While studying abroad a couple of years ago, I heard first-hand accounts from Jordanian-Palestinian friends about the displacement their families, and families like theirs, experienced during the 1948 Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”). Moved by the painful memories they shared, I started researching student organizations advocating for Palestinian rights, and came across the Instagram of the University of Florida (UF) chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). When I enrolled at UF a few months later, I immediately joined.

As a member of UF SJP, it was devastating when top Florida officials ordered public universities to deactivate all SJP chapters in the state, including ours. I remember being in shock when I read the order. Officials justified deactivating our chapter not because of anything our group had said or done—but because of our affiliation with the national chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a separate group. According to the order, certain views expressed in an advocacy toolkit the National SJP issued on October 7 violated Florida’s “material support of terrorism” law. But my student group was not even involved with the creation of that toolkit, which itself is protected by the First Amendment.

On October 8, our SJP chapter issued its own statement, saying that we “mourned the loss of innocent Palestinian and Israeli life,” and made clear that “the killing of any life is always undignified and heartbreaking.” Later, we issued another statement urging the University of Florida to condemn all violence, antisemitism, Islamophobia, Palestinian erasure, and anti-Palestinian sentiment.

Our chapter has students from a variety of religious, racial, and cultural backgrounds, including members who are Jewish, Palestinian, and Palestinian-American, who believe that speaking up for Palestine is speaking up for humanity. Reading the deactivation order, we felt like we had no choice but to sue to protect our First Amendment right to free speech and free assocation. We know of multiple current and potential members of UF SJP who feared being punished and investigated. Our advocacy has suffered from having our state and university officials levy false accusations of “terrorism” against us. For months, we feared that at any moment the University could have denied us access to critical school funds, resources, and facilities that are fundamental to the survival and operation of our organization.

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Near the end of January, the ACLU, ACLU of Florida, and Palestine Legal went to court to defend our rights and, on January 31, a federal judge dismissed our lawsuit. The court found that after issuing the order, Florida officials do not intend to deactivate our chapter. Although the court did not rule on our First Amendment claims, it’s a relief to know that the court concluded our chapter does not currently face deactivation.

As the judge acknowledged during the hearing on our case: “Words have consequences.” For months we have lived with fear and anxiety as a result of the order. I still carry a deep worry for my safety, for my loved ones’ safety, and the safety of any student who chooses to get involved in our SJP chapter. We hope that state officials learned their lesson when they walked back the deactivation order, and that the State University System Chancellor will now take his order down from his website.

I remember learning about my constitutional rights in seventh grade civics class, including how we were all entitled to free speech. The juxtaposition of what I grew up thinking college kids in the U.S. were allowed to do and say and what we went through last semester is really stark. I can’t overstate how deeply disappointing it was to see our state’s highest officials attempt to censor us. Their actions were contrary to everything I understood about how our democracy is supposed to work.

At a time when the number of Palestinians killed or injured in Gaza is rising exponentially each day, standing up for our right to speak out on the issue felt like a no-brainer. While this experience hasn’t been easy, we’re proud to have fought for our rights in court. We hope our case sets a precedent that students cannot be silenced.

The Senate voted on Wednesday against a bill that would have been the first major overhaul of asylum and immigration law in a generation — and would have been a disastrous retreat from basic principles of fairness. As our elected leaders continue to debate immigration reforms, they must instead advance humane and sensible solutions that help manage the border without compromising our nation’s values and the safety of people fleeing danger.

Although branded as a compromise bipartisan “border security” package, this bill would have been a major rewrite of our nation’s long-standing asylum laws. To make matters worse, these changes were attached to a supplemental funding bill that also included a massive investment in failed and punitive immigration enforcement policies, such as funding to finish former President Trump’s border wall, an expansion of nationwide immigration detention, and a significant increase in surveillance targeting immigrant families. Although ostensibly dead, Senate Republicans are reportedly trying again to push for another vote on this immigration package as an amendment to foreign aid, plus additional extremist policies that would remove protections from unaccompanied children.

At its core lay a new rule that would have fundamentally blocked asylum for the vast majority of people who come to our southern border seeking protection. Under this new rule, once an average of 5,000 people arrive at the border daily over a seven-day period, or 8,500 people on a single day, no one would be eligible to apply for asylum between ports of entry. Furthermore, the government would have gained the power to enforce this “no-asylum” rule when there is an average of 4,000 people per day over a seven-day period.

Showing Up to Protect the Right to Seek Asylum

For decades, the ACLU has worked to protect the rights of asylum seekers.

This was poised to become an operational nightmare, and there’s no need for speculation regarding the horrible consequences if the government implemented this rule. We need only to look back at the chaotic and violent days under the Trump era Title 42 policy, which similarly closed our asylum system under the guise of public health. During that period over 13,480 people were raped, murdered, kidnapped, tortured, or extorted while waiting for the border to reopen. As history has taught us, this new rule would not have stopped people from seeking safety in the U.S., but people who have undoubtedly been sent back to danger as a result.

Even when people were allowed to apply for asylum, they would have been subject to a mind-boggling and dangerous fast-track deportation process, with punishing timelines for those who could not meet new restrictive screening tests.

If passed, the vast majority of asylum seekers would no longer be able to seek court review of their cases, representing a major shift from our asylum and legal system. This would have denied them one of the most essential due process safeguards in a system riddled with errors. Independent judicial review has been a life-saving protection, with courts consistently finding that asylum officers wrongly denied people protection. Asylum officers currently conduct their case screenings and interviews with the understanding that their work will be checked by an immigration judge. Eliminating that legal review would have meant sacrificing basic fairness in cases where life or death is at stake.

The other major story about this bill is the money. It was a shockingly punitive, pro-detention bill that revived the construction of Trump’s failed border wall and included an unprecedented $3.2 billion for immigration detention — more than even allocated or requested under the previous administration. The bill also included over a billion dollars for surveillance technology that would subject individuals and families to 24-hour suspicionless surveillance. This amounted to $4.5 billion dollars directed towards harmful and punitive immigration enforcement measures that would have impacted all immigrant families throughout the United States. Most of that funding would have lined the pockets of the for-profit prison industry, which stands to get billions more in taxpayer dollars and without the overdue oversight and accountability.

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In addition to the unimaginable harm inflicted on immigrant families, the bill would have permanently undermined our moral standing in the world, and ensured the return of people to danger and even death.

There is no denying the need for real changes at our southern border. However, none of these callous and extremist policies were ever going to “fix” the border: they wouldn’t have created a fairer immigration system or helped cities, states, and communities support and welcome new immigrants. What’s more, they wouldn’t even have deterred people from seeking protection or opportunities here in the U.S., as their proponents suggested. This bill would have essentially altered who we are as a country without improving the situation at the border from any perspective.

With thanks to Senators Markey, Menendez, Padilla, Sanders, and Warren, all of whom voted against this deal, this harmful legislation will no longer move forward — but our work here isn’t done just yet. Now it’s time for all our elected leaders to take this failed vote as an opportunity to finally get immigration reform right and ensure we pass sensible and humane solutions to address the challenges at the border.

We often hear about government misuse of face recognition technology (FRT) and how it can derail a person’s life through wrongful arrests and other harms. Despite mounting evidence, government agencies continue to push face recognition systems on communities across the United States. Key to this effort are the corporate makers and sellers who market this technology as reliable, accurate, and safe – often by pointing to their products’ scores on government-run performance tests.

All of this might tempt policymakers to believe that the safety and civil rights problems of facial recognition can be solved by mandating a certain performance score or grade. However, relying solely on test scores risks obscuring deeper problems with face recognition while overstating its effectiveness and real-life safety.

Many facial recognition systems are tested by the federal National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In one of their tests, NIST uses companies’ algorithms to try and search for a face within a large “matching database” of faces. In broad strokes, this test appears to resemble how police use face recognition today, feeding an image of a single unknown person’s face into an algorithm that compares it against a large database of mugshot or driver’s license photos and generates suggested images, paired with numbers that represent estimates of how similar the images are.

These and other tests can reveal disturbing racial disparities. In their own groundbreaking research, computer scientists Dr. Joy Buolamwini and Dr. Timnit Gebru tested several prominent gender classification algorithms, and found that those systems were less likely to accurately classify the faces of women with darker complexions. Following that, the ACLU of Northern California performed its own test of Amazon’s facial recognition software, which falsely matched the faces of 28 members of Congress with faces in a mugshot database, with Congressmembers of color being misidentified at higher rates. Since then, additional testing by NIST and academic researchers indicates that these problems persist.

While testing of facial recognition for accuracy and fairness across race, sex, and other characteristics is critical, the tests do not take full account of practical realities. There is no laboratory test that represents the conditions and reality of how police use face recognition in real world-scenarios. For one, testing labs are not going to have access to the exact “matching database,” the particular digital library of faces on mugshots, licenses, and surveillance photos, that police in a specific community search through when they operate face recognition. And tests cannot account for the full range of low-quality images from surveillance cameras (and truly dubious sources) that police feed into these systems, or the trouble police have when visually reviewing and choosing from a set of possible matches produced by the technology.

Parks v. McCormac

On January 29, 2024, the ACLU and the ACLU of New Jersey filed an amicus brief in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey in support of

In response to these real concerns, vendors routinely hold up their performance on tests in their marketing to government agencies as evidence of facial recognition’s reliability and accuracy. Lawmakers have also sought to legislate performance scores that set across-the-board accuracy or error-rate requirements for facial recognition algorithms used by police that would allow police to use FRT systems that clear these requirements. This approach would be misguided.

It is easy to be misled by performance scores. Imagine a requirement that police can only use systems that produce an overall true positive rate, a measure of how often the results returned by a FRT system include a match for the person depicted in the probe image when there is a matching image in the database, above 98 percent in testing. At first glance, that might sound like a pretty strong requirement — but a closer look reveals a very different story.

For one, police typically configure and customize facial recognition systems to return a list of multiple results, sometimes as many as hundreds of results. Think of this as a ‘digital lineup.’ In NIST testing, if at least one of the results returned is a match for the probe image, the search is considered successful and counted as part of the true positive rate metric. But even when this happens in practice — which certainly isn’t always the case — there is no guarantee that police will select the true match rather than one of the other results. True matches in testing might be crowded out by false matches in practice because of these police-created ‘digital lineups.’ This alone makes it difficult to choose one universal performance score that can be applied to many different FRT systems.

Let’s look at another metric called the false positive rate, which assesses how often a FRT search will return results when there is no matching image in the database. Breaking results down by race, the same algorithm that produces the 98 percent true positive rate overall can also produce a false positive rate for Black men several times the false positive rate for white men — and an even higher false positive rate for Black women. This example is not merely a hypothetical: in NIST testing, many algorithms have exhibited this pattern. (1) Other recent NIST testing also shows algorithms produced false positive rates tens or hundreds of times higher for females older than 65 born in West African countries than for males ages 20-35 born in Eastern European countries. (2)

By only considering the true positive rate, we miss these extreme disparities, which can lead to devastating consequences. Across the United States, police are arresting people based on false matches and harming people like Nijeer Parks, a Black man who police in New Jersey falsely arrested and held in jail for ten days because police trusted the results of face recognition, overlooking obvious exonerating evidence. Human mis-reliance on face recognition is already a problem; focusing on performance scores might make things worse.

Lawmakers should know that a facial recognition algorithm’s performance on a test cannot be easily or quickly generalized to make broad claims about whether a facial recognition algorithm is safe. Performance scores are not an easy fix to the harms that are resulting from the use of face recognition systems, and they of course don’t account for humans that will inevitably be in the loop.

As the ACLU explained in its recent public comment to the Biden Administration, the problems of facial recognition run deep and beyond the software itself. Facial recognition is dangerous if it’s inaccurate — a problem that testing aims to address — but also dangerous even if it could hypothetically be perfectly accurate. In such a world, governments could use face surveillance to precisely track us as we leave home, attend a protest, or take public transit to the doctor’s office. This is why policymakers in an expanding list of U.S. cities and counties have decided to prohibit government use of face recognition. And it’s why ACLU supports a federal moratorium on its use by law and immigration enforcement agencies.

Conversations about the shortcomings of performance scores are important, but instead of trying to find some magic number, policymakers should focus on how any use of facial recognition can expand discriminatory policing, massively expand the power of government, and create the conditions for authoritarian control of our private lives.