News & Commentary

Carl Takei, Former Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality

In early June

This year, many Texans are choosing to cast their votes by mail. Voting by mail is a safe and reliable way to make your voice heard in this election, but there are several important things to know and key deadlines to remember.

For years, the U.S.-Mexico border has been a testing ground for practices that violate people's rights. Under the Trump administration these policies have become more extreme.

Shaw Drake, He/Him/His, Staff Attorney and Policy Counsel, Border and Immigrants’ Rights, ACLU of Texas

Customs and B

As students go back to school across the state, families are facing unprecedented challenges. And as some students attend classes online, others are venturing back into the classroom or doing a hybrid of in-person and remote learning. Even in these trying times, students continue to face challenges that existed even before COVID. In hallways, classrooms, and even online, students still face different forms bullying, harassment, and discrimination on the basis of their gender identity, sexual orientation, sex, race, and religion.

The size of someone's bank account shouldn't determine whether they live or die in jail during the ongoing pandemic.But today, tens of thousands of Texans – disproportionately people of color and low income people – sit in jail as they await trial because of money bail. People with enough resources can buy their freedom and await trial in their homes and communities, while people without enough resources remain stuck in jail. In addition to facing the possibility of losing their housing and their jobs, people locked up because of unaffordable bail now face an increased risk of dying from COVID-19.Not only is money bail unfair and dangerous, it’s also expensive: Jailing people who have not been convicted of crimes costs Texas taxpayers an estimated $905 million each year.We need meaningful bail reform now more than ever to protect all people who interact with the criminal legal system and to reduce the enormous burden that pretrial incarceration puts on our communities.That’s why today, the ACLU of Texas is launching a free, new, interactive online tool developed in collaboration with Houston-based data science and technology firm, January Advisors. The Texas Jails Data Dashboard tracks COVID-19 cases in Texas jails, visualizes the enormous financial costs associated with pretrial incarceration, and allows people to see how Texas county jail populations have changed, both during the COVID-19 health crisis and before.The free online tool culls information from the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, allowing policymakers and journalists to see how incarceration rates and COVID-19 cases in jails have changed since January. It allows visualizations of jail population data going back to 1998, provides comparisons in pretrial incarceration rates between counties using the latest available data, and helps policymakers, journalists, and the public understand the cost to local taxpayers of high rates of pretrial incarceration.The tool is a straightforward rendering of a complicated layer of our criminal justice system, the motivation for which is guiding policy change. Data from the dashboard shows that jail populations in many Texas counties dropped in April in response to the COVID-19 epidemic, but that in many cases, jail populations are on the rise again. Sadly, there are thousands of reported COVID-19 infections among guards and incarcerated people, the data shows. Finally, the dashboard shows that a majority of individuals detained in Texas jails are held pre-trial, and in most cases, these people are presumed innocent but are only kept in jail because of their inability to afford cash bail.Using the dashboard’s “Policy Simulator” feature, users can see the impact of mass incarceration in Texas jails on taxpayers. For example, a 25 percent reduction in jail populations statewide would save Texas taxpayers more than  $198 million annually.Fixing our unjust money bail system in Texas begins with helping everyone understand the scale of the problem. With this new tool, we aim to make publicly-available data about Texas Jails accessible and actionable - moving advocates, organizers, journalists, and policy makers towards smart justice.Explore the Dashboard for yourself to find out how our existing system is costing taxpayers millions and endangering lives, then take action to fix Texas’s broken bail system.

Abortion is legal in Texas and across the United States, but that doesn’t stop anti-abortion politicians from doing whatever they can to interfere with access to reproductive healthcare. Local governments have added fuel to the fire by passing anti-abortion ordinances that confuse residents about their rights and increase the ever-present stigma around seeking abortion care.That’s why, for the first time, reproductive rights, health, and justice groups in our state are joining forces to expand essential health care access for all Texans by creating the Texas Abortion Access Network. Get involved and sign up to become a founding member of TAAN.

We live in a proud community where English isn’t always the language spoken. Our families, culture, food, and livelihoods are all shaped by our binational culture in El Paso, our relationship to the border and our neighbors in Chihuahua.

Update December 2020: The ACLU of Texas staff is saddened to learn of the recent passing of our client Román Vázquez. Mr. Vázquez was in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention at the Montgomery Processing Center for three months until his release in April 2020. In July, we published the story below in which he detailed the horrific conditions of his detention. We are glad that Mr. Vázquez was able to spend his last months with his family, to whom we send our deepest condolences. We will continue to fight for the release of more detainees from the threat of COVID-19 in immigration detention through our case, Vázquez Barrera et al v. Wolf, to which Mr. Vázquez lent his name as the lead plaintiff.