5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Opinion
DC Police Collaboration With Occupying Feds Perpetuates Family Separation
Increased criminalization and deportations exacerbate family separation by creating the conditions used to justify state intervention and forcible removal.
Nov 22, 2025
Washington, DC is already the most policed city in the US, through resourcing policing more than any other major US city to the dozens of local and federal law enforcement agencies that residents encounter in our daily lives. These conditions and increased criminalization contribute to the stopping, arrests, sentencing, incarceration, and deportation of disproportionately Black and brown youth and adults. These circumstances contribute to forcible family separation. As a former foster youth I’ve seen how this exacerbates harms rather than pathways to safety for too many families.
Since August, additional presence of federal law enforcement and the National Guard have blanketed the city. Though Mayor Muriel Bowser claims that the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) is not cooperating with immigration enforcement, numerous local accounts show MPD and federal agencies working alongside each other on. Local legal service and mutual aid organizations have declared MPD’s collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a violation of the Sanctuary Values Amendment Act (which DC Council Chair Phil Mendelson revealed Mayor Bowser secretly tried to repeal), calling the decision by DC Police Chief Pamela Smith a “betrayal of the city’s residents.”
The current conditions that DC residents are living under have rippling effects that will be felt long after the current occupation, including exacerbating family separation through deportation, incarceration of youth and adults, and forced removal under the guise of care.
Like the presence of federal agencies, Child Protective Services (CPS) are framed as protectors. But what DC families have felt is not protected, but increasingly unsafe conditions. What DC families have experienced is not security or sanctuary, but the very real consequences from a manufactured crisis that justifies the conditions for family separation in the state’s eye.
As DC residents, we must ask: What does true family safety look like for us?
Since the “surge” of the presence of federal agencies, community documentation and data project Courtwatch DC has reported a sharp increase in people detained who appear during arraignment court proceedings, which have gone as late as 1:00 am the following day. When a parent or guardian is arrested or incarcerated, even if for only one night, CPS often intervenes by displacing their children into the foster system, a pipeline that predominantly impacts youth of color. The increased criminalization of DC residents puts families at risk of separation due to parental incarceration.
ICE agencies are employing historic tactics of family separation as CPS continues a legacy of using immigration policies to separate families. When parents or guardians are detained and disappeared by ICE, children may be left with no caregivers and become vulnerable to CPS intervention. The justification of forcible removal of children while parents are indefinitely detained is a state-created problem, unnecessarily perpetuating family separation.
Residents have additionally reported that parents of immigrant students are afraid to send their children to school for fear of kidnapping by ICE. Making the choice to keep immigrant children away from school may be a double-edged sword, where the absence that is meant to protect them may be met by punitive attendance policies, putting both students and their parents at risk of intervention from CPS and law enforcement.
With or without youth programs, young people should be able to exist safely outside, in public, in their own city. Punitive tactics that directly target DC youth exacerbate the impacts of local law enforcement cooperation with federal agencies. Criminalizing existing as a young person in public, Mayor Bowser has continued to implement and threaten to implement youth curfew zones which target areas Black youth choose to spend time together in public.
When youth are criminalized and subsequently arrested, this may be considered a form of child endangerment or neglect—a justification for forcible removal of children from family care. While the city’s Black and brown youth are funneled into foster, jail, and prison pipelines, their Black and brown parents are blamed for the removal of their own children, justifying the expansion of state intervention and family separation.
One’s home, from the living room, neighborhood, to the city, should feel safe—like a sanctuary. When families are separated, missingness is a constant reminder that we live in unsafe conditions. As DC residents, we must ask: What does true family safety look like for us? Residents have been clear that they recognize that the federal “surge” is not about crime or safety, but about control, extraction, and repression of the most vulnerable. As DC residents, we must make this demand: If DC’s lawmakers care about the security and wellness of families, they must end the cooperation of MPD with federal agencies.
Keep Reading
Show Less
'Just Cause' Is a Worthy Cause
Activists in Ithaca, New York are mobilizing for the first city-wide ban on arbitrary firings in the US. Other cities should take note.
Nov 22, 2025
Activists in Ithaca, New York are trying something unique: They’re mobilizing support for an ordinance that would prohibit employers in that small city from firing their employees without just cause. If they succeed, they’ll have enacted the first such city-wide ban on arbitrary firings in the country.
Success in this effort will be a big deal, because in the United States, employment—unless otherwise restricted by law, collective bargaining agreement, or individual employment contract—is considered to be “at will.” This means that in the vast majority of cases, employers are entitled to fire workers at their whim, without warning or explanation.
A 2021 report from the National Employment Law Project (NELP) tells us that about half of US workers have been affected by unfair or arbitrary firings at some point in their lives, with devastating consequences for them and their families. Not surprisingly, then, a nationwide survey cited in the report found wide public support for just cause protections, including from 71% of voters in battleground states, with both Democratic and Republican majorities weighing in favorably.
Existing Restrictions on Employers' Right to Fire
Even without new federal, state, or local legislation, employers today face some limits to the at-will doctrine: federal and state laws, like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, that bar various sorts of discrimination in the workplace; anti-retaliation statutes, like those included in the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and many other whistleblower-protection statutes; and section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, that prohibits firing for union or other "concerted" activity. All these laws fall short of robustly protecting workers from retaliatory or discriminatory firings, however, largely because the burden is on the employee to prove the employer's illegal motivation—no simple feat—when under the general at-will rule the employer can fire the worker for no reason at all.
In addition to these limited statutory constraints on the at-will doctrine, over the past 50 or so years a number of state common law exceptions to the rule have developed. The most prevalent is the "public policy" exception, under which, in theory at least, employers can't fire workers for reasons that are contrary to public policy. Courts generally interpret the exception narrowly, applying it only to employees who exercise a clear legal right, perform a clear legal duty, or refuse to violate the law, or when the employer engaged in an “outrageous violation of a well-established public policy.”
Well-crafted state and local laws and ordinances, with accessible and effective enforcement mechanisms, have the potential to empower workers in new and game-changing ways, especially as federal protections erode before our eyes.
A second exception is the "implied contract of continuing employment" (at least theoretically available in 41 states and the District of Columbia). It's derived from employee handbooks, policies, and the like, that suggest protection from discharge except if the employee performs poorly, violates company policies, or has to be laid off because of the employer's economic necessity. Employers can generally get around this claim by expressly stating in their materials that the employee is working on an at-will basis, and that its various policies can be revised at any time, at the discretion of the employer.
Lastly, 11 states have read into the common law an "implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing," imposed on employers and employees, to act fairly. While theoretically this should prohibit firings without cause altogether, in actuality courts rarely find it applies, and then only in the most abusive cases. In other words, none of these common law carve outs from at-will employment have been particularly helpful to workers.
The Ithaca Ordinance
Which brings us to Ithaca’s legislative proposal. As the core provision of its current draft version (embedded at the Ithaca Just Cause website), the ordinance would prohibit discharge of an employee who has completed their (maximum 90-day) probationary period, for any reason other than just cause or a bona fide economic reason. In considering whether the just cause standard has been satisfied, the fact finder is to consider, among other things, whether the employer trained the worker on its performance requirements and bases for discipline, and whether the employer’s policy, rule, practice, or performance standard, including its use of progressive discipline, was reasonable and applied consistently.
Also, except in cases of egregious misconduct, the employer has to specifically notify the worker of what rules they violated or requirements they fell short of, and must utilize progressive discipline prior to firing. Similar notice of reasons is required before discharging a worker on account of bona fide economic necessity. Significantly, if an employee termination is to be upheld, the burden is on the employer to satisfy these requirements by a preponderance of the evidence.
The proposed legislation also adds a "Worker Rights" section to the City of Ithaca Municipal Code, and establishes a commission that would adjudicate complaints of violation. Complaints of violation can also be filed in court.
Retaliation against workers who exercise any of the rights granted by the legislation is expressly prohibited, and use of electronic surveillance as a tool for determining employee performance is restricted. Remedies for employees vary depending on the violation, and include back pay and damages, rescission of discipline and reinstatement, penalties, severance pay, injunctive relief, and attorneys’ fees.
Other Just Cause Efforts
The proposed ordinance echoes the recommendations laid out in these NELP and Roosevelt Institute reports. Published in 2021, both make the case for why this kind of municipal ordinance, or more potently, a comparable state law (or, as an even more radical aspiration, federal legislation, as promoted by Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders) is justified and overdue for all workers—with NELP focusing particularly on the disproportionate impact of at-will employment on people of color and immigrant workers, who face higher rates of wage theft, discrimination, and retaliation for asserting their rights than the employee population at large.
It should come as no surprise, but it's still shameful, that this country lags far behind many other nations—Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and most of the European Union, to name a few—in providing just-cause protections against arbitrary and unfair firings. Which is why what the Ithaca coalition is doing is really worth noticing. But it's not the first city to take this on: Philadelphia led the (notably small) pack when, in 2019, its city council enacted a just cause termination ordinance for the city's approximately 1,000 parking lot attendants. New York City was next, enacting a comparable ordinance protecting its fast food workers in 2021. Also in New York City, a diverse coalition of unions, advocacy organizations, and high road employers are pressing for passage of a Secure Jobs Act covering all employees who work in the city. With its newly elected democratic socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani, it just might succeed.
The US territories of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands have just cause laws. In Illinois, a Secure Jobs Act, pressed by Raise the Floor Alliance and a broad array of allies, was introduced in the state legislature in 2021, but has yet to be enacted. In what might come as a surprise, Montana is the only state in the US to have enacted just cause legislation, and it's been on the books for decades. While not nearly as progressive as the Ithaca, New York City, and Illinois models, it is unique in prohibiting, state-wide, firings without good cause.
Will Just Cause Laws Hamper Unionization Efforts?
Some may be concerned that just cause legislation could undercut unions' ability to successfully organize, since that's a key benefit they can provide in collective bargaining agreements. But there are a number of arguments that cut the other way—including that if firing without good cause is made illegal and is readily enforceable, it creates a more effective impediment to employers' efforts to get rid of pro-union activists than the weak and slow remedies the National Labor Relations Act has to offer. And, just cause for all workers would provide a floor, not a ceiling, for union negotiations for even better protections against improper firings at unionized workplaces.
Parting Thoughts
Worker rights advocates should watch Ithaca Just Cause's initiative with keen interest. It also should give food for thought—and inspiration—for those of us who live in other cities and states. It’s clear that just cause protections are popular with workers across party lines. Well-crafted state and local laws and ordinances, with accessible and effective enforcement mechanisms, have the potential to empower workers in new and game-changing ways, especially as federal protections erode before our eyes. For those of us in locales where this might be possible, maybe it's time to give it a try.
Keep Reading
Show Less
Eugene V. Debs, Defender of American Liberty
Released from jail on this day 130 years ago, the great socialist and labor leader delivered a speech we would do well to remember in these perilous times.
Nov 22, 2025
On November 22, 1895, Eugene V. Debs was released from Woodstock Jail, where he had been imprisoned for six months for his leadership of the 1894 Pullman strike. Later that day, before a large crowd of supporters at Battery D in Chicago, he spoke on the topic of “Liberty.”
Debs was a great orator, and “Liberty” is a brilliant speech, powerfully evoking both “the spirit of liberty” heralded by the Declaration of Independence, and the promise of a freedom yet to be redeemed by American workers in thrall to plutocratic government. As Nick Salvatore noted in his classic biography, Eugene V. Debs, Citizen and Socialist, this speech marked an important moment in the evolution of Debs from a radically republican labor activist to the country’s leading socialist.
Debs notes his own situation, “stripped of my constitutional rights as a freeman and shorn of the most sacred prerogatives of American citizenship.” He proceeds to defend the American Railway Union as a necessary and legitimate organization of workers, and the strike as a legitimate means of pursuing justice, which” threw down no gauntlet to courts or armies—it simply resisted the invasion of the rights of workingmen by corporations.”
An adamant defense of worker rights, the speech’s overriding theme is unmistakably the political theme of “liberty” and indeed democracy. This is clear from Debs’s opening words:
Manifestly the spirit of ’76 still survives. The fires of liberty and noble aspirations are not yet extinguished. I greet you tonight as lovers of liberty and as despisers of despotism. I comprehend the significance of this demonstration and appreciate the honor that makes it possible for me to be your guest on such an occasion. The vindication and glorification of American principles of government, as proclaimed to the world in the Declaration of Independence, is the high purpose of this convocation.
The entire first half of the speech centers on the theme of “personal liberty; or giving it its full height, depth, and breadth, American liberty, something that Americans have been accustomed to eulogize since the foundation of the Republic.” Paying tribute to the republic’s founding—"For the first time in the records of all the ages, the inalienable rights of man, ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ were proclaimed July 4, 1776”—Debs proceeds to wax poetically, for eight long paragraphs, about the enduring resonance of that 1776 proclamation, the indivisibility of liberty, and the “more than satanic crime of stealing the jewel of liberty from the crown of manhood and reducing the victim of the burglary to slavery or to prison.” It is for this crime that he morally indicts the railroad magnates and their federal government allies for breaking the strike and imprisoning its leaders.
Debs insists that it is the labor movement that most embodies “the spirit of ’76”:
To the unified hosts of American working men fate has committed the charge of rescuing American liberties from the grasp of the vandal horde that have placed them in peril, by seizing the ballot and wielding it to regain the priceless heritage and to preserve and transmit it without scar or blemish to the generations yet to come.
The ballot, Debs notes approvingly, “has been called a weapon that executes a free man’s will as lighting does the will of God.” Debs rhapsodizes in almost religious tones about the power of democratic elections:
There is nothing in our government it cannot remove or amend. It can make and unmake presidents and congresses and courts. It can abolish unjust laws and consign to eternal odium and oblivion unjust judges, strip from them their robes and gowns and send them forth unclean as lepers to bear the burden of merited obloquy as Cain with the mark of a murderer. It can sweep away trusts, syndicates, corporations, monopolies, and every other abnormal development of the money power designed to abridge the liberties of workingmen and enslave them by the degradation incident to poverty and enforced idleness, as cyclones scatter the leaves of the forest. The ballot can do all this and more. It can give our civilization its crowning glory—the cooperative commonwealth.
Debs appreciated the rhetorical and the inspirational power of the dissenting American political tradition that hearkened back to the Revolution and its “spirit of ’76,” a tradition that included his heroes Jefferson, Paine, Garrison, Phillips, Lincoln, and Anthony. And he firmly believed that civil liberties and regular democratic elections represented forms of genuine if precarious social progress whose defense and expansion offered real opportunities for the furtherance of social and economic justice. He was, in short, a democrat.
He ended his speech with the hope that “American lovers of liberty are setting in operation forces to rescue their constitutional liberties from the grasp of monopoly and its mercenary hirelings.” That hope was not in vain, even if the Pullman strike was suppressed and Debs twice found himself in prison for refusing to be silenced, in 1895 and then in 1918 when imprisoned for his famous “Canton address,” critiquing WWI. The labor movement he helped to lead played a crucial role in advancing many of the policies—from the 8-hour workday to occupational safety and health regulation to “social security” broadly understood—that most Americans today simply take for granted. Debs was indeed one of the 20th century’s true crusaders for civil liberties and democratic inclusion. And his distinctive vision of a democratic socialism established an enduring legacy whose most recent heir is New York City’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, who indeed quoted Debs in his victory speech.
At a time when the Trump administration is attacking liberty on a daily basis, targeting everyone on the left as a “radical lunatic” and “enemy from within,” and seeking to destroy the very possibility of political dissent and opposition, Debs’s paean to “Liberty” on November 22, 1895—and his commitment to its active promotion—has never been more relevant.
Keep Reading
Show Less
When it Comes to Women’s Health, The Trump Admin’s Hypocrisy is on Full Display
President Donald Trump and his cronies are peddling lies about abortion care while touting their farce advancements for women’s health.
Nov 22, 2025
Earlier this month, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made an announcement regarding the removal of broad “black box” warnings from Hormone Replacement Therapy products for menopause.
As an OB-GYN PA with more than a decade of experience in reproductive care, I know what decisions women and patients are grappling with when it comes to their health and maternal care. I also know first hand the devastating consequences of denying patients critical care when they need it the most and stripping access to care that’s been proven to be safe and effective after decades of research.
President Donald Trump and his cronies are peddling lies about abortion care while being hypocrites when touting their farce advancements for women’s health. Right now, Trump and his anti-abortion administration are pulling every string possible to ban abortion and that includes banning abortion medication.
Ironically, Commissioner Makary said in a statement that “women and their physicians should make decisions based on data, not fear,” and anti-abortion extremist Kennedy Jr. said that the administration is “returning to evidence-based medicine and giving women control over their health again.”
Contrary to their assertion of trusting research and doctors, right now, the Trump administration is working to roll back access to mifepristone and reproductive care, with Makary and Kennedy Jr. at the helm.
At the press event for this announcement, while responding to a question from a reporter, Makary said that the administration is “sticking with our philosophy that the government is not your doctor.”
So, which is it? Does this administration trust women and patients to consult their physicians for what’s best on making personal medical decisions, or is that only convenient messaging when it’s pushing forward their extreme agenda?
The healthcare crisis in America is a dire one, and yet, the Trump administration continues to play political games and feign ignorance as to how their efforts to ban abortion nationwide will have a catastrophic impact on women and patients across the country.
It has been 25 years since the FDA approved mifepristone, a safe, effective medication that has reshaped abortion care in the US.
Contrary to their assertion of trusting research and doctors, right now, the Trump administration is working to roll back access to mifepristone and reproductive care, with Makary and Kennedy Jr. at the helm.
At the urging of anti-abortion politicians and junk science, the FDA has agreed to revisit its approval of mifepristone, because extremists condemned the FDA approving a generic abortion pill just last month.
We must continue to call out this hypocrisy, because Republicans know that imposing Project 2025’s abortion agenda risks significant political backlash, particularly in battleground states where abortion is either legal or popular. More than 6 in 10 Americans support keeping medication abortion available. Even many Trump voters oppose new restrictions.
Let’s be clear—this administration’s attacks on mifepristone are a national abortion test.
Project 2025, spearheaded by Trump, Kennedy Jr., and Makary, would dismantle access to one of the safest, most widely used medications in the country. Medication abortion accounted for nearly two-thirds of all US abortions in 2023.
Will women and families retain the ability to make private medical decisions—or will patients have their rights ripped away and be forced to jump through unimaginable hoops just to receive care?
If Republicans were actually committed to prioritizing women’s health in their agenda, they would invest in healthcare so expecting mothers across the country have access to the most comprehensive care available, including abortion care.
If Republicans were actually committed to protecting women and advancing medical research, they wouldn’t pull funding from clinics and hospitals dedicated to providing care for women and patients nationwide, especially in rural communities where resources are already sparse.
I’m not buying this feigned effort toward showing allyship toward women, when everything that this administration has done since January has been an assault on women’s health and the care we undoubtedly need. Physicians and providers like me spend years in schooling and training so we can provide the best care to our communities, and yet this administration undermines those years of dedication and expertise to appease an extreme anti-abortion minority.
If Trump, Makary, and Kennedy Jr. want to walk the walk in advancing women’s healthcare, they should start with looking at themselves and acknowledging the harm that they are doing across the country to the detriment of the American people.
Lives are at stake, and we are waiting for them to mean what they say.
Keep Reading
Show Less
Most Popular