An open letter to President Obama on inequality in our justice system

NEW YORK CITY — All Americans should applaud you, President Obama, for wanting to tackle head on the inequality of the justice system with the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, which aims to help young men and boys of color reach “their full potential.”

Part of your challenge is to address the inequalities of our justice system when it comes to these young men of color and our law enforcement.

Too many communities fall victim to what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) calls the “School-to-Prison Pipeline” — a “disturbing national trend” in which children, often with “learning disabilities, histories of poverty, abuse or neglect,” are “funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.”

While your initiative is a nice step in the right direction, the ugly truth is that the United States of America has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world.

Do you remember when the countries that topped that dubious list were China and Russia? Back then, in the good old days, I used to let out a little sigh and think: “we can never be number one. How could we be the world’s greatest democracy and also have the largest number of people behind bars?”

I used to kid myself into believing it would never happen, but now the numbers say it all.

Per capita, we incarcerate more people than any other country. We have more people sentenced to death than anywhere else, and we have the highest number of mentally ill people behind bars. We have more women behind bars, more fathers, more elderly and more juveniles.

And more than anything, we imprison the most men of color.

So yes, Mr. President, thank you for addressing this issue — for naming it, for making it public and for actively trying to do something about it.

The only problem, Mr. President, is that you are sending a mixed message.

In all of my conversations with young brown skinned people, Latinos and other immigrants — young people with accents who might have been born outside of the country, men and women—I hear a lot of people saying that they are not feeling the love from the White House.

In fact, if you are one of these people, what you are feeling is quite the opposite. You are feeling like you are the target.

Whether they are in Chicago or Chattanooga, young immigrants overall probably don’t consider themselves a part of your initiative. They know the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has quotas to fill pertaining to the number of undocumented people they have to detain and deport every day. They don’t know you as a protector of people of color, who happen to be immigrants or the children of immigrants. For them you are only, and possibly forever, the Deporter in Chief.

And you, Mr. President, constitutional law professor that you are, have created alongside your initiative to protect men of color, a very specific type of profiling.

We have for a long time known what it looks like to be black in Alabama. But do you know what it is like to be brown and accented in Alabama?

Being brown and accented in Alabama means there is no protection from the president for you. Even Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is left up to the discretion of the agent on the ground.

If you are an immigrant in Alabama, the state looks like Arizona from where you’re standing. That means that, in any encounter, first and foremost, you have to show your papers. If you don’t have those papers and you have been caught before trying to get back to your family, you’re put behind bars, which is one reason why Latinos now account for 48 percent of all people sentenced for federal offenses. And for the first time in history, the share of Latinos among sentenced offenders has surpassed other groups.

So if you are black in Alabama, we know your car will likely be searched for drugs. But if you are brown, your car is searched for drugs and you are searched for your papers.

The problem isn’t that it is offensive to the people who are routinely asked to show papers. They believe the US is a country where you have to present your ID at anytime. They don’t remember a time when that wasn’t the case.

Actually, what worries me the most is how these practices are impacting due process for the rest of us.

And the truth is that our constitution allows for any person living in the US to be free from unwarranted search and seizure. Due process is being violated in our country everyday on the backs of brown men.

The president says he wants young men of color to “dream big.”

Dream big if you are a young man of color in detention? How can you think about dreaming when the conditions you are held under are not even legally binding?

Dream big if you are hungry? Dream big if your allowance of food and fresh air is not required by law? If you are a young man of color in detention, you have very few rights.

Under this administration, we have witnessed a new class of people behind bars. They are not criminals but they are treated like them in immigrant detention facilities. And for people who are sentenced for federal crimes, 40 percent of them are now undocumented. Our prisons are filled with Latino undocumented immigrants whose only crime is to be without papers. Our detention centers are filled with immigrants, too. Where is the so-called relief?

There is a lot of shame around the experience of incarceration and detention. Who wants to talk about that?

Recently I interviewed Lulu Martinez, who was a Chicagoan of the Year for 2013, about her experiment in an act of civil disobedience that landed her in detention.

She is one of the Dream 9, a group of young people who don’t have papers and who purposely got themselves detained and sent to a detention center. There, the other detainees were threated with retaliation and even deportation if they spoke to the two young women from Chicago who everyone knew were activist Dreamers.

One day Lulu, dressed in her orange jumpsuit, stood up on top of a lunch table in the cafeteria and started chanting the slogan of undocumented activists in our country: “Sin Papeles! Sin Miedo! Undocumented and Unapologetic!”

Remember, Lulu is not a criminal. She has not been arrested. She is in civil detention.

But despite the fact that she is not a criminal and is not in prison, Lulu was taken out of the cafeteria with handcuffs chained around her waist and hands, and shackles on her small feet (she is only five feet tall) — just for speaking out in her orange jumpsuit during lunch. She was then promptly led to solitary confinement, where she was held for 7 days.

President Obama got elected because of young people who once were prepared to be arrested, and even killed, for what they believed in. And so I am taken aback by the fact that young men and women of color and immigrants who are taking up the mantle to fight the same way the suffragettes, abolitionists and civil rights activists did remain invisible in the mainstream media and general American consciousness.

What’s more, these people are being silenced and thrown into solitary confinement simply for believing in their right to act on the First Amendment.

You might be creaking open some old doors of trust for young black men, Mr. President, but you are simultaneously creating a generation of young people who will only see people they cannot trust when they look at law enforcement.

This is the unfortunate hypocrisy of President Barack Obama.

GlobalPost columnist Maria Hinojosa is a regular contributor to the VOICES series on the GlobalPost commentary page. She is president and CEO of The Futuro Media Group, which produces LatinoUSA, the longest running Latino news program in America.

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This piece is part of a new GlobalPost Special Reports/Commentary initiative supported by the Ford Foundation called "VOICES." The mission of VOICES is to present the ideas and opinions of those who are less frequently heard in the media, including women, people of color, sexual minorities, citizens of the developing world and young people. These voices will consistently discuss topics important to GlobalPost Special Reports including human rights, religious issues, global health, economic inequality and democracies in transition.