News & Commentary

One of the greatest men I have ever known has left this earth — which leaves a certain kind of heartbreak but also a reminder of how lucky I was to experience his mentorship.

It is past time to remove unjust mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines that takes all discretion away from judges.

On voting rights and immigration, the Legislature chose to traffic in misinformation and extremism in order to go back to a time before the constitution protected the rights of all people, and that is shameful.

This heartbreaking case of another mentally-ill Broward County inmate who faced inhumane treatment behind bars, and was forced to give birth in a jail cell, is yet another example of why incarceration is often the wrong route for individuals who require proper medical care and treatment.

The 2019 Florida Legislative Session was the most dangerous and threatening to Floridians’ civil liberties and civil rights in over a decade.

If we legalize without mindfulness of the full ecosystem of the criminal legal system and how it impacts people, then corporate and industry-backed legalization efforts will lead us away from what is right and just.

U.S. citizens cannot be deported or held by immigration authorities. And yet we know that federal agents working for U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, or ICE, have been indiscriminately targeting them on a regular basis. SB 168 would lead to countless U.S. citizens being held for ICE.

Around midnight on Sept. 5, 2018, guards responded to prisoners banging on their cell doors inside a lockdown unit at Broward County Jail’s main facility in downtown Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. They went to the solitary cell of J.I.* and made a gruesome discovery.  

Last Friday, a Honduran asylum seeker suffered an unthinkable tragedy when she had a stillbirth while in ICE detention in Texas. While the facts of this case are still coming to light, it is only one of many tragic incidents involving immigrants detained by the federal government in recent months.