By Michelle Griffith | Reporter
Good morning, Reformers.
The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday weakened a landmark civil rights law that has prevented discrimination against minorities at the ballot box for over 60 years.
The Voting Rights Act has helped elect thousands of Black and Latino lawmakers and is seen as one of the most consequential laws in U.S. history.
The Supreme Court’s right-wing majority, which has been working to water down the Voting Rights Act for over a decade, strictly limited the use of race to draw congressional districts. The law was intended to protect voting rights and prevent the dilution of minority votes in states with a history of discrimination. In practice, it has led to more Black representation in Congress.
The law, which was extended by wide margins every few years until 2006, is intended to bolster the 14th Amendment and 15th Amendment, which bar the government from restricting voting rights on the basis of race.
Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the court’s majority opinion, said that because Black Americans vote at similar rates as other Americans, the country essentially doesn’t need the Voting Rights Act anymore.
“Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, which have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination,” Alito wrote.
This is similar sentiment to the other major weakening of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, when Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “our country has changed” as an argument for eliminating the law’s requirement that states with a history of discrimination receive federal pre-approval to change their voting laws.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent at the time wrote that more Black Americans were voting and Congress had more minority representatives because of the Voting Rights Act.
Gutting the Voting Rights Act “is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” Ginsburg famously wrote.
Republicans are moving swiftly: Florida’s Legislature hours after yesterday’s ruling dropped a new congressional map that creates four more Republican-leaning seats. Expect other southern states to do something similar.
The Supreme Court’s ruling could help Republicans keep control of Congress this November.
Onto today’s Reformer.
ICE agents search the passenger of a truck as they arrest both him and the driver during a traffic stop in February in Robbinsdale. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
By Tim Henderson
A quarter of immigration arrests since August were labeled by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “collateral,” a type of arrest and detention that’s been challenged in court as an end run around civil rights.
Public outrage and lawsuits over the arrests may be tamping down the large-scale sweeps that foster them, but tens of thousands were arrested this way between August and early March.
Collateral arrests can result from street sweeps and raids in which a person is singled out for questioning based on appearance or proximity to someone wanted on a warrant. That person could be taken into custody if agents think they may be subject to deportation and also likely to flee if released.
From August to early March, there were about 64,000 collateral arrests, a quarter of the 253,000 total arrests by ICE, according to the Deportation Data Project.
As our colleague Alyssa Chen reported recently, ICE labeled 1,300 arrests as “collateral,” during Operation Metro Surge.
By Ariana Figueroa
The U.S. Supreme Court appeared poised Wednesday to uphold the Trump administration’s efforts to end temporary legal protections for 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.
The decision could also affect several other lawsuits related to what is known as Temporary Protected Status that are pending in lower courts. The suits challenge the Trump administration’s procedures to terminate country protections, which have sharply raised deportation risks for more than 1 million immigrants.
Arguing on behalf of the Trump administration, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said that federal courts, under the law, cannot review the executive branch’s decision to end or extend a TPS designation.
By Patrick Hamilton
Blue-green algae blooms are appearing in the cool lakes of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and scientists believe a warming climate is creating ecological changes to the Boundary Waters, writes Patrick Hamilton, a fellow for the Science Museum of Minnesota.
“Harmful algae blooms … underscore how the Boundary Waters are highly sensitive to human decisions made far beyond its borders but can nevertheless change the composition of the atmosphere above it and the quality of the waters that flow into it. Which is another reason to fear the great risks of Congress’ recent decision to open an area near the Boundary Waters to sulfide mining leases,” Hamilton writes.
IN OTHER NEWS
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Have a great Thursday.
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