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By Maria Rodriguez, Executive Director, Florida Immigrant Coalition Today's signing of a Florida law allowing young undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizen children of immigrant parents to pay the same tuition rate as every other Florida resident represents a truly remarkable achievement. It will change the lives of young immigrants like Carlos, who is twenty years old, undocumented, and comes from a family of agricultural workers.

I am pretty concerned – as maybe you are as well – about the impact of this week’s elections on civil liberties. But I’m not discouraged. Let me tell you why. Do you remember the final match that the U.S. Men’s team played in this year’s World Cup? I don’t watch a lot of soccer, but that match is helpful in understanding where things stand after this week’s election. An aggressive Belgian team had the U.S. rocked back on their heels playing defense for nearly the entire match. It should have been a blowout by the Belgian team, but it wasn’t -- because of the heroic effort of the U.S. goalkeeper, Tim Howard. He made an incredible athletic effort, refusing to give up. He set a World Cup record for blocking shots, keeping the Belgians scoreless in regulation and forced overtime. That’s what ACLU is. You, me and all of our thousands of members and supporters across Florida -- when civil liberties are under attack, we are the goalkeeper.

This blog post originally appeared as an op-ed in the Pensacola News-Journal. Oftentimes, it takes a tragedy to draw our attention to inadequacies and failures that have been long simmering just below the surface. And when the time comes to rebuild after a tragedy, if we lose the opportunity to also fix those long-festering problems, we do ourselves a disservice. As we near two months since the tragedy at the Escambia County Jail that killed and injured inmates and staff, our community must take stock of our jail's controversial history and do what we can to change it. Even before the lethal explosion, the jail was not where it should be.