President-elect Donald Trump has made mass detention of immigrant communities a central part of his political platform. Trump’s cabinet nominees are reportedly laying the groundwork to expand detention capacity in cities around the country. The Trump administration's proposed plans include making detention mandatory, which would trap immigrants in abusive, inhumane conditions for years as they fight deportation.

Immigration detention, or civil detention for those awaiting a determination of their immigration status or deportation, must be limited. Right now President Joe Biden can act to limit mass detention of immigrants by closing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities with egregious records of human rights violations and abuses and halt further detention expansion.

During the last Trump presidency, ICE opened more than 40 new detention facilities, with the vast majority owned or operated by private prison corporations, whose business model depends on locking up more people and are ultimately accountable to their bottom line.

Earlier this summer, President Biden directed ICE to issue Requests for Information (RFIs) and contract solicitations to identify new detention facilities to allow for a possible expansion of immigration detention across the country. These RFIs and contract solicitation indicated that ICE is considering expanding detention in at least 17 states.

Right now ICE detains approximately 37,000 people each day. These numbers exceed its annual budget and congressionally-approved detention levels. Efforts to expand the mass detention machine would lay the groundwork for future administrations to continue to abuse its detention powers, especially with the support of the next Trump administration.

Immigration detention has become another system of mass incarceration for Black and Brown people in the United States. It is also often inhumane. Congress, government oversight agencies, the media, and advocacy groups have documented widespread abuse in immigration detention centers, including use of force, sexual assault, and solitary confinement. In the past four years alone, at least 43 people have died in ICE custody. A recent ACLU study showed that 95 percent of deaths in ICE custody were likely preventable had ICE provided adequate medical and mental health care.

These abusive conditions come at an immense cost to taxpayers, while lining the pockets of private prison corporations. Nearly 90 percent of people in ICE detention are held in facilities owned or operated by private prison companies. In 2022, the GEO Group made $1.05 billion in revenue from ICE contracts alone. President Trump intends to continue funneling money to these private corporations. His proposed immigration policies are by far crueler, more extreme, and more fundamentally damaging to core rights and freedoms than any in living memory, including his own 2017-21 policies. Mass raids and deportations, detention camps, and other extreme measures create terror in our communities and do nothing to make our immigration system function more effectively.

The ACLU is calling on President Biden to close detention facilities and halt ICE’s current detention expansion plans. These steps are vital to protect communities from the planned enforcement agenda of the incoming administration. They are also vital to saving lives and preventing abuses against people in ICE custody, often committed by for-profit prison companies. ICE should also immediately rescind all outstanding requests for information or proposals for detention expansion.

“Immigration detention is cruel, unnecessary, and risky. President Biden must act now to do all that he can now to prevent full-scale attacks against vulnerable immigrant communities.” -- Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney, ACLU National Prison Project

President Biden can stop the expansion of immigration detention facilities and close abusive detention facilities once and for all. Urge him to do so today.

Twenty minutes from where I grew up, in Owasso, Oklahoma, Nex Benedict was relentlessly bullied for being trans. This bigoted aggression continued for more than a year and, last March, Nex died after being physically beaten in a school bathroom.

Nex is far from alone. According to a recent study by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention one in four transgender youth missed school because they knew they were unsafe. A Department of Education (ED) investigation found that Nex’s experience was part of a routine negligence to prevent sex-based harassment in their school district.

Trans Day of Remembrance is an annual ceremony of mourning for the trans and gender non-conforming people whose lives were lost to anti-trans violence this year. In 2024, four of those lost were teenagers, like Nex. The youngest, Pauly Likens, was murdered at just 14. Memorializing our trans kindred we lost in the previous year started with the 1998 death of Rita Hester and, for 26 years, this day has served as a reminder of how vitally important it is that we remember those we’ve lost, and that we continue to fight for justice.

I started my advocacy doing reproductive justice organizing in Oklahoma, not far from where Nex grew up. At the core of reproductive justice is the fundamental belief that everyone has the right to decide if, when, and how they have children and the right to raise those children in a safe and healthy environment. In that work, I saw anti-abortion legislators in Oklahoma pursue countless policies that allowed the state to police our bodies, from abortion access to gender identity. It was that fundamental belief in autonomy — that my body is mine, and mine alone — helped me understand my own transness.

Trans individuals are policed because we bend expectations of gender when we inhabit public spaces like bathrooms, when we seek housing, relationships, and education. Social, political, and legal institutions continue to attempt to control our bodies and our lives. But it is this refusal of expectations, this insistence on the freedom to be ourselves, that makes us who we are. Right now, extremist politicians across the country are putting our lives at risk when they restrict access to abortion and gender-affirming care. Josseli Barnica died waiting for emergency abortion care. Trans youth and their parents have reported devastating interruptions in medically-necessary health care when politicians attempt to ban gender-affirming care. In one study, 70 percent of gender-affirming care providers reported receiving threats to their personal safety or their practice.

On this Trans Day of Remembrance, I can’t stop thinking about the important precedent the Supreme Court is about to set. On December 4, the Supreme Court will take up U.S. v Skrmetti, a case that would decide whether or not trans youth are protected by the Constitution. This case asks the court to decide whether Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming hormone therapies for transgender minors violates the Equal Protection Clause. The ACLU is prepared to tell the court what we know is true: Trans people are protected by the Constitution, just like everyone else, and that includes our access to gender-affirming care.

My colleagues and I are working tirelessly for the right to live our lives with dignity and the right to choose what is best for our own bodies. But today, I am also grieving. In our grief, justice can feel like an abstract concept, but in our pain and anger is an understanding that, even when justice feels bloodless, injustice must still be stopped. The relentless political attacks on the LGBTQ community that seek to dehumanize us must be stopped. The lack of adequate medical care, shelter and mental health resources must be stopped.

Mariame Kaba reminds us that we should let our grief radicalize us rather than lead us to despair. It is not radical to want safety and justice for myself and my community — it is a fundamental right. Trans people deserve the freedom to be who we are.

Today, we mourn and honor those who we have lost. Tomorrow, we celebrate, support, and fight like hell for the trans and non-binary people who are still living.

President-elect Donald Trump has chilling plans to use his second term to expand the federal death penalty. This expansion continues the killing spree he initiated in the final six months of his first presidency when Trump oversaw more executions than any president in the past 120 years. His plans for a second term include sentencing more people to die, expanding the category of crimes punishable by death, and killing all 40 people currently on federal death row.

President Joe Biden can — and must — act now to finish the death penalty reform work his administration began in 2020. He must commute the sentences of all people on federal death row to stymie Trump’s plans and to redress the racial injustice inherent to capital punishment.

Tell President Biden to Commute the Row

The federal death penalty is plagued with systemic flaws at the expense of human life. Donald Trump has promised to expand it. We must act now....

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

The ACLU has long fought for an end to the death penalty. We know that its cruel practices are out of step with the fundamental values of our democratic system. Trump’s return to the White House, and his unprecedented, extreme, and inhumane stance on capital punishment, only threaten to make an already cruel system more dangerous.

Already, Trump has called to unconstitutionally expand the death penalty to include non-homicide crimes, such as drug-related offenses. He has also reportedly called for the death penalty as punishment for those who leak information against him in the press or undermine him politically. He has suggested bringing back firing squads, the guillotine, and hangings by noose – a symbol and tool of our country’s sordid legacy of lynching and racial terror.

Trump’s promise to expand the death penalty magnifies the systemic inequities that already plague our capital punishment system. The federal death penalty, like state capital punishment systems, is error prone, racially-biased, and a drain on public resources. More than half of those under federal death sentence in 2024 are people of color, some of whom were convicted by all-white juries. People with serious mental illnesses, intellectual disabilities, brain damage, and histories of trauma are also overrepresented on death rows across the country, including the federal row. Additionally, as long as the death penalty exists, we risk executing innocent people, as evidenced by the 200 people who have been sentenced to death and exonerated since 1973.

In 2020, Biden made history as the first president to openly oppose the death penalty. Under his leadership, the Department of Justice (DOJ) acknowledged the death penalty’s disparate impact on people of color as well as the staggering number of people who have been sentenced to death and, subsequently, exonerated over the past five decades. Though Biden stopped short of acting on his promise to secure an end to capital punishment, he can still save lives and help build a legacy rooted in racial justice by commuting all federal death sentences to life in prison.

Studies show that the death penalty does not keep our communities safer. In fact, research has consistently shown that the death penalty does not deter homicides and that in states that homicides are lower in states that do not have the death penalty.

Trump has consistently ignored these facts. Instead, during his last term, he went on a killing spree and rapidly executed 13 men in quick succession without regard for serious miscarriages of justice. Of the 13 people Trump executed in his last term, two were Black men sentenced as teenagers, one was a woman with mental illness who had survived a lifetime of horrific sexual abuse and torture, another was a man with intellectual disabilities, and there was also a 67-year-old man whose Alzheimer’s disease left him unaware of the reason he was sentenced to die. A majority of the 13 executed were people of color, including seven Black men and one Native American man.

These executions, particularly of people with mental illness and intellectual disability, demonstrate that no amount of procedure eliminates the fundamental flaws of the death penalty.

The ACLU is calling on President Biden to commute the sentences of all people on federal death row before he leaves office. Commuting federal death sentences will redress the legacy of racial bias inherent to capital punishment and make Trump’s brutal plans for another killing spree impossible. If Biden does this he’ll not only take away Trump’s power to oversee another execution, but he’ll also help set the U.S. on a different course. By setting an example of empathy and a willingness to root out injustice, he can pave the way for future administrations to build on his legacy and finally end capital punishment.

Our work is not confined to federal commutation efforts. The Eighth Amendment forbids cruel and usual punishment, including Trump’s proposals to expand the application of the death penalty to non-homicide crimes like drug trafficking and to use methods like hanging or the guillotine. The ACLUis ready on day one to challenge inhumane death penalty expansion efforts and any attempts to return to regressive killing methods.

At the state-level, the ACLU will build on our ongoing work against the death penalty. We’ll continue our litigation in states like Kansas and North Carolina under laws that are more protective than the U.S. Constitution — like state racial justice acts and constitutions — to invalidate the death penalty based on its racist administration, including in the selection of jury members.

“The death penalty is a morally-bankrupt and inescapably racist institution. President Biden came into office committing to abolishing the federal death penalty because of its fundamental flaws. Commuting the federal row is the way he can honor that commitment, and prevent irreversible miscarriages of justice.” — Yasmin Cader, ACLU deputy legal director and the director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality.”

President Biden can commute all federal death sentences before his time as president ends, saving lives, preventing an irreversible miscarriage of justice, and building a legacy rooted in racial justice and compassion. Urge him to do so today.