American Civil Liberties Union

In a huge victory for civil liberties, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday, June 1, 2011, suspended his state's participation in a federal deportation program that tore apart families, encouraged racial profiling and harmed public safety by creating mistrust between police and immigrant communities.

Under the program known as Secure Communities (S-Comm), local police hand over the biometric data of every person arrested and fingerprinted — innocent or guilty — to federal immigration authorities who check it against their databases. If there is a match — whether correct or not — an individual could be sent to detention centers hundreds of miles from home and even deported.

"Elijah," an eighth grader, enjoyed school and got good grades. A black student at a mostly white school in Queens, he got caught with some friends one day playing with a miniature baseball bat — the kind sold at the Yankee Stadium gift shop.

The school's principal determined that the toy was a weapon and suspended Elijah, even though another student had brought the novelty bat to school. None of Elijah's friends, all of whom were white or Asian, were suspended.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg should get a standing ovation for his teary-eyed speech yesterday in defense of pluralism and religious freedom with regard to the proposal to build an Islamic cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero.