The Honorable Tom Ridge, Secretary
Department of Homeland Security
3801 Nebraska Ave., N.W.
Washington, DC 20393
Dear Mr. Secretary:
We are writing to urge you to appoint an experienced, effective Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties as required under Section 705 of the Homeland Security Act (""HSA""). This position is extremely important for the protection of fundamental constitutional rights as the new Department of Homeland Security (""DHS"") carries out its mission of protecting national security. We are part of a national coalition of immigrants' rights and civil and human rights groups who urge you to put into place adequate rights protections for all communities in the United States.
The new position of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer can play an important role in developing your agency's response to abuses by its officers. As you know, the DHS incorporates many pre-existing agencies, such as the Immigration and Naturalization Service (""INS""). While most immigration officers, Border Patrol agents, and other officials have treated immigrants with the respect due to them under the law, abuses have occurred all too often, including serious violations of civil rights and civil liberties. These abuses include:
- racial profiling (e.g. relying on race and ethnicity when enforcing immigration laws)
- excessive use of force
- unlawful workplace sweeps and midnight home raids
- failure to provide for due process
- human rights violations at the border
- tolerating interventions by vigilantes in immigration enforcement
- unsupervised, untrained use of state and local officials in enforcing federal immigration laws
As part of the mandate of the DHS, we hope you will take the opportunity of a newly-structured agency to put in place mechanisms to prevent such abuses from continuing to occur. These mechanisms should include clear agency-wide policies, proper training, preventive measures, and adequate remedies. We are sure that you will agree that we need to make effective legal protections an integral part of the DHS structure, in order to guard against the types of abuse of authority that can lead to serious violations of civil rights and civil liberties.
In light of the current terrorist threats faced by the United States, there is a strong possibility that some immigration or border patrol officials will believe they have carte blanche to conduct their work without respect for civil rights and civil liberties. Immigrant communities and people of color know from tough experience that it is all too easy for officials to use racial profiling in their quest to enforce immigration laws-but these tactics will do nothing to deter crime and terrorism, and in fact might hamper these efforts.
It is therefore imperative that you nominate a Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer who is truly an expert in the field. The Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer will be charged to ""review and assess information alleging abuses of civil rights, civil liberties, and racial and ethnic profiling by employees and officials of the Department,"" §705(a)(1) HSA, which involves significant responsibility given that DHS contains twenty-two previously-separate agencies. No less than a civil rights expert, with many years of experience and the intellectual background required to assess such a broad range of potential abuses in so many different functions, could effectively complete this task.
Aside from reviewing alleged abuses, the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer should also be capable of assessing what violations of law have occurred, and what steps must be undertaken to effectively investigate, prosecute, punish and compensate for violations of civil rights and civil liberties. We would also hope that the Officer would have the capacity and authority to contribute to the development of policies and programs that may affect civil rights and civil liberties and to design monitoring and compliance policies and preventive measures, such as training programs for new as well as existing agency staff. It is also essential that the Officer have the stature and experience to provide leadership and expertise within DHS, so that respect for civil rights and civil liberties is clearly part of every employee's mandate.
For all of these reasons, we urge you to appoint a highly qualified civil rights expert to the vitally important post of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Officer. We look forward to working with you to fashion effective ways of protecting fundamental rights as your agency carries out its important mission.
Sincerely,
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
American Civil Liberties Union
American Immigration Lawyers Association
Center for Democracy and Technology
Human Rights Watch
Lawyers Committee for Human Rights
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund
National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium
National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund
National Council of La Raza
National Immigration Forum
National Immigration Law Center
Open Society Institute
Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs
cc: President George W. Bush