NLG CHICAGO

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Remembering Susan Compernolle

Susan Compernolle

Susan Compernolle (credit: Chicago Tribune)

On June 15, 2018, beloved Chicago activist and immigration lawyer Susan Compernolle peacefully passed away while surrounded by family.

Sue worked and volunteered in several immigration organizations including Centro Romero and American Immigration Lawyers Association. She passionately committed to providing legal aid to countless immigrants. Her brother, Paul Compernolle told the Chicago Tribune, “[Sue] was always off doing good things, helping farmworkers in Florida and the Carolinas who were facing deportation.”

James Fujimoto, a federal immigration judge in Chicago, worked with Sue on immigration issues including the National Immigration Project of National Lawyers Guild (NLG). The non-profit initiative promotes justice and equality of treatment in all areas of immigration law, the criminal justice system, and social policies related to immigration.

NLG Chicago honored Sue with the Arthur Kinoy award in 2008 as recognition of her enduring and distinguished commitment to the struggle for immigrants’ rights. Sue joined the Guild while attending Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, where the student chapter was involved in the struggle to end U.S. involvement in Latin America. Her ability to speak Spanish fluently allowed her to travel widely in Latin America, Europe, and Asia.

After living a full life, Sue – who friends described as a “quiet advocate with a keen sense of justice”—died of cancer in her Edgewater neighborhood home. Sue’s memorial service was held at Donnellan Funeral Home in Skokie, IL.

NLG Chicago’s board and members express our deepest condolences to the Compernolle family and friends in the activist community. Susan, PRESENTE!

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Remembering Lewis Myers, Jr.

Lewis Myers, Jr.

Lewis Myers, Jr. (credit: Chicago Crusader)

On May 24, 2018, Chicago’s activist community lost a fantastic criminal defense lawyer and ally when Lewis Myers Jr. passed away following heart surgery complications. Lewis, a Chicago transplant from Houston, was a former board member for National Lawyers Guild Chicago.

Brother Lew, as he was affectionately called, rooted his life in progressive activism. As a longtime activist in the National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL) he fought bravely in the fight against racist America. His community service started in his teens when he took a leadership position with the NAACP.

Close friend and former NLG president, John C. Brittain wrote, “Brother Lew stood fearlessly inside the courtroom or in the streets.  He defended his tactics with best practices and research.  His boldness, dedication, and education earned him much respect among the people in the boardrooms, courtrooms, classrooms, and living rooms.  Though he could be a fiery and dynamic speaker at times, he remained an unselfish, humble servant of the people.”

He is remembered as a compelling courtroom orator and quintessential lawyer-activity. Brother Lew fought workplace discrimination, acted as a progressive voice in the legal and civil rights community, and passionately pursued doing right. Friends and colleagues described Brother Lew as fearless, loving, and a true advocate for the people.

Celebration of life services for Lewis were held in Chicago and Houston. NLG Chicago’s board and members express our deepest condolences to Lewis’ family and friends in the activist community. Rest in Power, Brother Lew!

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Remembering Ora Schub

Ora Schub

Ora Schub (The Chicago Defender by Sebastián Hidalgo)

On June 11, 2018, the Chicago activist community lost a beloved ally, colleague, and friend. Ora Schub, a former president for National Lawyers Guild Chicago, passed away after a long and courageous battle with cancer.

Ora was born and raised in Chicago and dedicated her life to activism, advocacy, and peace. As a leader in the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), Ora also supported human and legal rights delegations to other countries. Having worked as a criminal defense attorney and clinical law professor at Northwestern University, Ora helped organize the National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL).

Ora was known as one of the “grandmothers” of the city’s restorative justice movement. Together she and fellow activist Cheryl Graves helped many Chicago organizations learn and embrace restorative justice principles. Through Community Justice for Youth Institute – which they co-founded – Ora and Cheryl held restorative justice workshops and peace circle keeper trainings.

In a January 2018 interview with City Bureau reporters, Jenny Casas and Sarah Conway, Schub said, “if [holding peace circles] works, the circle creates a safe space where you can be vulnerable. Cause we can disagree with each other on opinions, but we can’t disagree on your story.”

A memorial for Ora will take place:

Saturday, August 25, 2018
4:30 – 7:30 pm
South Shore Cultural Center
7059 S. South Shore Drive

NLG Chicago’s board and members express our deepest condolences to Ora’s family and friends in the activist community. Rest in Power, Ora!

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NLG Chicago is Part of the Struggle to Keep Families Together

NLG Legal Observer (LO) - Pilsen, June 2018

NLG Chicago Legal Observer (LO) with Pilsen Alliance protestors during the ‘March to Abolish ICE’ (June 2018). www.thepilsenalliance.org

The slogan of the National Lawyers Guild is “law for the People.” This call has always been an ideal that we struggle towards by building dignity-focused, movement-based spaces for advocates and activists to come together.

Small steps have been made over the years. Although some decisions were — and still are — inadequate at the time, they are nevertheless important steps. For example, decisions like Flores, which limited detention of children in immigration proceedings; or Obergefell, which established same-sex marriage rights; or increased pay for teachers through Union support and strikes; or the ongoing fight by Chicago Community Bond Fund to bring dignity to those facing felony charges, freeing those incarcerated solely because they cannot afford to post bond. “Relentless advocacy — by lawyers, paralegals, and organizers — was key to all of these wins.” And in countless other, less known but incredibly important instances, the people who find solidarity through the NLG have continue to fight for dignity, and law that works for the people, across all areas.

Sadly, this ideal of “law for the People” seems so far away right now.

These past few weeks have been devastating as we watch our government rip up what we have fought for and destroy rights belonging to disenfranchised communities across the United States. We protest in fear and anger for ourselves, our families, our friends, our neighbors, our countries. We grieve for the loss and trauma that has come and organize to stop what is coming.

We must continue to organize — to stand in the strength of solidarity across religion, ethnicity, income, and employment. This diversity of thoughts and life experiences is what makes our struggle for dignity a bright light in these truly fucked up times. We need that bright light as a reminder that we are strong and will not give up.

NLG Chicago Legal Observer (LO), Pilsen, June 2018

NLG Chicago Legal Observer (LO) with Pilsen Alliance protestors during the ‘March to Abolish ICE’ (June 2018). www.thepilsenalliance.org

And while this should not need to be said — this should not ever need to be shared — it feels important to remind each of us reading this.

You are wanted, here, in your country. You are deserving of dignity, appreciation, love, and respect. You are needed here. What you bring matters. Who you are matters. You have a community here, built out of our collective tenacity, strength, and loyalty. We, all of us, are lucky you are here. THANK YOU.

Today, the NLG Chicago re-commits to standing with its membership to fight in solidarity with, alongside, and among our many communities for the children separated from families; for the people detained and for those jailed; for all those discriminated against because they are Muslim; for black men and women who daily fight the persecution of police and institutionalized racism; for labor movements fighting for dignity in the workplace; for the First Nations working to save our water and our lands; for women everywhere whose reproductive autonomy is taken away, over, and over; and for countless other struggles.

Guided by our ‘law for the People’ ideal and the light of many movements guiding us through, we stand together.

Stand with us by donating to the work of NLG Chicago.

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Statement Opposing SB 2562 – Increased Police Surveillance by Drone

We the undersigned organizations stand together in opposition to SB 2562. This bill would allow police to use drones equipped with facial recognition capabilities to spy on large public gatherings across the state of Illinois.

Increased surveillance of demonstrations and other public gatherings will make us all less safe because it intimidates and deters people from exercising their First Amendment right to protest, a necessary tool for holding elected officials accountable–especially in the age of Trump. If we want to build a more equitable world, the Illinois legislature must encourage political engagement, not scare our fellow Illinoisans away from its most elemental form: public gathering.

We are greatly  troubled by the dramatic expansion of surveillance powers this bill would make available to Illinois law enforcement. The Chicago Police Department’s long history of violating the rights of protesters is well known and includes unlawful surveillance and targeted abuse of people working to make this a more just city for our most marginalized residents. Chicago police violence as exemplified by the police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the murder of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in 1969 continues today. We need only look at the recent attempts by the Chicago police to interfere with protected First Amendment activity by the #BlackLivesMatter to be convinced that the Chicago police are not to be trusted with a legal tool that will allow them to invade personal privacy and impede political activity from the skies.  

We strongly encourage elected officials to oppose SB 2562 and the widespread use of surveillance technology by police.

Signed,

Current Status of SB 2562

On May 2nd, the Illinois Senate approved SB 2562. The bill passed out of committee in the House on May 17th. SB 2562 must now be presented three times in the House before it can be put up for a vote.

How Did We Get Here:

Currently, Illinois law only allows police to use drones if they have obtained a warrant, suspect a high risk of loss of life, are searching for a missing person, or are taking crime scene photos. citizens of Illinois are currently protected by the Biometric Information Privacy Act which prohibits most kind of facial recognition technology being applied to them, although these protections do not apply to police departments.

SB 2562 would dramatically increase the ability of law enforcement to surveil public gatherings and public gatherings. The bills were introduced in early 2018 by two legislators who are extremely-friendly to Rahm Emanuel’s policy agendas and both currently in committee. The ACLU of Illinois went as far as accusing Rahm Emanuel and his administration as secretly being behind the bill. The threshold for deploying drones could be very low: a “large-scale public event” of over 100 people or “if the United States Secretary of Homeland Security determines that credible intelligence indicates that there is that risk”.

Racial Bias and Facial Recognition Technology:

Facial Recognition is automated process by which computer algorithms compare unknown faces to a known database of previously collected images such as mug shots or driver license photos. First, a large data set of images must be collected and then an unknown image will be classified to return the probability of a match against a known image. It is estimated that the FBI’s FACE system has access to forty-three million faces from driver licence photos from the Illinois Secretary of State. An import assumptions of the training data is the faces are usually in well-controlled environment, with a face looking directly at a camera and with good lighting.  

According to a report by the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, the use of facial recognition technology has several racial biases. After an analysis of the top three algorithms used by facial recognition “all three of the algorithms were 5 to 10% less accurate on African Americans than Caucasians”. There was also a “a similar decline surfaced for females as compared to males and younger subjects as compared to older subjects”. Furthermore, since facial recognition technology only returns the probability of a match and other similar faces, a person can come into contact with law enforcement for the actions of other individuals. This issue is exacerbated due to the racial discrepancy of interactions between minorities and law enforcement which leaks to an over-inclusion of minorities in facial recognition datasets.

A Troubling Trend

The Chicago Police have abused surveillance technology in recent history. Most recently, the department came under scrutiny for their use of Stingrays. Multiple lawsuits have challenged the lack of oversight and the use of Stingray technology to collect data from the phones of thousands of unsuspecting individuals attending protests. After it was discovered that Chicago Police were using Stingrays with minimal legal protections, the legislature passed a strong warrant requirement bill in 2016. Now, some members of the legislature are pushing to give police more access to surveillance technology despite the fact that state law already allows law enforcement use of drones in a genuine security crisis.

In a 2012 Senate hearing, Senator Al Franken, then Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, confronted the FBI about an agency PowerPoint presentation showing how face recognition could be used to identify people attending the 2008 presidential campaign rallies for then-senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.150 In 2015, the FBI admitted that it conducted surveillance flights over Ferguson and Baltimore during protests of police use of force. The Department of Homeland Security has monitored Black Lives Matter protests. And footage of Chris Wilson’s protest shows an officer videotaping the event.

In Hassan v. City of New York, a 2015 case challenging the NYPD’s pervasive video, photographic, and undercover surveillance of Muslim Americans following 9/11,161 the Third Circuit agreed with the plaintiffs—the victims of surveillance—that the manner by which the program was administered—specifically targeting a group of people for their beliefs and religious affiliations—may have caused them “direct, ongoing, and immediate harm.” Hassan v. City of New York, 804 F.3d 277, 292 (3d Cir. 2015).

Surveillance Doesn’t Mean Accountability

While some argue that such technology can be used to hold police accountable, the proliferation of body cameras has shown the fallacy of this position. Police body cameras now allow us to watch the ongoing abuse of power in viral social media videos, yet have little impact on the consequences for police officers involved. In Washington DC, The Lab @ DC conducted a study on the Metropolitan Police Department’s use of Body Worn Cameras. That extensive study found that “body-worn cameras had no statistically significant effects on any of the measured outcomes.”

This was displayed quite clearly in the body camera footage of the Chicago Police murder of Paul O’Neal in July 2016. The fact that the officers were wearing body cams didn’t stop them from shooting 18-year-old O’Neal in the back or from high-fiving each other as he bled to death in a Southside backyard. More often than not, surveillance technology is used to criminalize the victims of police violence, not to hold the perpetrators of state violence accountable. Like body cams, new cameras on drones will be trained on civilians and not on the police themselves.

What You Can Do

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University of Chicago NLG Chapter Protests Trump’s Solicitor General

At the University of Chicago Law School, just months after the Edmund Burke debacle earlier this year, students members of the Federalist Society decided to honor Trump’s Solicitor General Noel Francisco. Francisco’s visit was following his cringe worthy oral arguments before the Supreme Court to defend the Muslim Ban. He struggled to indicate that Trump’s Muslim Ban was an informed and deliberately protective policy, rather than the animus-based and xenophobic mess that unfurled in airports across the country. In a lesson on how not to represent your client, Francisco uttered his last statement, “Islam is a Great Country,” indicating the level of precision and knowledge of the policy and legal decisions made within the administration.

The Federalist Society celebrated Francisco by awarding the Lee Otis Award for Public Service. Lee Otis is an alum, and founder of the Federalist Society at the University of Chicago. During the event’s introduction she spoke of how as a student she felt there was a need to represent the views of conservative libertarians, that they were a minority group and remain a minority group. At this point, Professor Otis began to list decades of professors at the Law School that precisely align with and espouse the views she finds so lacking within the field. As Otis spoke on the need for smaller government, at least four plainclothes bodyguards for Francisco were noted in the front and back of the courtroom, presumably paid for with federal funds. Twice Otis noted how embarrassing it is that the Federalist Society’s award is named for her. Students at the University of Chicago agree; we are also embarrassed by her attendance at the law school.

Prior to the event, students from the National Lawyers Guild worked to advertise the event to their fellow students:

Just two weeks before, the University of Chicago NLG chapter was featured by the law school for winning the first annual pro bono student organization award. The NLG continued their good works in the school, lining the hall to offer informative brochures to contextualize the event for attendees, and handing one to Francisco himself as he entered the corridor.

At the entrance, students held posters which greeted the guest speakers. Francisco spoke to the Muslim woman holding a poster by the door which read “A Complete and Total SHUTDOWN of Francisco until we figure out what is going on.”

He tried an exchange with her,

“How are you doing?”
“Disappointed by your presence here in the law school.”

Driving the student dissatisfaction were the events of the prior quarter. The Edmund Burke society, a conservative “debate” society existing at the law school for over two decades, released a whip sheet that finally caught the attention of the student body. Though the whip sheet comparing immigrants to literal trash was particularly notable, this was just one in a series which can be found here.

The Chairman of the Burke Society is now the new President of the Federalist Society, an unsurprising development given the almost complete overlap between these sets of student organizations. Other students saw this awards ceremony as another attack on the same targets: undocumented, Muslim, immigrant and LGBTQIA people who suffer as a result of Francisco’s insistence on defending the indefensible. However, the Federalist Society wanted to learn his tactics and normalize his advocacy. Upon the introduction of Francisco to the audience, approximately half of the students in the courtroom stood to turn their backs. Harried law school administrators asked students to lower their posters lest they obstruct the views of the audience. Some explained that they posed no obstruction, and remained standing.

Students had also prepared a card to show they were in compliance with University policy:

The audience was permitted to ask questions of the speaker via pre-submitted index cards. For a University obsessed with “Free Expression,” it is surprising that every question was filtered by the moderator Professor Todd Henderson. The remarks by Professors Otis and Henderson praised the federal official for his magnanimity in the face of the clear opposition before him. Likely this was one of the few venues in which he sees the faces of those who object to his work, from which even his bodyguards could not protect him.

Some students walked out of the talk, which consisted largely of anecdotes from his days at the Law School (Did you know Francisco once dropped a class? He also studied in the library). Among the most substantive praises of his actions were celebrations of his confidence when he casually dismissed opportunities to further develop his thinking as a law student.

Protest posters were used again to alter the school’s homogeneous string of white man portraits, helping re-contextualize the artwork in the law school and make it relevant to the needs of our time.

 

When the remaining attendees entered the courtroom hallway to pick up their lunches, they had the welcome of the artwork, with ambiance provided by the music of Nipsey Hussle’s FDT. Remaining brochures about the event accompanied each lunch box. As the main speaker exited with the esteemed Dean of the Law school , the students—with no prior planning—decided to escort them through the school hallway. Students trailed behind the prominent lawyers while the lyrics of Nipsey’s song captured our spirit:

“We the youth. We the people of this country. We got a voice too. We will be seen, and we will be heard.”

Eventually, the two officials and bodyguards entered the Dean’s corridor, beyond the reach of students. It was a funeral procession for old ideas and a broken world that the law students are committed to defying. What remained of the Federalist Society’s student members convened around the leftover food from the American Constitution Society’s talk that was concurrently held on pro bono work the world actually needs.

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