Past and present directors of the ACLU of Florida weigh in on immigration, education, recreational use of cannabis, reproductive rights and voting

ACLU of Florida executive directors — Howard Simon And Bacardi Jackson in the WMNF record library. By Sean Kinane/WMNF News, Aug. 2024.

The ACLU of Florida turns 60 next year and is welcoming a new executive director this year; on WMNF’s Tuesday Cafe, we spoke with Bacardi Jackson, the new executive director of the ACLU of Florida and Howard Simon, the long-time executive director of the ACLU of Florida about a range of state issues from voting rights to Amendment Three and Amendment Four on this November’s ballot.

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Transcript:

Seán Kinane: I’ll ask about what the ACLU has been doing, and what it will do in the future. So maybe, which one of you would like to answer, what is the ACLU of Florida?

Howard Simon: Well, what is the ACLU of Florida? The ACLU of Florida is the state affiliate of a more than now 100-year-old national human rights organization. We’re the nation’s leading non-partisan defender of constitutional rights for everybody, regardless of their political point of view. We try as best as we can to fight back against government intrusion upon the fundamental freedoms that people have. That means the right to speak, to read, to have opinions or express those opinions, freedom of religion, equal protection of the laws and so on. We’ve been doing this for more than 100 years as a national organization, about 60 years now, as a state organization, and we’re heavily involved in issues like trying to keep state government out of people’s private medical decisions, which is on the ballot here in November. And we’re also trying to protect people’s right to read books that they want to read, the right of teachers to have discussions with their students in classrooms and high schools and in university levels and so on. So that’s my short description. Let me turn it over to our new director to add to that.

Bacardi Jackson: The only thing I will add is that we are also the people of Florida. We are about 40 staff members. We are over 100,000 members across the state. We are supporters, financially, we are volunteers. We are just an amalgam of Florida that cares about freedom.

HS: Well, this is kind of coincidence that we are both here together, but this is my pleasure. Yes, I’ve been the state director for about 23 years. Before that, I was the director in the state of Michigan for about 23 years as well. So I’ve spent, you know, 45 years or so as a state director of the ACLU, and it was about time for me to retire. And it is my absolute thrill and pleasure to be here and introduce you and your listeners to our new incoming executive director, who is just going to be a wonderful leader for civil rights and civil liberties in Florida, Bacardi Jackson.

BJ: And Howard is a bit modest, so let me just add a little bit to that. It’s not just about his longevity of over 40 years with the organization, but he has been an impactor. He has affected not only what has happened in this state, in the state of Michigan, but with the whole national organization. He has been a visionary in terms of what the organization can be, how we exist and work together across all 53 affiliates and with the national organization. And he has just been the visionary who has made sure we have been at the vanguard of protecting rights for everybody in this state and across the nation. So Thank you Howard.

HS: Oh, thank you, very sweet of you.

SK: The ACLU of Florida is turning 60 next year. Anything special planned?

HS: Well, maybe the most important thing that we’ve ever been involved in is what’s on the ballot in November. My God, this is protecting the right of the women of Florida and the families to access reproductive health care, including a right to abortion, is so important. I have to say, not merely for the women and the families of people of Florida. But you know, all the states around us have absolute bans. And we are it for the women and the families of basically the southeast quadrant of the United States. So this is a very, very important referendum that’s on the ballot in November to just keep government out of the medical decisions that women and their families need to make.

Amendment Three: legal cannabis in Florida

SK: There are other amendments on the ballot in Florida. Is the ACLU of Florida taking any position on, say, Amendment Three?

BJ: We are supportive of Amendment Three. We aren’t at the forefront of bringing that amendment, but we know it has been a huge criminal justice issue that Black Floridians are prosecuted and incarcerated at rates four times that of white Floridians for marijuana possession. And we know it’s a racial profile issue, so we are very supportive of the law changing on that front.

HS: You know, let me add to that. What we’re about is freedom. Part of what’s going on is this crazy battle about language. I mean, our governor has erected signs at the border to the state of Florida, saying, Welcome to Florida, the Free State of Florida. And here we have, you’ve mentioned two measures on the ballot. One is the right of people to use marijuana, and the second is the right of women to access reproductive health care. If those two things aren’t the definition of part of what freedom is about. But here is our governor opposing both of them in the name of freedom. I mean, this is like Orwellian. As if he can call night as day, as night, and up is down and whatnot. I mean, this is a crazy battle about language. I don’t know whose freedom he’s talking about. If he’s trying to block the right of people to use marijuana or the right of women to access reproductive health care.

Voting in Florida

SK: You mentioned earlier, access to voting. What are the barriers in Florida for people to get access to being registered or to actually voting, and what is the ACLU of Florida doing to protect those rights?

BJ: Well, we know one of the barriers that exist is a hard-fought right for returning citizens to be able to have access to the ballot. It was another referendum some years ago, the other Amendment Four we fought so hard for. And we saw, like we see, with many things, the shenanigans of the state to roll that right back after Floridians declared and gave a mandate that this was important to our state. That we believe, once people had completed their sentences, that they should be able to vote. And it should not be a matter of pay to vote. We’re seeing this with both of the amendments right now. Is if you have money and you can go to another state, or if you have money and you can get a medical card, then you have access to rights other people don’t have. And so we saw the same thing happening with the criminalization of people who are — by Florida voter mandate — should be allowed to vote. But now the state is putting up another barrier, and without even giving due process, and without even giving access to information about what they owe, but subjecting them to potential criminality. Which has the same chilling effect that many of these repressive laws we are seeing. So we are still very much concerned about making sure people have access that should be given. But also, we are focused on redistricting. We have been doing that at a local level and making sure that our districts are drawn fairly. In a free Florida, we would actually see districts that represent the people who live in those districts.

HS: Yeah, I just want to add just a little bit to that. Voting rights has been close to the top of our priority for, oh God, for decades. And we’ve been involved in many, many lawsuits involving efforts on the part of the legislature, primarily, to make it more difficult for people to vote on. There are obviously some people in the legislature who think that they have a partisan advantage if fewer people vote. So for example, there have been cutbacks on vote by mail or access to mail drop boxes. The vote-by-mail restrictions by the legislature actually been pretty effective. It’s cut in half the number of people who signed up for vote by mail. But I want to go back to what Bacardi said a minute ago. For me, the major injustice in Florida, which is just an overriding, horrible injustice in the state, are the continuing restrictions on former felons who have served their sentence and their inability to vote. So where we have now, as Bacardi said, is a pay-to-vote system. People can vote if they can pay whatever they may owe in terms of fees and fines. So people have an obligation to pay, but the state has no obligation to tell them if they owe anything, or how much, and that just leaves people in limbo up in the air. And it’s what you what people have seen in terms of these arrests by some people who believe that fairly, that they have the right to vote. Well, they even have received voter registration cards from their county supervisor of elections, and then they get arrested by DeSantis’ election police. So we are left with, I think, a horrible injustice by the legislature and the courts, which is that people have an obligation to pay, but the state has no obligation to tell them if they owe anything.

BJ: And we’re gearing up for this election too to ensure we have voter protection. We want to make sure, you know, in a climate like this one, we don’t see intimidation of voters, we don’t see outbreaks of violence. So we will be on the ground, as we are in every election, making sure that we have access to the ballot.

SK: One of the effects of people seeing videos of those arrests, people who had registered to vote but then got arrested after they voted, is they might think, well, it’s not even worth it for me to register. Who knows if the state does or doesn’t consider me to be someone who should vote. I’m just not going to bother. And so even if they don’t get arrested or something just the fact of them not registering to vote has the same effect.

HS: I don’t think we’re being overly cynical to say that that’s the whole point. The whole point is to reduce the size of the electorate by intimidating people from voting. This is so anti-democratic that there may be people in the legislature and maybe the governor himself who thinks that there is a partisan advantage by reducing the size of the electorate and trying to intimidate people from voting.

Redistricting in Florida

SK: Earlier, Bacardi, you mentioned redistricting. There was redistricting in Florida after the 2020 census. In 2022 the Florida legislature had a map. It passed a map, but then the governor came back and said, Wait a second, I’m going to redraw this map. And then the legislature went along with it. What was the effect of that new map that got passed and is now the law in Florida? What did that do to the districts, especially, I’m thinking of congressional districts up in North Florida.

HS: Yeah, in the Jacksonville area. I mean, what the governor did. Well, let’s let’s back up. Let’s back up. 1000s of people in Florida were involved in the effort to try to end partisan gerrymandering once and for all, by people who remember, it’s now almost 1415, years ago, in the 2010 election, we worked so hard to get passed what was called the Fair Districts amendments. And the point of the Fair Districts amendments was to try to impose constitutional standards on the legislature to end once and for all partisan manipulation of district lines. And one of the requirements there was a prohibition on reducing the political power of racial and ethnic minorities. So as a result of fair district lines, there was a district in the Jacksonville area that was a congressional seat in which there was a Black member of Congress. And the our governor has this view, the legislature passed it, approved it, and the governor came in at the last minute and said, Wait a minute. We can’t do we can’t do that. Force the legislature to redraw the lines, divide up the Black community in a number of different districts. So that Black seat in Congress was dissolved. And now it’s before the Florida Supreme Court. Which I think is, you know, in the short run, it’s a test of whether or not the Black community in the Jacksonville area will have a political voice or their political voice will be diminished. But in the long run, I think what it really is all about is the governor’s assault on the fair district constitutional amendments and whether we’ll end up with just having nice words in our Constitution, but a governor and the governor’s control of the courts that will leave those words as having no practical impact.

SK: Congressional redistricting is not the only districting case that the ACLU of Florida has been concerned about lately. In July, a federal court resolved a lawsuit that concerned racial gerrymandering in the city of Miami. Not all of our audience is going to know about that, but it kind of is maybe a microcosm of what’s going on with the congressional race. Can either of you describe what happened there and what the result was?

BJ: Well, I’m 90 days in. I’m going to let Howard talk about all of the work that happened under his leadership.

HS: Actually, we have a unit within our legal department that has been doing just wonderful, wonderful work challenging racially based gerrymandering. But not only Miami. Miami was the most visible one, because it’s because it’s the city of Miami, and it was a big but we’ve been involved in, I don’t God, I lost track, maybe 15 different lawsuits challenging the racial gerrymandering of county commissions, or in many, many counties in the in the state of Florida and part of that was the city of Miami. And this was essentially this the Miami redistricting case is very similar to these other ones. It’s where we’ve challenged the district lines that essentially froze out, divided up racial communities into a number of different districts so that their political clout was diluted. And we challenged that as intentional racial discrimination. There was a trial, appeals all the way up to the US Supreme Court, and finally, the city recognized the handwriting on the wall. They recognized the handwriting on the wall after a federal judge ruled against the city numerous times. And I have to say, frankly, with a lot of pride on the both of our parts. That lawsuit, I think, changed the government of the city of Miami, in which the city council for the city of Miami was drawn in an intentional way that namely, well, these will be Hispanic districts. This will be a white district. We’ll have one bBack district. And they drew it, and they thought that was perfectly legal, and they can get away with that. And it took a lot of work on the part of wonderful staff attorneys that we have in our legal department to finally bring that to an end. So I think we’ve permanently changed the government in Miami by essentially allowing racial minority communities to have a greater voice in city government.

Immigration and Florida

SK: Moving on to the topic of immigration and the laws in Florida and barriers maybe in Florida for immigrants to participate civically. What are some of the things that the ACLU of Florida are paying attention to and are working to improve for immigrants in Florida.

BJ: Well, one challenge we took on was a law that was making it a crime for family members, essentially to just drive other family members across the state border, whether it’s for purpose of even visiting an immigration office, or for some other legal and important purpose or for health care reasons. And so we have taken on that statute, and I believe we’ve got an injunction. Just got the injunction on that one so we are certainly trying to stop additional barriers to families being able to just exist in this state.

HS: I think there are two general areas that we’ve been working on. Bacardi has just talked about one, which is basically challenge a lot of the anti-immigrant restrictions that have come out of the legislature maybe prompted by the governor. The governor used that, frankly, as a platform when he was running for higher office. And I have to say that this is something that is ultimately going to have to be sorted out within the governor’s office, within the business community in Florida. I mean, this is kind of a crazy thing that we have. We depend so much in agricultural industry in Florida, the hospitality industry, so much of the industry in the business of Florida is dependent upon immigrant workers. And the governor’s assault on on that is just totally it’s cruel and it’s counterproductive to our economy. But the other part of what we’re doing is what happens to immigrants when they are picked up and detained. And we’re not ready to talk about it now, but we’ve been doing — there are three places in Florida where immigrants are primarily detained and one of which is way up in the north, almost at the Georgia border, in Baker County. And we have been studying the really abysmal conditions in which immigrants have been housed, and we will be releasing a report about that very soon, and I think it’s going to be shocking about what we’ve uncovered.

SK: On that note, in June, the Department of Homeland Security’s internal oversight mechanisms were a subject of an ACLU report. The report was called Deadly failures, preventable deaths in US immigration detention. Is this part of that Baker County example you were giving? Or is this? Is that separate from this one?

HS: Yeah, part of the report we’re going to issue in Baker County. Interestingly, part of what we did, I mean, we’ve been filing complaints, filing lawsuits and filing requests for the ultimately, for the Department of Homeland Security, it’s the federal government, the federal government. The federal government rents space in county jails to house people, immigrants who are detained. And what we’ve been trying to do is get the federal government to step up to its responsibilities to ensure that there are humane conditions in these county jails. So one of the complaints we filed was with the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, which came in and did an investigation and confirmed our allegations. So that will be part of the report we will be issuing shortly.

Education in Florida

SK: I want to also talk about education in Florida and some of the barriers that educators face, whether it’s college professors or teachers in public schools. Maybe, let’s begin with issues in the public schools where people are, for example, teachers are getting in trouble for using their preferred pronouns. Where did this all come about, and what’s the ACLU take on this?

BJ: I think this is probably one of the things as a mother of three that is such a personal battle for me, and one that I think anybody who cares about freedom has to pay attention to. Because we know that the front line of all of our freedom lies in our children having the right to learn and educators having the right to educate and to teach. And we also know that educators are in the best position to decide what is, what should be in a curriculum. And it should not be a matter of politics. It should not be a matter of a power grab. And so you know, what we have seen happening in our schools has been absolutely devastating. I know, the last school year, we started with about a 7000 deficit of school teachers, and we have seen teachers leave the profession by the droves because of this personal attack on teachers. Teachers don’t even feel safe, and I mean physically safe. We have seen teachers who can’t use their pronouns, who are being restricted from bathroom usage. We are seeing teachers who are afraid to teach subject matters and truth and basic history. We have seen math books banned. I mean, it is really at an unbelievable level of feeling like we’re in a very unfree state. And so, you know, we absolutely are paying attention to this whole swath of repressive laws that are attacking the freedom of people to learn and the freedom of people to teach and the freedom to research and the freedom to publish. We have been at the forefront of the STOP Woke case that focuses on higher education. We just had recently over the summer, an argument in front of the 11th Circuit, and are awaiting a decision from the 11th Circuit. And most sad to me, as I was sitting in that argument, is I live in a state where the state is actually arguing that professors are the mouthpiece of the state, that it’s the state’s right to speech, that it can dictate what its teachers say. It can dictate what its professors research. It can dictate, you know, what they publish. That is a dismal state of affairs. I’ve told my oldest son, who is heading to college this fall, he can’t go to school in Florida. He is eligible for full scholarship in Florida schools. But I am very, very concerned about any child being in this state where our own history is being relegated, where their existence is being relegated. We are seeing student groups being chilled from forming. We are seeing professors who are afraid to sponsor student groups. We have this ban on finances, anything that that supports the unassailably important principles of diversity, equity, inclusion. These are not bad words, these are principles that we should be excited to embrace and to see our students and our young people embracing. And so, you know, it is not even just about a matter of the loss of curriculum, but it’s also about what kinds of people are we trying to develop in this state. And you know, when I first moved to Florida, someone sort of lightly said, you know, one of the greatest exports of Florida is caskets, because lots of people come here to retire, but they want to be buried at home. And sadly, I think, in my stint here, and I’ve been here for 18 years, I have seen the transformation that probably one of our greatest exports will be our children. We will see a brain drain. We will see educators leaving, and we will see our young people not wanting to be in this state because they will not be getting a first-class education or an education that will be usable anywhere else in the world.

SK: I saw a report in Inside Higher Ed recently where it said that because of the new laws in Florida, about 20% of professors, tenured professors who were being reviewed were getting, I don’t know if it was denied tenure or their tenure wasn’t renewed somehow. And so the teachers unions are calling it that tenure’s gone in Florida, that it’s more like a five-year contract. Any thoughts about what’s happening there?

BJ: Yeah, that’s one of the changes that we saw, is that tenure was removed, and we now have this system where these professional contracts can only be renewed by a board that’s appointed by our governor. And so, you know, preceding this, it’s important to put all of this in context and to see the connection of the dots. We also saw our universities surveying as to the political parties of professors. I mean, what in the world does that have to do with being a qualified educator on a campus? Except that you want to transform our universities into centers of indoctrination, into centers of censorship. And so, you know, absolutely, this is one of those many, you know, I think there’s, there’s been this sort of death of 1000 cuts of our academic freedoms, and that is one of them, is that professors have to please the government, the government appointees, In order to continue teaching at universities.

HS: Well, you know, I spent about eight, nine years as a college professor before I started working for the ACLU, and lucky enough, to many decades ago to be able to live my dream of working for the ACLU. So I come out of this. Maybe I hope this doesn’t come across as overly intellectualized, but of all of the public policies that we are pushing back against and trying to defend freedom from the governor’s policies. This is one of, for me that one of the most troubling things to essentially abolish academic freedom, to dictate to professors what they can and cannot say, and the governor’s ban on talking about race. And you can’t talk about it in a way that might upset certain people. I mean, for me, how do you possibly understand or learn about American history without understanding the crucial role that race has played in almost every aspect of our history. From before there was a constitution, before it was a Declaration of independence. I mean, obviously race is crucial to the our aspirations about the promise of what this country is supposed to be, as laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And to have restrictions on that because information about it may be upsetting to certain people. I mean, education is supposed to upset you. It’s not supposed to just confirm your prejudices. It’s supposed to upset you by learning different things. And this assault on the freedom to think, to speak, the assault on academic freedom, for me, is one of the most troubling aspects of all of DeSantis’ policies.

SK: We’ve covered a lot in a half an hour. But if there’s anything else that we should talk about with our audience before I let you guys go?

Reproductive freedom in Florida

BJ: Yeah, there is one thing I want to make sure we hone in on. And right now we have our entire organization is all hands on deck to pay attention to what is happening to the loss of reproductive freedom in this state. You know, as I mentioned, I am a mother. I have a daughter, and it is incredibly disheartening to me that she may exist in a world where she has less freedom than I did. I stand on the shoulders of civil rights activist, who are my parents, and I know it is my responsibility to deliver to my child and my children and everyone’s children, a more free place, not a less free place. And what is happening right now with amendment four on the ballot is that we are seeing the government again come in and attempt to undermine the great momentum, the will of the people. We know we have well over 60% of the people, which now is this unbelievably high threshold that has been imposed on the citizens of this state in order to amend the Constitution. But we know we have over that, but the government is attempting to confuse voters. We have been having this fiscal impact statement battle that I don’t know if a lot of people are aware of, but they should be aware of. And the first fiscal impact statement that was written was declared by a court to be unconstitutional. It still referenced a 16-week ban, a 12-week ban, in order to confuse voters. It had no other purpose than that that it was not amended as the law changed to what’s called a six-week ban, but is in actuality much less than six weeks. And so we saw, in the midst of that battle where we had won that case and the state appealed, the state then took the opportunity to have three additional convenings of the FEIC, and that’s the body that determines what the fiscal impact statement is. Now that body usually is just looking at pretty mundane, objective kinds of facts about fiscal impact. It’s economists. It’s people who crunch numbers and on that body is one of the state’s greatest economists. But instead of continuing with the body that existed the state — DeSantis and the legislature — came in and put in two new members to that body, one of them someone from the Heritage Foundation, and another person who’s a political crony who had a certain mission to come in and make sure that that language was as confusing as possible. And so what we see now is this language that is deeply, deeply prejudicial, that is confusing, that is misleading, that follows none of the constitutional principles that the court laid out very clearly for the state that was required for this fiscal impact statement. And so we see a statement now that is, you know, not at all based in fact or objectivity, or really looking at any kind of financial impact, but it was designed to try to scare people. It is designed to bring up things that are completely speculative, nothing at all to do with any of the objective principles that you write impact statements for so people can make a decision fairly and honestly. And so this current impact statement is making references to things like the possibility that there may have to be state-funded abortions. There’s absolutely nothing about the amendment that would require that, or that would, you know, go into that direction. They are making insinuations about whether or not parents will be involved in children’s decisions. There is nothing in the amendment about that. And so these speculative statements are meant to confuse voters, and we want to make very, very clear that we are doing everything we can. We’ve been part of an incredible, powerful coalition called Floridians Protecting Freedom. We are very excited to sit at the table with many organizations who care about this freedom, who care about pregnant people. And we also understand that this battle is critical, not only for Florida, but for the ecosystem of access to abortion. We are, as Howard mentioned earlier, the only state in the southeast that has a citizen-initiated process to amend our constitution, and we are surrounded by states that have total bans. We are it for the southeast. This opportunity is it for the southeast. And so it is such a critical battle, we want to invite people to join us in it, to make sure they are paying attention. The language on the ballot is, it may be confusing. We are still fighting it. We are out in front of the Supreme Court now with a motion hoping to get some justice in that regard. But if we don’t succeed, and that horrific language is on the ballot, we need to educate people. So we need people to share information about what is Amendment Four. The actual summary is the first 75 words, and everything else after that is state propaganda to undermine it.

SK: Howard anything as we close?

HS: That was eloquently put. I think in this period of time, the ACLU is probably one of the most important organizations in the country, certainly in Florida, where we’re fighting back against authoritarian public policies. We are so needed right now. And what you just heard from is our new leader, Bacardi Jackson. And I hope your listeners, will get to meet her going forward, and she will be a very important, inspirational leader for the cause of defending true freedom, not not the governor’s manipulated understanding of freedom, but real freedom for the people of Florida going forward.

Also on Tuesday Café on August 6, 2024

We spoke with HOPE, the coalition of faith communities known as the Hillsborough Organization for Progress and Equality, about trying to stop the Hillsborough County Commission from taking funds away from affordable housing.

Our guest was Dr. Sheila Simmons Tribble, the co-president of HOPE and the co-chair of its Affordable Housing Committee.