This post was originally published in The Palm Beach Post.

Former President Donald Trump stoked his 2016 election campaign by labeling immigrants as “criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” During four years in office, he vilified immigrant communities, co-opted local law enforcement to collaborate in hunting them down and wasted billions of taxpayer dollars building a wall on our southern border that serves, primarily, as a failed monument to prejudice. 

Another “accomplishment” of the past four years was the unnecessary — and extremely expensive — increase in the number of immigrants held in federal detention centers.

Since 2017, 40 new detention facilities have opened, most of them run by private, for-profit operators. Many others are run by local governments lured by the same sordid promise of money at the expense of immigrants’ rights. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, over 55,000 people per night were jammed in those centers, including in facilities across Florida. 

This system has long been plagued by dismal, life-threatening conditions and severely deficient health care. Nationwide in 2020, 21 people reportedly died in ICE detention (including at least one death in Florida) or shortly after being released. Eight of those deaths were due to COVID-19, according to the Vera Institute. That’s the highest annual death toll since 2005.

Despite these realities, in fiscal year 2021, the Trump administration requested taxpayers increase funding for ICE detention to more than $4 billion, with the intent of expanding daily detention capacity to 60,000. Expanding this inhumane system is the opposite direction we should have been moving. 

But the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that a different way is possible, and the release of tens of thousands of detained persons across the country illustrates how unnecessary our bloated system is. In response to public outcry over the pandemic and litigation by immigrant advocates, ICE has been forced to reduce the number of people in detention to 14,000 and the new administration needs to ensure that the numbers are reduced even more.

In South Florida alone, last May a federal judge ordered three immigration detention centers to lower their total population to no more than 75% of capacity. On April 28, the ACLU sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas calling for the closure of 39 detention facilities across the country, including three in Florida: Baker County Detention Center, Glades County Detention Center, and the Krome North Service Processing Center. The Biden administration should immediately close these facilities with egregious records of abuse.

Beyond these 39 facilities, all detention centers must immediately end inhumane conditions, including the elimination of solitary confinement and forced feeding, and seriously investigate civil rights and civil liberties complaints. 

Florida was routinely among the 10 states with the highest levels of detention, and we must do more to protect immigrants detained in our communities.

In one particular Florida facility, the Glades County Detention Center, conditions have become so life-threatening that a coalition of advocacy organizations filed a civil rights and civil liberties complaint in February with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The ACLU’s letter echoes calls from organizations and advocates in Florida who are calling for ICE to terminate their contract with Glades County, among other recommendations, in light of the testimonies in the complaint and the long history of horrific conditions in this facility. 

This is the same Florida facility where ICE reported a death due to COVID-19 last summer, days after a federal judge dismissed a request by the ACLU to urgently release nine medically vulnerable persons detained there. There have been a combination of at least seven complaints and lawsuits filed regarding Glades alone. Troubling reports of conditions in this facility and others in Florida continue on a regular basis.

ICE also needs to end the practice of guaranteeing payment to detention contractors for filling a certain number of beds every night, a policy that ensures they remain profitable and also guarantees that thousands of immigrants are unnecessarily detained, separated from their families and placed at risk due to crowded conditions and poor health services. Financial incentives should not be regarded over human life. 

This model is unsustainable in the end. This is why the Wakulla County Sheriff's office recently terminated its contract with ICE deep in debt, after profiting from the detention of immigrants for the past 30 years. The warehousing of immigrants is unnecessary and costly. Local governments in Florida and elsewhere have no business supporting this cruel and inhumane system. 

Most of the reforms we need can still be achieved in the first year of the Biden administration, without the involvement of Congress. While initial efforts to recalibrate immigration enforcement priorities are going in the right direction, they still fall far short of what is needed to reverse the past four years of immigration detention policies driven by racist rhetoric, demonization of immigrants, malicious separation of families, fiscal irresponsibility and a cruel disregard for the crucial contribution that immigrants continue to make to our society. 

What we know for certain is that, unless the Biden administration acts decisively to address the detention problem at the heart of our immigration system, the countless human rights and civil rights abuses we have already witnessed will continue.

On March 5, when Deb Mihal learned that the governor of South Carolina had just ordered non-essential state employees like herself to return to the office in person and full time with just a few weeks’ notice, she knew it was going to be a problem. Ms. Mihal had been doing her job as director of disability services for a public college remotely since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, in addition to supervising her son’s remote schooling at the same time. Now, she had less than a month to find child care.

It was too late to switch her son from remote instruction to in-person learning, and she couldn’t find anyone appropriate to supervise her son. And the fear of increasing her family’s exposure to COVID-19, before anyone was yet eligible to be vaccinated, loomed. This put her in a position of having to choose between her paycheck and her family’s health.

Ms. Mihal was hardly alone: We’ve heard from numerous other state employees — disproportionately caregivers, women, and people with disabilities — confronting similar hardships after the governor announced that tens of thousands of non-essential staff who had been working remotely for over a year must suddenly report to the office. Many were denied accommodations. That’s why yesterday we filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission asking the agency to investigate the discriminatory effects of South Carolina’s “return mandate.”

To be clear, the problem is not transitioning back to in-person work — that is inevitably happening in one form or another across the country, and for most, will bring a welcome return to normalcy. The problem arises when return mandates are issued with inadequate notice to workers, and in a manner divorced from the ongoing hardships of the pandemic — for example, before schools are open in-person full time, and child care facilities are back in operation at normal capacity. And if the South Carolina mandate is any indication of what is to come, it raises the likelihood that these mandates will play out in a way that is not just potentially harmful to workers and their families, but also discriminatory.

Many of these burdens result directly from government policies like school closures and guidelines on social distancing issued in response to the pandemic. While those policies have generally been necessary to protect public health, the government is putting state workers in an impossible position, requiring them to return to normal working conditions before ensuring that the critical supports they need to make that possible have returned to “normal” levels. And without these supports, “return to office” mandates could lead to the next wave of pandemic push-out of women and people of color from the workforce.

The toll of job losses during the pandemic has already fallen disproportionately on women and people of color. Despite the advances in most fields, women remain disproportionately responsible for caregiving for children and adult dependents in the home. Studies have long shown that women are more likely to adjust their schedules and reduce hours when the needs of children and other family members collide with work. Indeed, mothers with young children have reduced their work hours during the pandemic four to five times more than fathers, growing the gender gap in work hours by 20-50 percent. And women have left the labor force during the pandemic at a far greater rate than men, with Black and Latina women showing the highest rates of job losses.

Return mandates issued prior to widespread vaccination are also likely to exacerbate existing racial disparities in the health impacts of COVID-19. For example, in South Carolina, Black people constitute 27 percent of the population, yet they have accounted for 38 percent of COVID hospitalizations and 32 percent of COVID deaths. At the same time, Black people represent only 19 percent of those vaccinated, compared to 64 percent who are white. This will likely compound the disparities already faced by communities of color, and in particular Black communities and women of color, who were disproportionately represented in jobs deemed essential — and thus who were already required to return to work in person — over the course of the pandemic.

And no matter how long employees are given to return, or how much progress has been made in vaccination efforts, the ongoing — and still deadly — COVID-19 pandemic still requires accommodations to be made for workers with medical conditions or disabilities that make them or their loved ones especially vulnerable to infection, or those dealing with specific conditions, such as pregnancy and lactation, where the data on the safety of vaccines is still limited.

This week’s discrimination charge comes on top of a lawsuit we filed against Governor McMaster last month. Other states and cities had best take note that if they rush into forcing remote employees to return to the office without confronting the ongoing realities of the pandemic, they could cause new setbacks to workplace equality that will take decades to overcome. That’s not only unwise, it’s also illegal.