Image credit: ACLU NJ Website (NJ Election Guide)

In this interview, Public Square Amplified community reporter Alaa Essafi speaks with Amol Sinha, executive director of the ACLU-NJ, about the types of legal advocacy being utilized to ensure immigrant rights are protected, ongoing immigration policy campaigns, and ways to promote civic engagement leading up to the 2024 presidential election. 

Amol Sinha previously worked at the Innocence Project leading policy reform campaign against wrongful convictions, and as a director at the NYCLU. In 2023, he received the South Asian Bar Association of North America (SABA) Public Interest Achievement Award.

Amol Sinha, X profile picture

Public Square:  What misconceptions have you encountered in your work that New Jersey voters should know about? 

Amol Sinha: I was born in an immigrant family, my parents came from India in the early 1970s and it's been incredible to see the growth of the immigrant community in New Jersey. We are one of the most ethnically diverse and we have one of the biggest populations of immigrants in the country as well. One misconception that some people may hold is that immigrants are not entitled to constitutional protections.  Anybody in the United States, regardless of their immigration status, is part of the fabric of our society and therefore deserves to have the same constitutional rights as everybody else. 

There are certain things that citizens can do, but non-citizens cannot, like vote, for instance, however, It's crucial that we recognize the fact that people from immigrant backgrounds, no matter where they're coming from, are so essential to the economy, to the civic life of our country and of our state, towards schools, to every institution, every institution in our state, and they should deserve the dignity, the respect and the protections that any one of us expects.

What role do you believe young people play in the upcoming election and what should they know about their rights as voters?

Young people, historically, have been at the forefront of civic engagement. We have seen young people engage in politics and choose our leaders for the entire history of this country. Civic engagement does not only mean voting, and democracy doesn't just happen on election day. It's an ongoing thing. It's a value. It's a perspective about how one participates in a society.

In New Jersey, we are working towards getting 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds the right to vote for school board elections. That's because school board elections end up controlling a lot about student life and the communities that they serve do not have the voices of young people represented at the school board level. It is, frankly, a missed opportunity. We're not adequately capturing the community that these school boards are meant to serve, if we are avoiding hearing from the people, the very people that are in those schools. 

Newark is already on its way. They passed an ordinance to allow 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds to vote in school board elections in that city, and it's a leader for the country to be able to do that. I think that 16-year-olds should be able to vote in all elections. They shouldn't be just limited to the school board.

Could you speak to the limits of federal laws in preventing voter suppression and then the efforts being made in New Jersey to eliminate systemic voter suppression? 

We're seeing attempts to purge voter rolls to make it harder for people to vote in an election even though they voted in the previous election. We're seeing mail-in ballots being discredited for a variety of reasons, including because somebody neglected to handwrite their return address on it. There are these ridiculous things that folks are doing to try to discredit people's votes and it's all to manipulate the system so that certain folks can stay in power, and the civic relevance of certain groups including black and brown people in the United States is diminished. We also saw, for instance, the Voting Rights Act in the United States being basically gutted and the protections that the pre-clearance program no longer have effect in the United States, and that's a real problem.

We are sure that passing the John Lewis Voter Empowerment Act of New Jersey will protect our voting rights and to make sure that access to the ballot for all of our voters is equal and fair and  reduce barriers to voting. We're going to try to make sure that we are establishing a pre-clearance program similar to that which existed at the federal level so that New Jersey's local governments with a history of discrimination have to prove that certain changes that they've made to the voting process that will not harm voters of color before they can go into effect.

ACLU-NJ uses ‘integrated advocacy’ in the work that it does across several different issues such as immigration policy, voter suppression, legal incarceration, etc. What does ‘integrated advocacy’ mean and how does it manifest in influencing policy? 

An example I can give you is from, early in the pandemic, in New Jersey, in 2020 everybody was figuring out what was going on and what the future held. The government had many different communities to take care of at that moment, right? They were thinking about schools or people in hospitals, frontline workers or healthcare workers or first responders, people in nursing homes, the population that they probably did not have top of mind to order people who are incarcerated. We decided at the ACLU that we would focus on that population.

We quickly realized that when every single institution in the United States is rife with systemic racism, of course, a global pandemic is going to increase the disparities that exist in those systems. The most stark racial divide is in our criminal legal system, where in New Jersey, you're twelve times more likely to be incarcerated if you're black than if you're white. 

We started talking to the legislature about an idea for a bill that creates something called the public health emergency credit. We came up with the idea that, if you're incarcerated during a public health emergency, you should have time knocked off your sentence because you're not getting access to services. You may not get access to healthcare, and we need a pathway to reduce the prison population. Between 2020 and 2022, we saw over 9000 people being released from New Jersey's prisons and jails. We had reduced our prison population by more than any other state, and just in that period alone, between 2020 and 2022, we reduced our prison population by 35 to 40%. This was due to the integrated advocacy approach of this organization, where we use our experts or legal experts' communications to tell the stories.

We utilize voices from parents of people and mothers of loved ones who had died during the pandemic while incarcerated. We use integrated advocacy in every aspect of our work, whether it's voting, immigration, LGBTQ rights, or protecting people's free speech rights. We want to make sure that we're using all the tools that we're able to in order to implement the most inclusive policies for our state. 

What’s at stake with NJ immigration policy, especially post-election?

The ACLU did some polling across the country, in battleground districts, and in New Jersey as well, and it was polling around criminal justice and immigration. Immigration has been a political football in New Jersey and in the United States during the presidential election, and we've seen both candidates Trump and Harris talk about immigrants in dehumanizing ways. Trump more so, let's be clear, right? But Harris has been talking about further funding immigration enforcement and expanding detention. Both Harris and Trump present different threats and opportunities for our work, and in particular, for the work protecting the rights of the most marginalized, and that includes immigrant communities, especially undocumented immigrants.

I hope that when people go to vote, a message will be sent that we care about our immigrant neighbors and we want to make sure that we're leading into practical, proven solutions, rather than the fear-mongering and hate-based rhetoric.

What are some current immigration rights cases the ACLU-NJ is working on?

One of our priorities is the Immigrant Trust Act, which basically does a few things. One is that it creates a wall between local law enforcement and federal immigration enforcement, which means that people should not be afraid to report crimes or be witnesses when they are victims of crimes or engage with their local police because they fear deportation. It includes identifying circumstances in which public agencies can collect information related to immigration status, and limiting those instances. It requires agencies to adopt policies that make sure they are treating immigrants and other people with the same dignity and respect that they treat anybody else.

We recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of Cata which is a farm workers labor organization, and we have been advocating for the rights of farm workers for a long time, and for the past two-plus years, we've been building up towards this lawsuit. We filed a lawsuit on behalf of a farm worker advocacy organization that represents 20,000 farm workers in New Jersey because farm workers are one of the only groups to be excluded from certain labor protections in New Jersey. They don't get the same minimum wage, they don't get overtime, they don't get the same sort of health care protections, and they work in some of the most dangerous conditions which is really devastating to their health. Probably 100% of farm workers in New Jersey are from immigrant backgrounds, and oftentimes undocumented. We decided to file this lawsuit to make sure that they are treated equally with the fairness and respect that every worker deserves.