Inclusive Democracy

Our National Security & Civil Rights program challenges profiling, surveillance, and discriminatory immigration policies criminalizing and targeting community members, particularly Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian communities, Black communities, and Chinese and Chinese American communities that are acutely enduring political scapegoating and criminalization under the pretext of national security. On the local, state, and federal level, we fight national security and counterterrorism policies rooted in white supremacy and racism towards building a country that lives up to our best values of belonging and equality. In coalition with partners and community organizations state and nationwide, we work with community members to defend their civil rights to free speech, immigration, refuge, privacy, and safety.

In the past year, as our team has grown, we’ve deepened our community outreach across the Bay Area and are representing more local residents who are being targeted or denied their civil rights on the basis of their national origin, race, religion, or participation in protests and organizing for racial and social justice. Many of these community members have been unjustly denied their immigration benefits, threatened with denaturalization, endured warrantless surveillance by federal agencies, and/or been effectively banned from travel to and from the U.S.

During Ramadan, for example, as community members gathered for evening meals and night prayers at local mosques and community centers, our staff joined them to break the fast and share our legal and advocacy resources and support. At dozens of places of worship, community centers, and schools, ALC’s National Security & Civil Rights and Workers’ Rights teams spoke with Afghan refugees resettling in the Bay, Yemeni families about what to do if you are questioned or detained at the airport, and local workers about how they can access life-saving unemployment benefits and other support during the pandemic. With information spanning these two broad areas of expertise in English, Urdu, and Arabic, we were able to offer help in ways that match the diversity of the communities we serve and the most pressing threats to their safe, thriving lives.

At the same time, our national litigation strategies continue, from amicus briefs in the supporting Yassir Fazaga, Ali Uddin Malik, and Yasser AbdelRahim in the Supreme Court and Professor Xiaoxing Xi in the Third Circuit. Earlier this year, we celebrated a major legal win after a federal court in San Francisco ruled that the Biden administration must finish the work of its Muslim & African Bans rescission and undo the lasting harms that have denied people family reunification, jobs and educational opportunities, and medical treatment. Since the ruling in Pars Equality Center, et. al. v. Pompeo, et. al., ALC and our co-counsels at CAIR-CA, the Iranian American Bar Association, the National Immigration Law Center, and Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer have been meeting with federal representatives to resolve how the Biden administration will fulfill the ruling and establish a fair and effective process to reopen and reconsider applications from people harmed by the Bans.

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As our community engagement deepens, so too has our national security and civil rights policy advocacy in Washington, DC, Sacramento, and San Francisco.

At the local level, we’ve working in a coalition of civil rights and community safety organizations against invasive and unwarranted surveillance by the San Francisco police department, including pushing the Board of Supervisors to reverse an earlier vote approving the use of lethal robots and building a citywide accountability campaign against SFPD’s new policy to expand its real-time surveillance of residents, families, and workers.

In the past year, we have also started convening organizations across California to map out a multi-year agenda of state policy and administration advocacy and community education and mobilization. This work is aimed at protecting Arab, Middle Eastern, Asian, Black, and Muslim community members who are enduring the harms of state surveillance and discriminatory police targeting.

Finally, we continue to advocate for policy change in Congress, from advancing the No BAN Act to monitoring and defeating harmful legislative amendments that would profile and criminalize immigrants on the basis of potential and unproven “technology espionage.” In July, after ALC led a letter from dozens of community and civil rights organizations raising serious concerns with proposed language, Sen. Maria Cantwell blocked Sen. Rob Portman’s amendment to the CHIPS-plus bill from advancing. In December, the group also blocked the amendment from the House’s National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023. If enacted, the amendment would have denied admission or revoked visas of Chinese nationals and others based on innuendo, bad information, and racial targeting. Such language would establish a dangerous expansion of domestic surveillance and policing operations targeting Chinese, Arab, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Black, and Muslim communities, among other communities threatened by FBI, DHS, and other federal agencies because of their race, national origin, religion, gender, and sexuality.

Our Voting Rights program fights for full participation in the electoral process on behalf of all eligible voters, especially those from historically disenfranchised and limited-English speaking communities. Voting is a powerful vehicle for community empowerment and civic agency. Over the past year, we’ve supported hundreds of people of Asian, Arab, and Middle Eastern descent as active participants in Bay Area redistricting, trained more than 200 people to serve as volunteer poll monitors in the June and November elections, and created know-your-voting-rights materials and trainings to help grassroots organizers throughout California help people know how they can vote and get language support.

For the 2022 elections, we created a series of know-your-voting-rights fact sheets in 13 different languages and held trainings to equip partners with the facts about county-specific voting processes and language rights. Our work extended from San Diego and Orange County to Siskiyou County, where we registered hundreds of eligible Hmong community members who had faced significant barriers in registering to vote as well as repeated intimidation from the sheriff’s department.

In June and November, we trained more than 200 volunteer poll monitors to observe language and disability access at nearly 500 voting places in Northern and Central California. Our June poll monitoring program found that most counties complied with federal and state language access requirements. However, we also found that counties should continue to make improvements in posting translated sample ballots and related signs, recruiting bilingual poll workers, providing assistive devices, and training poll workers on accessible voting equipment.

In the Bay Area, we also endorsed two November ballot measures to strengthen our democracy, which both passed with over 70% of the vote. In San Francisco, voters approved moving elections to even years only (Proposition H), which is expected to boost voter turnout among people of color, young people, and working class voters. In Oakland, voters approved the Fair Elections Act (Measure W) that will make the city’s election finance system more transparent, democratic, and responsive to residents. The measure also creates a Democracy Dollars program that will provide each eligible Oakland resident with four $25 vouchers to donate to qualifying local political candidates of their choice.

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From redistricting to language access for voters, our team continues to serve as statewide technical experts alongside partners like California Common Cause and the League of Women Voters. After engaging communities in state redistricting, advocating for fair mapping processes, and pushing for maps that empower Asian, Pacific Islander, Arab, and Middle Eastern communities while respecting other communities of color, we joined with partners to advise the state on how it can further strengthen its redistricting efforts in 2030. These recommendations included:

• Improving the state commission application process to ensure that potential commissioners have the time and willingness to serve and that some of the commissioners have the group-management skills necessary to move the business of the commission forward;
• Hiring outreach specialists, especially for hard-to-reach communities and partner with trusted community groups to maximize public participation in the process;
• Mapping regions with federal Voting Rights Act obligations before mapping other regions;
• Posting all mapping proposals prior to when they will be discussed;
• Establishing a framework early on for how the commission will consider and weigh community testimony;
• Continuing to holding hybrid meetings in the future to make it easy for the public to participate; and
• Creating a consistent process for the public to request interpreter services.

At the local level, we also worked with California Common Cause and the League of Women Voters of San Francisco to advise the San Francisco Redistricting Task Force and other city bodies on best practices for fair, equitable, transparent, and accessible processes. While we were encouraged to see the San Francisco task force make significant improvements to language access towards the end of this cycle’s process, the task force’s practices and behavior overall often diminished the voices of people most often underrepresented and underserved by our political systems.

We continue to advise San Francisco and other city entities to adopt best practices for local redistricting, including:

• Allowing for sufficient time for redistricting with a detailed and specific timeline that includes key milestones and deadlines;
• Establishing a robust and transparent budget from the start and providing sufficient resources for language support;
• Establishing ranked mapping criteria and documenting the rationale for mapping decisions in each visualization and draft map; and
• Ensuring task force members are trained on how to make mapping decisions in a consistent, clear, and transparent manner, among many other recommendations.

Our analysis of local redistricting in places like San Francisco, Oakland, San Mateo, and Alameda are informing a statewide report on how California counties can improve their redistricting efforts and what state law advances are needed to ensure all residents have meaningful opportunities to shape electoral maps at all levels of government. These efforts complement our leadership as part of the California Language Access Workgroup to better understand the needs of voters with limited English proficiency and help California lawmakers, county registrars, and the Secretary of State’s office identify and implement long-term improvements to language access.