Over 150,000 Black and Brown children, disproportionately children with disabilities, are handcuffed, restrained, referred to law enforcement, and arrested in schools across the nation each year. Placing police in our schools perpetuates a chilling pattern of racial and disability discrimination that endangers and traumatizes our children and funnels them into the school to prison pipeline. School policing is a threat to our students’ civil rights and to their right to learn in safe and supportive school environments. This is why we’re calling on President Biden to stop policing our students by ending federal funding of police in schools.

Today, we sent a letter to President Biden with more than 150 organizations and individuals — including the Dignity in Schools Campaign, National Urban League, UnidosUS, YWCA USA, and the National Disability Rights Network, among others — calling on Biden to issue an executive order eliminating federal funding of police in schools and to work with Congress toward this goal. There are currently 14 million students in schools with police and no nurses, social workers, or psychologists. Instead of pouring money into law enforcement, President Biden must redirect the additional $300 million designated for community policing — which often goes into placing police in schools — and invest it in our communities. This money should be spent on community-led and community-centered safety strategies and getting more counselors and other supportive school staff, not cops, into our schools.

School districts across the country receive federal funding from the Department of Justice to hire police for their schools. Police in schools do what they are trained to do — detain, handcuff, and arrest — and students of color and students with disabilities are often the ones who pay the price.

In Osceola County, Florida, a school police officer body-slammed Taylor Bracey, a 16-year-old Black girl, to the concrete ground as she was walking down the school hallway. She was knocked unconscious and experienced a concussion, and now has memory loss and other traumas.

In San Antonio, Texas, a 7-year-old Latino boy with autism had an outburst during class at his elementary school. What was the school police officer’s response? He handcuffed the crying child, put him into a patrol vehicle, and drove him to emergency detention at a behavioral hospital.

Sadly, these are not isolated incidents. Students of color and students with disabilities are up to three times more likely to be referred to police and arrested in schools across the nation. And if historical trends in the data hold true, law enforcement in schools will continue to disproportionately target students of color, students with disabilities, and students of color with disabilities.

In response, we’ve seen communities across the country pushing their schools to divest funding from police and reinvest those funds in student mental health care and other supportive services. Several school boards and cities across the country have already decided that police no longer belong in their schools. For example, a large district in Oakland, California eliminated its school police department following strong community-led advocacy, and committed to a community-driven process to develop an alternative safety plan that would include funds for mental health professionals and other staff to support all students of color. In Portland, Oregon, smaller districts redirected its school police funding to hire more counselors, social workers, and other direct student supports. However, far too many other localities continue to use police in schools, despite the demands of students, parents, and community members.

President Biden has an important part to play to stop the policing of our students. Federal funding plays a key role. It is a core reason so many Black and Brown communities have police regularly stationed in their schools. The DOJ’s COPS Office awarded $50 million to 160 school districts and municipalities for school police in 2020 alone. While municipal governments and state legislatures have a role in keeping our students safe from police violence and trauma, President Biden should lead from Washington, D.C.

This is a unique opportunity for President Biden to uphold his administration’s promise to advance racial equity, redress harm to children with disabilities, and set a strong example for our nation’s schools. The time to invest in policing has passed. It is now time to invest in our students.

This month, the ACLU launched its Systemic Equality agenda — an initiative designed to center equity and attack our country’s legacy of systemic racism by addressing the imbalance of political power, challenging policies that ravage Black communities, and furthering efforts to advance our racial justice work. As a part of this ambitious effort, the ACLU is making an unprecedented investment in the people and region where vulnerable communities are most affected by local and national regressive policies: the South.

From Reconstruction to the attacks on democracy following the Black Lives Matter movement mobilizations this summer and the historic 2020 election, there is and has always been political backlash in retaliation to the advancement of marginalized people — particularly in the deep South. Those rooted in on-the-ground organizing and advocacy work in such places as Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana know that investment in people who live and fight in the South will lead to results that reverberate across the nation.

The ACLU has a long history of protecting civil rights and advancing racial equality in the South. We were founded nationally more than a hundred years ago, and by the late 1960s had an affiliate office open in every state in the South and a Southern Regional office. ACLU staff here have worked closely with our partners over the last 50 years to make progress in dismantling the Jim Crow system and to fight for the right to vote. Over the last several years, the ACLU invested deeply in its affiliates across the South, creating new opportunities for additional legal, communications, electoral, organizing, and legislative staff.

But if the last four years have taught us anything, it is that the South is still ground zero, and we have much work to do. Two years ago, the leadership of our Southern affiliates began to talk about how to take our work to the next level: How can we more effectively address the challenges in the region together, rooted in the South’s unique history of racial oppression and violence and equally remarkable history of civil rights struggles and victories? By the end of last year, we launched the Southern Collective, a collaborative project of the national office and the ACLU affiliate offices of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Together, we launched the Southern Voting Project, a regional initiative to protect and expand voting rights — one of the most critical racial justice issues — to operate at our highest capacity during the 2020 election. We engaged in election protection and get out the vote efforts, fought back against voter suppression efforts, and helped people get access to absentee ballots during the pandemic. We invested funds, ran electoral bootcamps, built new voter contact infrastructure, and joined together to educate and activate historically disenfranchised communities in the South. And we saw immediate results.

As a result of this investment, Alabama and Mississippi, which do not have early voting, saw record-breaking numbers in turnout boosted by the ACLU’s litigation and advocacy efforts that focused on expanding absentee access before Election Day. The ACLU of Tennessee’s voter contact program more than doubled its goals for volunteers taking action. The ACLU of Kentucky reached tens of thousands of newly eligible voters with criminal convictions whose right to vote had recently been restored. And after a chaotic and understaffed June primary, the ACLU of Georgia recruited nearly 3,000 people to be poll workers to address the massive staffing shortage due to COVID-19 and helped place almost 500 poll workers in key locations. In Alabama, we launched the state’s first statewide election protection initiative. We achieved these results by working together, learning from one another, and standing on each other’s shoulders to reach new heights.

Over the next two years, the ACLU will increase its investment directly in these Southern states to grow our Southern affiliates’ work on strengthening voting rights and democracy, ensuring reproductive justice in Black and Brown communities, and fighting for reparations.

Our Systemic Equality initiative is more than a policy platform; it is a culmination of the ACLU’s commitment to racial justice and our goal to be in alignment with the work we do externally. The support and information sharing we provide to local organizers and advocates in our affiliates across the country — and in the South — is paramount. We have long understood that systems do not create change, but our desire for liberation, equity, and equality ignites it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently deported a survivor of the 2019 Walmart massacre in El Paso, Texas, Rosa,* who was slated to testify at the suspect’s trial.

So how did she end up in ICE’s custody?

Before she was able to testify as a witness to the murder of 23 people — a murder committed by a man who authored a xenophobic and anti-Latinx manifesto before the crime — Rosa was arrested at a traffic stop by local law enforcement officers and detained for two outstanding traffic citations. According to ICE, the agency issued a detainer, or a request for a local law enforcement department to detain a person for ICE past their scheduled release. As a result, a person otherwise allowed to legally go free, perhaps by paying a fine, posting bond, or simply because there was no reason for their initial detention, is instead jailed for up to two days, so ICE can then detain and deport them.

ICE picked up Rosa and deported her to Mexico the very same day.

Many states have laws that try to compel counties to honor such detainers. Texas, Florida, and many other states have mandatory collaboration laws on the books, increasing ICE’s reach into local communities and taking away local communities’ power to decide how to spend their resources. Some counties also work with ICE by participating in a program known as 287(g), which delegates to local law enforcement officers the authority to perform some of ICE’s work.

The Biden administration can protect people like Rosa, reduce fear in our communities, and save taxpayer resources by ending the use of ICE detainers. As Biden builds support for  comprehensive immigration reform, his administration can move immediately to deliver meaningful and bold change by stopping ICE detainers and dismantling the 287(g) program.

Many law enforcement leaders who have personally witnessed the damage ICE has done in their communities are speaking out against these ICE programs, which undercut public safety by destroying community trust and contributing to a climate of fear. Just last November, voters in Charleston County, South Carolina, elected a new sheriff, Kristin Graziano, who committed to terminate the county’s longstanding 287(g) agreement with ICE and to no longer honor ICE detainers. She did so on her first day.

“We want people to be able to believe that they can turn to us, cooperate with us, when they’re a victim of a crime in our community,” Graziano said. “Our immigrant community currently does not have that trust in us, and that ends today with me.”

Two years earlier, Sheriff Garry McFadden of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, said that he canceled the county’s 287(g) contract “because it erodes trust with our community and ties up critical resources that should be used to ensure public safety.”

Both Graziano and McFadden defeated incumbent sheriffs who entered ICE agreements and supported continued work with ICE.

In November, voters in two Georgia counties, Cobb and Gwinnett, soundly rejected candidates who supported continued ICE collaboration, and elected sheriffs who were critical of ICE’s harmful role in their communities. Sheriff Craig Owens of Cobb terminated his county’s ICE contract in January, citing the fact that many immigrants were “not reporting crimes” out of “fear,” and Sheriff Keybo Taylor of Gwinnett terminated 287(g) and announced that he will stop honoring ICE detainers in order to “eliminate distrust.” Over 30 percent of all ICE 287(g) interactions in 2020 took place in the two Georgia counties.

Steven Carl, the Police Chief in Framingham County, Massachusetts, similarly stated that participation with ICE makes people “terrified of us” and “afraid” to report crimes when he rejected collaboration between his police department with ICE. Indeed, it is no wonder that studies have found that local collaboration with ICE undermines public safety.

Repairing community relationships isn’t the only reason that more law enforcement officials have decided not to help ICE. Local police who participate in the 287(g) program are emboldened to commit racial profiling, where officers target people of color and find questionable pretexts to arrest them on local charges just so that they can later be transferred into ICE custody. Sheriff Graziano said ICE made the Sheriff’s Office in Charleston “complicit in racial profiling of the Latinx community,” and apologized for the harm it had caused.

Local collaboration with ICE further jeopardizes immigrants’ safety by emboldening those who would target and exploit them, knowing that they are too afraid to seek help. Sheriff Dave Mahoney of Dane County, Wisconsin, said he didn’t want his deputies “to become ICE agents” in part because doing so might “empower [those] who are preying on the non-documented who fear coming forward to law enforcement.”

As communities seek to undo the damage wrought by the previous administration, the Biden administration should help local leaders rebuild confidence and trust by ending the use of detainers and other ICE programs that only bring pain and anguish.

*Rosa is a pseudonym used for her protection.