 - 12:00pm
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Since 2006, the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles has used face surveillance technology to try to weed out fraudulent license applicants. From day one, the RMV has allowed law enforcement agencies across Massachusetts and the United States to use its drivers license database and face surveillance tech with no transparency, accountability, or oversight required.
The company that sells this technology to the RMV is called IDEMIA, a French multinational biometrics corporation worth approximately $3 billion. Now, this very same company has released a new video analytics product called Augmented Vision that allows cameras to analyze people and their movements in real-time.
According to IDEMIA, the system includes multiple algorithms with the ability to recognize not only faces but silhouettes, vehicles, number plates, and an unspecified number of objects. All of those capabilities raise serious civil rights concerns, but a particularly pernicious advancement in the technology is its automated “access control system,” which claims to identify a “person of interest,” provide a direct alert, and automatically deny that person access to a space. Presumably, the same technology could be used by governments to track people as they move through public space in real time.
The company doesn’t define “person of interest,” meaning decisions about who is “interesting” to authorities will likely be left to the software user. A system like this could, according to the press release, help police determine who is allowed in a given area, and who may be flagged, stopped, or banned from entering a given area. It is unclear whether the system matches faces in real-time to a database of existing faces, such as from drivers licenses, or whether a user is able to declare a “person of interest” based on characteristics like race, age, and gender. Both of these capabilities allow for the automated tracking and banning of people without their informed consent.
There are currently no statutes in the United States regulating how government agencies can deploy technologies like these, leaving room for abuse, misuse, and discrimination to run rampant.
While the company’s marketing materials make it sound like Augmented Vision is primarily useful for controlling something like employee access to a corporate building, IDEMIA sees no such restriction on the uses of its product. According to the materials, the company envisions its software in cameras in public and private spaces, including airports, stadiums, retail spaces, and commercial buildings. The software does not require specific hardware, and can be integrated into any existing camera infrastructure.
The ability to secretly monitor and ban people from commercial spaces is unnerving, but these technologies pose particularly serious risks in the hands of law enforcement agencies. In the absence of strong privacy rules, there are no requirements that police disclose on what basis they are tracking people, where they are being tracked, what information police are storing about people, or how that information may be used for stops, searches, surveillance, and arrests.
That is one reason why the ACLU of Massachusetts supports legislation calling for a moratorium on Massachusetts government use of at-a-distance biometric surveillance technologies like face recognition until proper regulations are passed to protect civil rights and civil liberties. Biometric surveillance technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, without any legal protections in place to guard our most basic freedoms. It’s time to Press Pause on face surveillance now, before it’s too late.
Take action.
This blog post was written by ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty intern Sarah Powazek.
Date
Monday, June 24, 2019 - 2:45pm
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