Sandra Botello, an unemployed mother living in Chicago, faced a difficult financial choice — pay $400 in school fees for her son or cover the cost of renewing Chicago’s mandatory vehicle sticker. She paid the school fees, keeping her son’s education moving forward — but within weeks received five $200 tickets for not having a vehicle sticker. Late fees and collection fees caused her debt to balloon to nearly $3000. Chicago impounded Botello’s car for unpaid tickets, charged additional fees for storing her car for 33 days, and ultimately sold the car for scrap, leaving her with thousands of dollars of debt.
 
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court hears argument in Chicago v. Fulton, a case with profound implications for Botello and millions of others across the country who are buried under mountains of debt from fines and fees they cannot afford to pay to state and local governments.  As our country grapples with an economic recession that has plunged millions of people into financial crisis — with Black and Brown communities hardest hit — the Supreme Court’s ruling on the bankruptcy question raised in Fulton is of critical importance nationwide.
 
Fulton concerns three bankruptcy cases resulting from Chicago’s draconian practice of addressing staggering budget gaps by squeezing people for money through hefty fines and fees, driver’s license suspension, and the seizure of their cars. Chicago seized the cars of Timothy Shannon and George Peake for unpaid tickets and the car of Robbin Fulton for driving on a license suspended for unpaid tickets. It also charged them thousands of dollars in fees to get their cars back. Unable to pay, each debtor sought a fresh start by filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy.
 
Instead of returning the cars to Fulton, Shannon, and Peake when they each filed for bankruptcy, Chicago kept the cars, making it hard for them to go to work, earn money, and care for their families. Their cases raise the question of whether a creditor violates the automatic stay and turnover provisions of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code when it decides, after a debtor has filed for bankruptcy, not to return estate property to the debtor. The bankruptcy courts and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals all ruled that Chicago violated the law. Chicago sought review in the Supreme Court.
 
Last March, the ACLU and groups across the ideological spectrum — the Cato Institute, Fines and Fees Justice Center, Institute for Justice, Rutherford Institute, and R Street Institute — submitted a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court in Fulton. We argue that Chicago’s practice of keeping cars violates both the plain text of the Bankruptcy Code and Congress’ intent in establishing bankruptcy to give people a fresh start.
 
Our brief explains that the Bankruptcy Code requires creditors to return estate property to debtors immediately after the filing of a bankruptcy petition because debtors often need that property — like their cars — to earn income and make the payments required for a Chapter 13 bankruptcy plan. Instead of playing by the rules, Chicago seeks to keep cars locked up to coerce debtors into paying Chicago first. This practice causes real harm.
 
For example, Fulton needed her car to get to her job, take her preschool age daughter to day care, and care for her elderly parents. Shannon, a housekeeper, needed his car to get to work. Peake needed his car for his daily 45-mile commute. None of this is surprising since 86 percent of Americans describe a car as a necessity of life and 70 percent of Chicago commuters drive alone to work.
 
Our brief also provides context critical to understanding the national importance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Fulton. Chicago’s ticketing and impoundment practices are part of a nationwide trend in which governments turn to fines, fees, and punitive collection practices — instead of taxes — to raise public revenue. Cities and towns across the country use ticketing to raise money, leading to what some call “taxation by citation.” Nearly 600 cities raise at least 10 percent of their general fund revenue through fines and fees, and at least 284 rely on fines and fees for 20 percent or more of their general funds.
 
These powerful incentives for governments to impose fines and fees people cannot afford lead to crushing debts. Fines that are manageable for a person of means may be out of reach for a poor or low-income person. As of April 2020, 37 percent of American adults surveyed by the Federal Reserve reported facing difficulty covering a $400 emergency expense. Those who cannot immediately pay often face draconian collection efforts — like the suspension of their driver’s licenses (a problem in 41 states and the District of Columbia, including Illinois) and vehicle impoundment — leading to more fines and fees.
 
As of 2018, people owed a staggering $1.45 billion to Chicago in unpaid tickets dating back to 1990. These ruinous debts have propelled tens of thousands of people to seek bankruptcy relief, causing the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to lead the nation in non-business Chapter 13 bankruptcy filings. Chicago, California, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Denver all use vehicle impoundment to collect certain fines and fees.
 
The COVID-19 pandemic has made matters worse. State and local budget deficits have skyrocketed due to the recent economic downturn, increasing pressure on governments to balance budgets through fines, fees, and punitive collection tactics. Chicago’s aggressive ticketing and impoundment practices initially sought to address a 2011 budget deficit of $650 million, which was itself the result of the last recession. Now, Chicago confronts a 2021 budget deficit that may be as high as $1.6 billion.
 
Millions of people nationwide are out of work and facing rent, utility, and other costs they cannot afford, with Black and Brown communities hit hardest. A summer 2020 poll of residents in Houston, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago revealed dramatic racial and ethnic disparities in pandemic-related financial distress. While 50 percent of Chicago households reported serious financial problems since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, 69 percent of Black households and 63 percent of Latinx households reported the same.
 
The increasingly common practice of imposing fines and fees to generate government revenue and of impounding vehicles as a collection tactic falls heavily on the poorest among us — especially people of color. In resolving Fulton, the Supreme Court must recognize that the Bankruptcy Code was designed to give those who fall into serious debt a chance to begin anew — and that Chicago is violating both the letter and purpose of the law.

Nusrat Choudhury, Legal Director, ACLU of Illinois

When Flor got word that she was going to be able to make her way into the U.S. and reunite with her family last May, she was ecstatic. For more than nine months, Flor and her five-year-old daughter had been stuck in Matamoros, Mexico, living inside a two-person tent in a squalid refugee camp near the U.S. border while they waited for an immigration judge to hear their asylum claim.
 
Flor — whose full name is being omitted for her safety — and her daughter were among the roughly 60,000 asylum seekers who’d been trapped in Mexico under the Trump administration’s “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP).
 
The months she spent in Matamoros were a nightmare.Temperatures oscillated between blazing heat during the day and frigid cold at night. One of those nights, she and her daughter huddled in their tent as the sound of a gun battle between police and a local drug cartel echoed through the streets. Another time, Flor says men cornered her and demanded extortion payments. When she failed to pay, she was violently assaulted.
 
So when Flor heard that she and her daughter were going to be allowed to enter the U.S., the where they could continue the asylum process under the care of relatives in Massachusetts, she felt like she was being given a new lease on life.
 
“I don’t know how to express the happiness I felt,” she said. “Knowing that we would be happy, at ease, and safe…I don’t know if you could understand it.”
 
By May 2020, being allowed to enter the U.S. as an asylum seeker was akin to a miracle. 
 
The Coronavirus pandemic was raging in the U.S., and hearings for cases like hers had been indefinitely postponed, stranding thousands of asylum seekers in cities across Mexico with no idea when immigration courts would start hearing their claims again. In March, the Centers for Disease Control had caved under pressure from the Trump administration and issued a dubious public health order that allowed border officials to eject asylum seekers from the country almost instantaneously. By late Spring, America’s asylum system had essentially ceased to exist.

Paul Ratje

But in Massachusetts, Flor’s family’s plea for help had reached the ACLU of Massachusetts. They were desperate – the stories she told them about the situation in the camp were increasingly dire, and they feared for her life and that of her young daughter. ACLU attorneys in the state and nationally had already brought litigation against the MPP, and they decided to take her case along with a coalition of other advocates.
 
Flor joined two other women — one of whom also had a five-year-old child — as plaintiffs in the case, which argued that putting them in the MPP was illegal and inhumane. In the following weeks, attorneys for the ACLU in Massachusetts interviewed Flor and the other two women via cell phone. Flor would charge hers ahead of time in a communal charging station at the camp.
 
“It was only after talking to them on the phone for a really long time, sometimes ten hours, that they felt comfortable enough to share some of the things that they had been through,” said Adriana Lafaille, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Massachusetts.
 
Flor is from Guatemala and is Maya K’iche’ — a member of an Indigenous group from the country’s remote highlands. Throughout Guatemalan history, Maya K’iche’ and other Indigenous groups have been the target of discrimination and violence at the hands of politically dominant Spanish-descended Guatemalans, sometimes called “Ladinos.”
 
In recent years, that violence has surged, with conflicts erupting between Mayan communities and prospectors with their eye on valuable mineral deposits beneath Indigenous land.
 
Flor’s father was a vocal advocate for Indigenous rights, and she says she suffered as a result. After he was attacked and incapacitated, she began working as a maid in a Ladino household at the age of 10. She suffered repeated abuse at the hands of her employers, and, at 19, was violently attacked by a group of men who demanded information about her uncles.
 
By mid-2019, she knew it was time to leave.
 
“I realized that my daughter and I would never be able to escape persecution in Guatemala, and we fled,” she recounted in an affidavit.
 
But by the time the COVID-19 crisis erupted, Flor had been in the Matamoros refugee camp for nearly eight months. Her daughter was losing weight, saying she was too sad to eat, and Flor feared the men who’d assaulted her might return.

Guillermo Arias for the ACLU.

In May, Flor received a phone call from her attorneys. A federal judge had ruled in her favor, granting the ACLU’s request for her to be taken out of the MPP. She and her daughter would be joining a small handful of people who’d escaped the policy.
 
Flor’s attorneys feared she might be sent to an immigration detention facility instead of being released to her family in Massachusetts. But after only a single night in detention, she and the others were released.

For Lafaille, it was a hard-fought win in an era where the courts have often thwarted efforts to block the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies.
 
“We were all just so relieved,” she said. “For our clients, it was an end to this incredibly difficult ordeal and a long period of such hardship and uncertainty.”
 
Flor and her daughter settled into life in Massachusetts. The pandemic was still raging, so mostly they stayed inside, but occasionally she accompanied her aunt to the park or grocery store.
 
“It’s so peaceful here,” she said. “I feel a tranquility that I have never experienced in my life. I’m treated nicely by people.”
 
But it quickly became apparent that lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security were not going to accept the loss and move on. Not long after Flor and the others arrived in Massachusetts, Lafaille received notice that the government planned to appeal the decision.

By mid-summer, COVID-19 had arrived in shelters across the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as in the refugee camp where Flor spent nearly a year. Despite the rise in cases in Mexico, DHS refused to relent — the agency pressed on with the appeal, seeking the power to send Flor, her daughter, and the others back to Mexico immediately.
 
Lafaille says that the appeal is a symbol of just how hostile the federal government has become towards asylum seekers under the Trump administration.
 
“Not only has the government claimed that our clients weren’t facing urgent harms in Mexico,” she said. “But after our clients were here in Massachusetts, DHS also asserted that the appeal had to be expedited because it was the government that was being harmed by having to allow these three women and two children — who they never contended were dangerous in any way — to live in safety with their families.”
 
Because of DHS’s appeal, Flor isn’t just facing the daunting task of presenting an asylum claim in immigration court — she’s fighting to prevent her and her daughter from being forced to do so from a tent inside a refugee camp during a pandemic.
 
Flor says she has to find ways to distract herself from the prospect.
 
“I tell myself that I shouldn’t think about that,” she said. “When I do, I try to think about other things instead.”
 
The ACLU of Massachusetts argued against DHS’s appeal in front of the First Circuit Court of Appeals on Oct. 6. Even in an era where the federal government is using every avenue it can to prevent asylum seekers from entering the country, she says the appeal stands out.
 
“It just shows a government that is totally devoid of humanity,” said Lafaille. “In the government’s eyes, the MPP is working because it is so devastating to asylum seekers that many simply cannot make it to their hearings, and their claims are deemed abandoned. They want the process to be so hard and dangerous in Mexico that people just give up.”

Until the First Circuit rules on the appeal, Flor and the other new arrivals are stuck in limbo, hoping they’ll be allowed to remain safe and out of harm’s way.

“The thing I wish for the most, what I ask God for, is to not be sent back to Mexico,” she said.

The ACLU of Massachusetts is co-counseling this case with the firm Fish & Richardson. Flor has been represented in her immigration case by the Law Office of Jodi Goodwin in Harlingen, Texas, and is now represented by Greater Boston Legal Services and the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic. In the First Circuit, the plaintiffs’ position was supported by National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council 119, represented by Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP; former government officials including Janet Napolitano, Roberta Jacobson and James Clapper, represented by WilmerHale; and a coalition of legal service providers and organizations, represented by the Law Office of Joshua M. Daniels.

Ashoka Mukpo, Staff Reporter, ACLU

Over the last months on our podcast, At Liberty, we’ve explored different conversations on the subject of policing: abolition, violence and accountability, protest, and activism. This week, we dug into a topic that has gained more attention in the wake of Daniel Prude’s death in March at the hands of the Rochester Police Department: the startling connection between mental health-related 911 calls and police brutality.

Studies show that nearly 50 percent of victims of police brutality are living with a disability, predominantly a mental health disability. In many ways, 911 has become the only option for people looking for mental health crisis intervention. And police often arrive at the scene armed with deadly weapons and a lack of mental health training, with devastating results.

But there is hope. There are alternatives to policing that can provide real care for people in mental health crises, if we invest in them. Joining us on this episode to break down the issue is Gregg Bloche, a professor of law at Georgetown University and a mental health care policy expert, and Ellie Virrueta, an organizer with Youth Justice Coalition.

Why Are Police the Wrong Response to Mental Health Crises?

Why Are Police the Wrong Response to Mental Health Crises?

Over the last months, we’ve explored different conversations on the subject of policing: abolition, violence and accountability, protest and activism. Today, we’re exploring a topic that has gained more attention in the wake of Daniel Prude’s deat...

Over the last months, we’ve explored different conversations on the subject of policing: abolition, violence and accountability, protest and activism. Today, we’re exploring a topic that has gained more attention in the wake of Daniel Prude’s deat...

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