The ACLU’s Attempt at Community Activism and the Trials it Faces
On the 11th of March, I attended an American Civil Liberties Union “People Power” event. This gathering of a dozen people from the south of Seattle was one of many going on across the country; thousands tuned in to an ACLU livestream from Miami to learn how to do something about the agenda of our current President. I went because I wanted to get involved in something constructive, and the experience left me feeling hopeful, with a few reservations. People Power aims to be a grassroots, community-based movement that will push back against President Trump’s various unconstitutional or immoral policies, working at the local and state level to temper federal power and safeguard the people who the President and his followers would like to see deported, victimized or otherwise harmed. It sounded, and indeed still sounds, like a laudable mission. I intend to stay a part of it for as long as I’m able and as long as it stays afloat. But I have a few worries. I want to lay out what the event was all about, what we’re supposed to do with our newfound People Power and how this is going to impact things down the road. To understand where we’re going, we need to get a handle on what has already happened.
First, the People Power meeting.
The couple who hosted the meeting that I attended live in the more gentrified part of the south of Seattle, and all but a few of the attendees (including myself) were white. I was the second-youngest at 24 (one man brought his son along), and most everybody else were middle-aged or above. We were a liberal bunch, to no one’s surprise, and before the livestream started we talked about Trump’s second try at a Muslim ban and other outrages. Many attendees had been at the Women’s March, some had other experiences with protests or other action. There were a lot of ACLU donors.
The livestream lasted an hour, and there were several principal takeaways. The big one was that the ACLU, through People Power, wants to create a series of “Freedom Cities” across the nation. Putting the cheesy name to the side, this is an interesting proposal. The Freedom City is very much like a sanctuary city, but even more so; the idea is to pass a bevy of ordinances to “protect our families and our neighbors’ families from some of the worst abuses of the Trump administration”. Currently, the focus is on immigration. As part of the People Power event, we were introduced to 9 model ordinances that the ACLU wants people to organize in support of.
Most of the ordinances are focused on disrupting coordination between city and state law enforcement and federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), thereby making it harder for undocumented immigrants to be deported. The first and second model ordinances would require that local officials get a warrant from a judge before arresting, detaining or transporting anyone because ICE or CBP asked them to. The third would require that ICE and CBP agents get court orders before being allowed access local facilities (like jails) or talk to people in custody in an attempt to deport people without a criminal record. The fourth would require ICE and CBP agents to identify themselves and wear their badges when talking to anyone in a local facility.
The next ordinances are more broadly applicable. The fifth would create a “Don’t Ask” rule; local officials working on deporting people without criminal records couldn’t ask about a person’s immigration or citizenship status (thereby making it very difficult to deport anyone without a criminal record). Similarly, the sixth would ban local officials from voluntarily giving information to ICE or CBP about people in their custody that could lead to identifying their religion, race, address, release date or custody status, unless they needed to know for reasons other than deporting people without a criminal record. The seventh would ban profiling on the basis of race, religion or immigration status as a basis for surveillance; law enforcement couldn’t justify watching a group of people just because they were Latinx/Muslim/undocumented/etc. The ninth would in turn ban the same kind of profiling as a basis for arrest or detainment, unless a “reliable source” used race, religion or immigration status to link a specific person to a specific event. Meanwhile, the eighth is a redress rule, ensuring that if one of the new ordinances is broken, there are actually consequences.
The game plan is for People Power participants to meet with law enforcement in their cities and towns and figure out if they are already using any of these rules. Next comes the community push to get the ones that aren’t already on the books enacted. If all goes as planned, hundreds of communities across the United States will become safer for immigrants and racial and religious minorities.
There are plenty of areas for discussion surrounding the Freedom Cities campaign specifically and the People Power campaign more generally. There’s a debate to be had on the effectiveness of the ordinances, of the likelihood of success and about what might happen when the federal government comes into open legal conflict with Freedom Cities. All of these discussions need to happen, and already are. But I’d like to focus on another area. People Power is partially about the ACLU embracing more community-oriented strategies in order to do good. That’s great, but it raises the specter of a few extra problems further into the future.
I have heard many criticisms of the ACLU and organizations like it since entering law school and being exposed to a bunch of people who have far more experience with fighting injustice than I. A big one is that such institutions focus too much on big court cases and the like, and not enough on the people suffering from racist laws or discriminatory practices or what have you. The ACLU might bring a high-profile court case in an effort to solve a problem, and while they’re doing that there are still people being harmed, with no choice to do anything except wait for the case to be finished, for the ACLU to win (never a guarantee) and for the loser to actually implement any changes required of them (which doesn’t always happen, and rarely happens quickly). Not only can this practice mean that a lot of people fall through the cracks, but it helps to exacerbate what I’ve come to understand is a common occurrence in social movements. A bunch of people from a community will come together because they are faced with a problem, be it de facto segregation, police violence, or some other injustice. Someone might seek out a lawyer for help with the legal aspects of the problem, or maybe a lawyer will turn up out of the blue and offer their services. What happens next is the lawyer becomes the driving force behind the movement. They are assured of their mastery of the law and of strategy, and tell everyone that they know exactly what to do to get the people what they want. But often this lawyer isn’t from the community in the first place, and they might go so far as to not even speak to the people who are actually being harmed. The legal strategy might not address what the community wants addressed; it might go off in a completely different direction. And so the movement collapses because it has been taken over by someone who, for all their knowledge, doesn’t know what the people they ostensibly work for want. This lawyer need not be uncaring, or greedy, or some sort of Fifth Columnist here to destroy the community’s hopes from within. All they need to be is too sure of themselves and too far removed from the people who needed things changed.
I believe that the People Power initiative has the potential to be a great thing. The ACLU is perceived by many to be too far above the people who need help. How better to fix that problem than to mobilize people to seek action? What better way is there to avoid elite lawyers missing the forest for the trees and taking vulnerable communities down useless paths? Well, there are still some pitfalls to avoid.
I’m not sure if the ACLU considers this a bug or a feature, but People Power seems awfully compartmentalized. Every group got the same instructions, but that still resulted in a bunch of individual collections who are now expected to go out and change their cities for the better. My South Seattle group is laying plans and getting ready for meetings and we’re doing it all without any input from the rest of the city. That does not sound sustainable.
In the not-too-distant future, People Power is supposed to result in large-scale meetings with politicians and other decision-makers, and this is where we can and should consolidate. Community activism requires a united bunch, after all, and so once we realize who else is out there working toward the same goals, we need to get together and stick together to advance the cause. This will also put a stop to what I’m sure will be an embarrassing couple of weeks where different groups all try to schedule different appointments with the same officials, resulting in confusion and annoyance. Not only do the various People Power groups need to gang up, but we all need to recognize that there are a bunch of other people in our communities who aren’t a part of this organization but are a part of this work.
People Power isn’t intended to be secret; its proposals and the livestream are available publicly and should we get to the “big meetings with city councils” phase it should become obvious who we are and what we’re trying to do. But as for now, I haven’t the slightest idea how widespread knowledge of this nascent movement is. That’s the other annoying thing about the current compartmentalization; we are much less obvious right now than might be good for us. The Freedom City plan is nothing less than an attempt at a nationwide restructuring of law enforcement power, and if it succeeds it will have huge repercussions for issues of immigration, police profiling and even federalism itself. This is something that everyone needs to know about so they can either get in on it or oppose it, if it comes to that. People Power talks a lot about “the community”, and how the community can rise up and impede some of the nastiness flowing out of the White House. We had pieces of the community come together on that Saturday afternoon, but that’s not enough.
People Power is designed for people who’ve never ventured into this whole “community activism” thing before. You can tell by reading the materials we were given; I imagine a seasoned activist would snort with derision at the implication that they wouldn’t know how to do any of these things. That’s not to say such experienced people aren’t a part of the effort, but at this point I assume they are outnumbered by those folks just starting their activist careers. But beyond the People Power circle there is a whole world of activists, people who have been striving for change for a long time, and who have become very good at what they do. Pretty soon, should People Power retain momentum, these old hands are going to see some new faces show up, and it matters a great deal how these first meetings go.
I firmly hope that People Power is able to integrate into existing modes of community activism. People Power members who have done this sort of thing before need to help their groups form ties with outside movements. Those movements should reach out to People Power, and that’s another reason for us People Power types to get as visible as possible. This isn’t just about continued coalition-building, this is about avoiding stepping on each other’s toes. It’s not just lawyers who can show up and take a movement off in the wrong direction. People Power needs to make sure that it’s working in the best interests of everybody in the community, and we’re never going to be certain of that unless we all meet up, say hello and find out what everybody wants and how we’re going to go about getting it done.
There are other challenges that People Power faces, the sorts of challenges that any movement faces. Momentum is a big one; will people remain invested and energized and angry? Will the goals of the ACLU and the goals of the People Power participants remain aligned? It wouldn’t be the end of the world if some people decided they wanted to try different methods or push for different outcomes, but will they be able to soldier on if they remove themselves from the larger group? This could be a good opportunity for other established community activist movements to snap up People Power defectors. Then there are all the other questions that activists have been asking themselves since the first person protested a poor decision: will what we are doing make a difference? Will anyone listen? Are we focused on something that really matters?
The time is ripe for people to come together and makes things work better than they do now. We’ve certainly got enough problems. I’m writing this in part because I want to do what I can to advertise for People Power. I’m not going to urge you to join, but just to be aware, in case you’d like to get involved, or you’d like us to coordinate with your movement on something, or you’d like to come by and say “hey, you’re doing this all wrong”.
The other reason why I’m writing this is to explore the difficulties in a bunch of neophytes banding together and going off to fight evil in their community. We can’t expect a quick fix, fellow newbies. And when people who’ve been doing this for longer than we have show up and give advice, and perhaps urge us to do things that would take us out of our comfort zone, or move away from the way the ACLU would like things to go, the least we can do is listen and learn. THAT’S People Power right there.
