My ID is often the first thing people see about me.

I could be at the grocery store, the DMV, or working my last job as a commercial driver. As a trans woman, if my gender marker doesn’t match my name, paperwork, or how I present, then it will determine the way I get treated — whether I get called “ma’am” and helped, or dismissed because they don’t want to deal with me. 

Having an inaccurate gender marker has cost me a job, housing opportunities, and basic respect. I worked as a commercial driver for 13 years. When I started a job at a new company, everything was going smoothly until I had to provide my birth certificate for paperwork. At the time, my birth certificate read “M” for gender. After my new employers saw it, they found reasons to question my work and fired me. I haven’t been able to find the same kind of steady job since. 

It’s hard not to take it personally, but over the years I have grown numb to the discrimination. Sometimes, these experiences made me want to give up. But that’s not true happiness. That’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to identify myself accurately and get respect. So I have no choice but to keep pushing through. 

I wasn’t always able to get a gender marker that matched who I am. When I lived in Maryland, I was able to get my legal name changed to Erica, but the requirements to get my gender marker changed on my Maryland ID back then were just too burdensome. I was supposed to provide letters from two different doctors — a physician and a therapist. This was impossible because I didn’t have a regular doctor or therapist. So every time I showed my license I would just hope that they didn’t notice the marker and question or disrespect me.

Allison Shelley

When I moved to D.C. they made it a lot easier. I didn’t have to get a medical examination, and the whole process seemed more open. It just seemed like they were saying, “Okay, we understand your experience. We understand that this will make life better for you.” Ever since I got my IDs changed, there has been a noticeable difference in the way I get treated.

Today I feel very comfortable and confident when I show anybody my ID because it matches my true self. For me, that meant getting an “F” as my gender marker. For others, that might mean using a gender-neutral “X” marker, because some people don’t identify as male or female, so they shouldn’t be forced into a box they don’t fit into. Having an accurate ID should be a right for everybody, whether you’re trans, cis, or nonbinary. 

Unfortunately there are still a lot of people who don’t understand. They might have a notion that everybody is the same and everybody makes the same choices, or that those of us who are trans and nonbinary are bad people who are up to no good. But trans and nonbinary people are just trying to be happy and access the same rights as everybody else. We are who we are. Until more people realize that, we are going to keep being rejected and discriminated against just for living our truth. 

I’m hopeful that with the new administration we will see real change. President Biden has already repealed the trans military ban and both he and Vice President Harris have pledged to support the Equality Act. We need to hold our leaders accountable. One way to make a meaningful difference in the lives of trans and nonbinary people is to give us identification that reflects who we are.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently deported a survivor of the 2019 Walmart massacre in El Paso, Texas, Rosa,* who was slated to testify at the suspect’s trial.

So how did she end up in ICE’s custody?

Before she was able to testify as a witness to the murder of 23 people — a murder committed by a man who authored a xenophobic and anti-Latinx manifesto before the crime — Rosa was arrested at a traffic stop by local law enforcement officers and detained for two outstanding traffic citations. According to ICE, the agency issued a detainer, or a request for a local law enforcement department to detain a person for ICE past their scheduled release. As a result, a person otherwise allowed to legally go free, perhaps by paying a fine, posting bond, or simply because there was no reason for their initial detention, is instead jailed for up to two days, so ICE can then detain and deport them.

ICE picked up Rosa and deported her to Mexico the very same day.

Many states have laws that try to compel counties to honor such detainers. Texas, Florida, and many other states have mandatory collaboration laws on the books, increasing ICE’s reach into local communities and taking away local communities’ power to decide how to spend their resources. Some counties also work with ICE by participating in a program known as 287(g), which delegates to local law enforcement officers the authority to perform some of ICE’s work.

The Biden administration can protect people like Rosa, reduce fear in our communities, and save taxpayer resources by ending the use of ICE detainers. As Biden builds support for  comprehensive immigration reform, his administration can move immediately to deliver meaningful and bold change by stopping ICE detainers and dismantling the 287(g) program.

Many law enforcement leaders who have personally witnessed the damage ICE has done in their communities are speaking out against these ICE programs, which undercut public safety by destroying community trust and contributing to a climate of fear. Just last November, voters in Charleston County, South Carolina, elected a new sheriff, Kristin Graziano, who committed to terminate the county’s longstanding 287(g) agreement with ICE and to no longer honor ICE detainers. She did so on her first day.

“We want people to be able to believe that they can turn to us, cooperate with us, when they’re a victim of a crime in our community,” Graziano said. “Our immigrant community currently does not have that trust in us, and that ends today with me.”

Two years earlier, Sheriff Garry McFadden of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, said that he canceled the county’s 287(g) contract “because it erodes trust with our community and ties up critical resources that should be used to ensure public safety.”

Both Graziano and McFadden defeated incumbent sheriffs who entered ICE agreements and supported continued work with ICE.

In November, voters in two Georgia counties, Cobb and Gwinnett, soundly rejected candidates who supported continued ICE collaboration, and elected sheriffs who were critical of ICE’s harmful role in their communities. Sheriff Craig Owens of Cobb terminated his county’s ICE contract in January, citing the fact that many immigrants were “not reporting crimes” out of “fear,” and Sheriff Keybo Taylor of Gwinnett terminated 287(g) and announced that he will stop honoring ICE detainers in order to “eliminate distrust.” Over 30 percent of all ICE 287(g) interactions in 2020 took place in the two Georgia counties.

Steven Carl, the Police Chief in Framingham County, Massachusetts, similarly stated that participation with ICE makes people “terrified of us” and “afraid” to report crimes when he rejected collaboration between his police department with ICE. Indeed, it is no wonder that studies have found that local collaboration with ICE undermines public safety.

Repairing community relationships isn’t the only reason that more law enforcement officials have decided not to help ICE. Local police who participate in the 287(g) program are emboldened to commit racial profiling, where officers target people of color and find questionable pretexts to arrest them on local charges just so that they can later be transferred into ICE custody. Sheriff Graziano said ICE made the Sheriff’s Office in Charleston “complicit in racial profiling of the Latinx community,” and apologized for the harm it had caused.

Local collaboration with ICE further jeopardizes immigrants’ safety by emboldening those who would target and exploit them, knowing that they are too afraid to seek help. Sheriff Dave Mahoney of Dane County, Wisconsin, said he didn’t want his deputies “to become ICE agents” in part because doing so might “empower [those] who are preying on the non-documented who fear coming forward to law enforcement.”

As communities seek to undo the damage wrought by the previous administration, the Biden administration should help local leaders rebuild confidence and trust by ending the use of detainers and other ICE programs that only bring pain and anguish.

*Rosa is a pseudonym used for her protection.

Over the last year, the criminal legal system’s many injustices dominated mainstream discourse as people took to the streets to grieve and protest the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police, and COVID-19 took a devastating toll on people in jails and prisons.

These events galvanized many people into action — in the streets, at statehouses, and online — inspiring them to join activists who have challenged the criminal legal system’s disproportionate and often tragic impact on communities of color.

One of the organizations at the forefront of this movement is the Youth Justice Coalition (YJC), a grassroots organization based in Los Angeles led by activists who have been incarcerated or otherwise entangled with the criminal legal system. The ACLU is part of a coalition representing YJC and impacted individuals in a lawsuit against LA County for its failure to adequately address the COVID-19 crisis in jails and prisons, and in protecting the health of incarcerated people. 

We spoke with two YJC members, Nalya Rodriguez and Michael Saavedra, about how the past year has affected their work and how their personal experiences help to shape this movement for change. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Justin Hamilton

How did you get involved with YJC?

MICHAEL: I spent close to 20 years in prison, and 15 of that was in solitary confinement. While I was incarcerated, I worked with a group of outside organizers on a hunger strike. It was one of the largest prisoner hunger strikes in this nation’s history. One of the things we asked for was access to higher education in solitary confinement. That’s how I was able to take some courses and later, enroll in community college. 

I learned a lot about the legal system during my time locked up, including when I successfully sued the Department of Corrections several times over my solitary confinement, which violated my constitutional due process rights. Once I was out, I applied for a job as a paralegal and was hired on the spot. They discovered I was formerly incarcerated about six months later, and fired me. At that same time a position opened up at YJC and my roommate Anthony, who was also incarcerated, told me about it. I applied and got the job. 

NALYA: I only recently got involved with the Youth Justice Coalition, but I was familiar with the work because I was a part of an organization in undergrad called Underground Scholars, which had an reentry program for formerly incarcerated and system-impacted students. During the pandemic, I’ve also been working with UCI 4 COLA and other partner organizations in North Orange County on an initiative to put together “solidarity packs” for formerly incarcerated people. One of those partners was YJC, and that’s how I met Michael. 

Justin Hamilton

Was there a turning point in your life that led you to organizing and activism?

NALYA: In high school, I was involved with gangs and didn’t really think I was going to college, even though I was already taking advanced classes. I hated school. I was always getting kicked out of class and spent a lot of time in the dean or principal’s office, and I was constantly told that I was either going to end up a teen parent or end up in jail or dead. It made school a negative experience. One day, literally the same day I was planning to drop out, a teacher intervened and asked, ‘Is this what you want to do with your life?’ That was the first time anybody had ever asked me that. I took a moment to pause and asked myself if I wanted to continue my life the way it is, or make a change. And I decided to make a change. I finished high school, got into Berkeley, and now I’m at UC Irvine studying for a PhD in sociology. Those experiences and seeing all of my friends go to court as teenagers, and just constantly being arrested and harassed by police officers — that’s what pushed me to get into this work.

MICHAEL: If you’ve been incarcerated for a long time, there are multiple turning points, starting with your public defender, who tries to get you to take a plea bargain even though you’re innocent. They don’t warn you that it will stay on your record for the rest of your life and harm you when it comes to housing and employment. That and many other experiences made me want to do the work that I do now, and also to become a lawyer and help people like myself to not have to rely on a classist and racist system.

Justin Hamilton

Can you describe a typical workday at YJC?

MICHAEL: As far as YJC, my day typically consists of taking calls as the lead on jail litigation. Since the recent announcement of the resentencing policy from [District Attorney] George Gascón, I’ve received a flood of calls and letters from folks inside and from family members out here asking for assistance with petitions for resentencing. I also work on letters from prisoners or calls regarding litigation. And prior to COVID, every other Saturday we would do free legal clinics to help people with immigration questions, expungement, tenants’ rights, debt relief, and things like that. Other than that, a lot of Zoom meetings with the many organizations we work with. 

Justin Hamilton

How has the pandemic shaped YJC’s work over the past year? 

MICHAEL: COVID has drastically changed things. It’s caused us to redirect our resources and take on all these calls from people in prison and their family members, who are sick or scared because of conditions inside. People have not been able to come into our legal clinics and not everybody can access support online. The community we serve in South Central is primarily Spanish-speaking and Black folks reentering society after being incarcerated and they don’t know where to go. We had to shut down our office at the Justice Center, which has affected the ability to work for some of us who don’t have computers or other office equipment at home. COVID has also changed the direction of our work. We usually work on policy impacting youth. Now we’ve been focusing more on incarceration, including women’s jails and prisons. 

NALYA: For the legal correspondence program, we are creating self-help guides and informational sheets on rights in regards to the situation with COVID.

Justin Hamilton

What do you think people who aren’t impacted by incarceration misunderstand about the system?

NALYA: We need to make sure programs are accessible to non-English speakers. So I’ve worked with a lot of organizations that work with Central American newly-arrived immigrant youth. That’s one of the things that has continuously been an issue in LA and also in Oakland, where I’ve done similar work. There just hasn’t been enough resources for Spanish-speakers or Indigenous people from Central America.

MICHAEL: One thing people fail to realize is that those same people called mafiosos or gang members, the worst of the worst, they’re the ones that actually want to see peace. They have the respect of the community, and could tell the youngsters to kick back and they will respect that. And that’s why we’ve been having this beautiful time of peace right now in South Central LA, which has been unheard of. YJC has led all of those peace treaty meetings taking place. We’re connected to the actual hood where all this stuff takes place, where people are overpoliced.

A lot of peacebuilding efforts have been unsuccessful because they are led by people who are not from the community and who have ties to the Los Angeles Police Department. Some of the biggest social justice organizations are run by people with white privilege, or white saviors. I don’t want to offend anybody, but it’s true. And they’re either working with the probation department, or they have contacts. They also have this thing called mandatory reporters. So whenever they go into a situation, they take down names and give this information to the LAPD, which puts it in its gang database. Now these people are labeled as gang members and that can be used against them if they ever get arrested, or in their housing. 

I think we need to come together and educate folks and put formerly incarcerated people, people who are directly impacted, people of color in leadership positions, not just lawyers. And they need to be paid the same. We’re called the experts and we’re tokenized all the time to speak on the issue, but they don’t want to pay us the same.

The Youth Justice Coalition works out of an office that is a converted juvenile court house.

Justin Hamilton

2020 was a difficult year, especially for many of the people you work with. But did anything good come out of it?

MICHAEL: For me, 2020 brought bright, beautiful things. I got accepted to UCLA and got a fellowship with Harvard Law School. 

NALYA: I haven’t been with YJC for very long, but some of the work I’ve done in Orange County popped off in 2020, which is really awesome. We were able to raise money with collective community funds, which has been redistributed via solidarity packs for formerly incarcerated people. We also started a letter-writing program and mutual aid efforts, like food distribution — with that alone, we’ve raised over $35,000 and over $30,000 for solidarity packs, respectively.

These initiatives came from the need to address what we were seeing in our community in regards to COVID. People are in need of resources, and people are out of jobs. Our food distribution effort was a direct result of COVID, as well as the solidarity packs, which provide people who are just being released with personal hygiene kits, PPE, socks, snacks, gift cards, and other supplies they need.

Justin Hamilton

The Black Lives Matter movement has brought abolition to the forefront of the policing conversation. How does YJC approach abolition? 

MICHAEL: Abolitionists say no more jails, no more cops. It’s an ideology about a utopia without prisons or police. But you have to have something to replace all of that. And that’s where we come in as members of the communities that are overpoliced. At YJC, we offer a real solution to no cops — we call it transformative justice and peacebuilding. So when you talk about taking cops off campus, we actually have a solution. We have a school without cops or even security. Instead, we have what we call peacebuilders who are trained on de-escalation and self-defense without any guns or weapons. We try to use our voices rather than violence.