Anahi Jaquez–Estrada is scared. As soon as Monday, she may be deported to a country she hardly knows: away from her 8-year-old daughter and her husband, both of whom are United States citizens. She has lived in the U.S. almost her entire life and is in the process of becoming a lawful permanent resident. Her story is at once exceptionally tragic and a paradigmatic example of how our immigration legal system is failing — and tearing families apart.

I met Anahi in late July at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention site in Aurora, Colorado, where she has spent the last year and a half. She shared her story through tears. She came to the U.S. at age 3 and grew up in the small town of Wiggins, Colorado. She was president of her senior high school class, played volleyball and basketball, and graduated with honors.

“I know my story [is] maybe one of a million stories regarding immigration, but I pray many people read [it].”

We are sharing her story here in the hope that it will shame the Department of Homeland Security into putting the brakes on her deportation — a step that would not only be compassionate, but logical.

Anahi has an approved petition for residency based on her marriage to a U.S. citizen and has filed an application for adjustment of status — if she wasn’t about to be deported, she would be free and awaiting her green card. The dark irony of her situation is this: While one arm of DHS is processing her green card application, the other is fighting in court to take her from her family and deport her before her application can be approved.

“I am truly scared I will be deported before my green card gets approved. With that I will [be] leaving my baby girl behind. The only difference from her to me is she is growing up without her mother.”

Her daughter Yasailie was born with a cleft palate. Since Anahi’s detention, 8-year-old Yasailie has been diagnosed with depression and borderline bipolar disorder. She is struggling in school, back in Wiggins, Anahi’s hometown.

Anahi describes her situation in a letter from August 14 to the ACLU:

“482 days of tears, fear, stress and confinement!”

Anahi had DACA status since 2015, but her nightmare began in 2018 after she pled guilty to misdemeanor insurance fraud and lost her DACA status. An insurance agent, she improperly sold insurance due to what her lawyer called “misplaced compassion for her home-owning client.” Though she never served time, she received a deferred sentence, she lost the protection that DACA status had conferred on her. In spring 2018 ICE detained her and placed her in deportation proceedings despite the fact she’s lived in the U.S. for more than 24 years.

ICE initially released her on a $5,000 bond to await the outcome of her case, but her ordeal was just beginning. An immigration officer reached out to ask her to return to the ICE field office and fix an error in her bond paperwork. She asked if she would be detained again, since she might be making the trip with her daughter, but he assured her she would not be.

Anahi was right to be worried, it was a classic ICE bait and switch. She arrived at the ICE field office and was told to take a seat. She expected to review paperwork — as ICE had told her over the phone — but minutes later, ICE officers handcuffed her and took her away. Anahi’s detention in Aurora would continue for months at a site where the ACLU of Colorado has documented medical neglect and abuse.

“We face many challenges here, which include no contact visitations with our family, lack of hygiene products, bad medical attention, and bad nutrition. We at times do not get our blankets washed up to 2 or so months…. At times, we do not have toilet paper, feminine pads, or paper towels for our dorm.”

Anahi told me that after an infectious disease outbreak at Aurora, medical staff drew blood from detained women in the open dorm area. They reused the same examination pads for each woman, even “after having blood from [other] detainees drip onto it.” 

“This has been my nightmare for 482 days and counting. Being kept away physically from my daughter[,] not being able to even hug her is also very tormenting; which is something many mothers in this facility feel.”

Anahi’s lawyer had won a stay of removal pending a decision on her appeal and green card application, meaning ICE had to hold off on her deportation. But ICE kept her in detention and appealed the stay. On Wednesday this week, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Anahi’s stay of removal — so now ICE can deport her, despite her ongoing legal fight.

According to her lawyer, Anahi wants desperately to be out of detention. Unfortunately, ICE refuses to release her unless she consents to her own deportation. The laws and policies governing Anahi’s case are illogical, unjust, and inhumane.

And the Trump administration is deploying them to effect maximum cruelty. ICE has set an ugly price for Anahi’s freedom: losing her family and her home.

Last Friday was a banner day for religious favoritism in the Trump administration.

In Nashville, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a “speech” that was — for all intents and purposes — a Christian sermon. Addressing an association of Christian counselors, Secretary Pompeo discussed how to be a good Christian leader, quoting scripture and urging audience members to conduct themselves in accordance with his interpretation of biblical tenets. He also commandeered State Department resources to advertise his sermon in advance, broadcast it live, and disseminate a video of it afterward using the State Department’s official social media channels and website.

As we explained in a letter sent today to the State Department’s Inspector General, this is not an appropriate or constitutional use of government resources. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits government officials from using their office to proselytize or promote religious favoritism. All anyone needed to do to confirm that the State Department crossed this constitutional line was visit the department’s website over the weekend, which prominently featured Secretary Pompeo’s sermon, “Being a Christian Leader.”

Thus, we’ve demanded that the Inspector General launch an investigation to identify all misappropriations of State Department resources in connection with Friday’s speech, including the misuse of government employees’ time and the department’s social media accounts, website, and other technical resources. We also filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the State Department, seeking all documents relating to this matter.

While Secretary Pompeo was sermonizing in Tennessee, another member of Trump’s cabinet, Attorney General William Barr, was delivering his own problematic speech at University of Notre Dame Law School in South Bend, Indiana. 

From the start, the Trump administration has made clear that it favors Christians, or at least those Christians who fall in line with its anti-Muslim, anti-immigration, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ political agenda. Trump officials have twisted religious-liberty principles beyond recognition in an unrepentant and unyielding effort to protect and extend religious privilege to these select few Christians.

But Barr’s address Friday took things even further, incorrectly pushing the view that free government is “only suitable and sustainable for a religious people,” and suggesting that those who don’t subscribe to “Christian morality” are “foes” of democracy.  In the process, he railed at length against non-theists — or “secularists” as he calls them — accusing them of being immoral and plotting the “organized destruction” of religion.  According to him, without religion, humans are “enslaved” by “the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good” and “the possibility of any healthy community life crumbles.”

For an administration that claims to lead the fight against persecution based on religious belief, Trump officials are certainly comfortable denigrating and demonizing huge numbers of people based solely on *checks notes* what they believe or don’t.

In Barr’s view, which is shared by many Trump administration officials, the United States was founded as a Christian nation and must return to its purported roots. He’s wrong. It’s true that most people were Christian at the founding of our country and that Christianity enjoys a majority-faith status even today. But the Constitution establishes a secular government because the framers were wise enough to recognize that faith (or lack thereof) should not determine an individual’s political standing within our society and that religious freedom thrives best when the government remains neutral and avoids religious favoritism. If only the Trump administration would heed their good judgment.

Heather L. Weaver, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU

Fifty years after the enactment of the Fair Housing Act (FHA), housing discrimination remains a national disgrace in the United States. Across the country, a growing tide of housing providers, perhaps emboldened by Trump’s anti-“other” rhetoric, discriminate against the very communities the FHA was designed to protect. In 2017 alone, there were nearly 29,000 reported complaints of housing discrimination across the country. Despite growing diversity in population, residential segregation persists at alarming rates hurting local schools, property values, and much more. Just this year, Black homeownership rates dropped to a record low of 40.6% which is the lowest level recorded by the Census Bureau since 1950.

Despite this ongoing crisis, the Trump Administration proposed a new rule that will dismantle critical housing protections for the most vulnerable and marginalized communities.

In one of this administration’s most outrageous attacks on civil rights yet, proposed rule will make a mockery of one of the FHA’s most critical enforcement tools: the Disparate Impact Rule. The Rule allows potential victims of housing discrimination to challenge unjustified policies or practices that disproportionately harm them. Courts have recognized disparate impact liability under the FHA for decades, culminating in the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision affirming disparate impact liability in Texas Department of Housing & Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project.  There, the Court explained the significance of disparate impact liability: “[H]ousing restrictions that function unfairly to exclude minorities from certain neighborhoods without any sufficient justification . . . reside at the heartland of disparate-impact liability.” Under the Obama administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) acknowledged this principle by formally codifying the Disparate Impact Rule in 2013, and consistently affirming the existing Disparate Impact Rule through its fair housing enforcement and guidance as recently as 2016.

But this new proposed rule will weaken existing housing protections by imposing a significantly higher burden on victims of housing discrimination to prove their claims, making it nearly impossible to prevail. This change would make it harder to challenge forms of algorithmic discrimination — such as unjust tenant-screening tools or discriminatory marketing schemes — by providing special defenses for business practices that rely on algorithms or statistics, undoing decades of progress in advancing fair housing opportunities for all.

Why does Trump want to undermine this rule? Because it works. Disparate impact liability is a tool like none other in the law with numerous examples of how it has helped dismantle the many systemic barriers to fair housing. The Disparate Impact Rule has been critical in challenging covert or disguised forms of housing discrimination that otherwise escape easy classification. Advocates have invoked the Disparate Impact Rule in challenging discriminatory zoning regulations, predatory mortgage lending practices that charge excessive rates to people of color or people with disabilities, overly restrictive occupancy requirements that shut out families with children, and policies that threaten housing for survivors of gender-based violence and women of color.  

Housing discrimination and segregation remain serious challenges for many people of color, particularly as property owners employ discriminatory screening policies. Just this year, the ACLU settled a lawsuit against a Virginia housing complex for its policy of denying any person with a felony conviction or certain misdemeanor offenses—no matter how long ago it happened or how serious the offense. The ACLU is also suing the City of Faribault, Minnesota, for its similar “crime-free” policy, which — given the disproportionate rates at which Blacks and Latinx people are charged with and convicted of crimes — unfairly hurts the most vulnerable among us. As HUD has recognized, excluding people with criminal records may constitute race discrimination in violation of the Fair Housing Act, thanks to disparate impact liability.      

HUD’s proposed rule also threatens the safety and security of domestic violence survivors — the vast majority of whom are women. Domestic violence is a primary cause of homelessness for women and families, as survivors regularly report lacking housing options as a major barrier to escaping abuse. Even if they escape the abuse, survivors face discrimination in housing as a result. Congress has acknowledged that “women and families across the country are being discriminated against, denied access to, and even evicted from public and subsidized housing because of their status as victims of domestic violence.”    

HUD itself has recognized that penalizing survivors for the abuse they endured can amount to sex-based discrimination, due to the disproportionate impact of domestic violence on women. In 2001, HUD issued a formal finding that a landlord’s policy to evict an entire household based on criminal activity at the home violated the Fair Housing Act’s protections against sex-based discrimination. The ACLU has continued to fight on behalf of survivors in need of housing by challenging similar discriminatory policies and nuisance or crime-free ordinances through the Disparate Impact Rule.  

As required by the Fair Housing Act, HUD has an obligation to affirmatively further fair housing and to address the alarming rates of segregation throughout the country. But the proposed rule will erect nearly insurmountable barriers to fulfilling the Fair Housing Act’s goals, while harming those who already struggle to obtain safe and stable housing.

Safe and stable housing is key to the well-being of individuals and families across the country. That’s why the ACLU joined a national coalition to #DefendCivilRights by urging HUD to rescind its proposed rule. The ACLU urges all to submit comments to HUD in opposition of this harmful and cruel attack by October 18th.

Linda Morris, Skadden Fellow, ACLU &
Alejandro Agustin Ortiz, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU