Search online for the phrase “immigration detention” and you’ll notice lots of hits over the past few months – mostly because the federal government now holds a record number of immigrants in detention facilities. That number will soon surpass 45,000 – a mid-sized city of immigrants locked in prison-like conditions. This week, over two hundred organizations, including the ACLU, wrote a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson expressing alarm over record immigration detention rates.

The prevailing narrative surrounding immigration detention evokes images of young, mostly male, migrants, many of them “dangerous criminals,” who were caught either trying to enter the United States illegally or living here without authorization, and who are merely being held until they can be deported. But that view is false and leads to widespread public misperceptions about who these detainees really are and why they are entitled to due process protections that the Obama administration has denied them.

Many of the people held in immigration detention centers are in the country lawfully. Most have not committed any crime at all, and those that have are, with rare exceptions, not “dangerous criminals.” Nor are most immigration detainees merely awaiting deportation. Rather, many of them have strong claims for relief, which they often win.

The largest group of people currently in immigration detention are asylum seekers, almost all of whom have no criminal record. Many of them presented themselves at the border and requested protection from persecution and other human rights abuses. Another large group of immigration detainees are lawful permanent residents of the United States. Many of them have lived in this country nearly their entire lives. The government wants to deport them because of crimes they committed – often relatively minor and from long ago – for which they have already served their sentences. Like the asylum seekers, many of these detainees have strong legal defenses that they end up winning.

These distinctions are important both legally and morally. Under U.S. and international law, asylum seekers who flee persecution have a right to request protection and a right not to be deported until that request is adjudicated. They broke no law by asking for our aid. Those who argue otherwise are mistaken, and would do well to remember the lessons of World War II, when the U.S. closed its doors to Jewish refugees who were sent back to Germany and killed in the Holocaust.

As my colleague Carl Takei of the ACLU National Prison Project pointed out in a recent blog, the U.S. has a clear obligation under international law to treat people seeking refuge from violence fairly and humanely. Yet, the Obama administration has chosen to imprison them while their claims are investigated, often with little or no access to legal assistance. We betray our nation’s values when we treat these people as criminals.

We also betray our values by detaining many other immigrants, including longtime lawful residents of the U.S. Those people often face permanent banishment from the country they consider home, and permanent separation from their family members, many of whom are U.S. citizens. Because their cases are often complex, they take months and often years to decide. But again, the government locks them up, even though many of them will win their cases.

We believe all people – including undocumented immigrants and those who have lost their immigration cases and are awaiting deportation – are entitled to due process and should only be detained if absolutely necessary to ensure their removal. The Due Process Clause protects all “persons,” not just those who have their papers in order. But it is important to remember that many of the people whom the government imprisons in its immigration detention centers do have a right to stay in this country. They have broken no immigration law and will never be deported. While the government seeks to justify the inhumane treatment it affords such people by implying that they are on their way out of the country, that picture is false. These immigrants are not, as the prevailing narrative goes, awaiting deportation. They are awaiting justice.

In a few weeks, the ACLU will be arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of thousands of immigrants who have been detained for months, and often years, without being afforded the most basic due process protection: a hearing before a judge who can consider whether their detention is necessary. The case, Jennings v. Rodriguez, will consider whether a 2015 ruling in our favor by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was correct. The Ninth Circuit found that individuals are entitled to a bond hearing once their immigration detention exceeds six months. The Supreme Court will hear the case on Nov. 30. (Read more on the ACLU’s recommendations for reducing the immigration detainee population here.) A victory would not end immigration detention, but it would represent a modest improvement by ensuring that people detained for lengthy periods can at least ask a judge to release them while their cases remain ongoing.

More than a dozen leading legal and international human rights organizations, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), have joined the effort to obtain basic due process protections for immigration detainees by submitting amicus briefs in support of the ACLU’s argument that immigrant detainees deserve a hearing to determine whether they should be released on bond after six months of incarceration.

In today’s politically charged environment, thousands of people who seek nothing more than freedom from persecution or the chance to remain with their families in the country they consider home have been demonized as a threat to our nation’s core values. But imprisoning people without a hearing for months or years represents a far greater threat to those values. It is time to end the needless and immoral mass incarceration of immigrants. Ensuring basic due process to those detained for months or years would be a good place to start.

Ahilan T. Arulanantham is director of advocacy and legal director at the ACLU of Southern California. He will be arguing Jennings v. Rodriguez at the U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 30.

Back in the day, a student who broke school rules or otherwise misbehaved would be reprimanded by a teacher or sent to the principal’s office. But today, school administrators are increasingly relying on law enforcement to keep students in line, and the results can be dire.

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Take the case of Michael Davis, a five-year-old student with disabilities in the Stockton Unified School District.  A senior police officer in the school district’s police department decided to “scare him straight” after Michael acted out in his classroom, and the situation quickly spiraled out of control. When Michael got upset and could not calm down, the officer zip-tied Michael’s hands and feet and took him to a mental health facility. Michael’s family filed a lawsuit, and the police officer was finally dismissed from the department four years later, shortly after the family settled with the district for $125,000.

This incident, and many others like it, demonstrates how police officers are ineffective substitutes for counselors or other adults trained to work with young people who need guidance more than harsh discipline. Students who are treated as criminals for commonplace misbehavior are often traumatized and humiliated.

In a newly released report, “The Right to Remain a Student,” we examined 109 school-district policies on the use of law enforcement on campuses in California and found them often conflicting and vague, giving administrators wide latitude to request police assistance. Many schools have called the police to enforce minor violations like "disruption," "disturbing the peace," vandalism, tardiness, and inappropriate use of electronic devices — hardly criminal offenses.

In the San Bernardino Unified School District, for example, campus officers arrested around 30,000 students between 2005 and 2014, mostly for minor infractions like tagging and disobeying curfews.

We also found that these policies disproportionately target students of color and young people with disabilities, unnecessarily feeding them into the criminal justice system. Black students are three times as likely as white students to face school-related arrest. Students with disabilities are three times as likely as students without disabilities to be arrested on campus.

Rather than unjustly contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline, school administrators should call the police only if there is a real and immediate physical threat to student, staff, or public safety.

In 2013, the Pasadena School District developed guidelines that clarify the role of police on its campuses. Under these new rules, school staff cannot ask police officers to address incidents that involve school discipline. This progressive step has led to a significant decrease in school-based citations and arrests in Pasadena. Still, more needs to be done to ensure that district staff and police follow the rules, and that the district publicly and accurately report the data.

Similarly, school administrators should take back control of their campuses and stop relying on police officers to handle minor discipline issues, which only serves to criminalize students and push them out of school. Instead, school staff should address these issues themselves and correct student behavior with restorative justice and other more constructive practices.

Victor Leung is staff attorney and deputy director of advocacy at the ACLU of Southern California.

Like countless other young women, Monica Jones fixed her hair, applied her make-up, put on a dress and set out on foot for an evening at a neighborhood bar in Phoenix. Along the way, Monica, a social work student, attracted the attention of two men in a car. They pulled over, flirted with her and offered her a ride to the bar. She accepted.

Before she knew it, Monica was under arrest, accused of being a sex worker.

The two men, who were undercover cops, arrested Monica for "manifesting prostitution" on the grounds that she was wearing a tight-fitting dress while walking through her own neighborhood, an area known for prostitution. But Monica knew the harsh truth that officers profiled her as a sex worker that weekend night in 2013 because she is a Black, transgender woman. Monica challenged her charge, and an appeals court overturned her arrest and conviction.

While Monica was ultimately exonerated–after nearly two years of legal battles, many other transgender women of color along with LGBTQ people (cisgender and transgender alike) are routinely profiled or targeted by law enforcement for sex work-related arrests because of their sexual orientation, their gender non-conformity and their transgression of gender stereotypes.

Women like Monica are frequently arrested for sex work for simply “walking while trans” – going about daily routines like walking to the grocery store, coming home from work or school, waiting at a bus stop or daring to wear a tight dress on an evening out. In a survey of Latina, trans women in Los Angeles, 60 percent said they were profiled by officers. At a community forum in New York, nearly all 200 transgender attendees reported the same experience.

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Department of Justice has found that some major police departments practice biased and unlawful profiling of trans women as sex workers based solely on appearance – violations of the right to be free of gender discrimination and First Amendment protections for freedom of expression.

Gay men and LGBTQ youth, particularly those who are gender non-conforming and homeless, are similarly targeted. Police use laws prohibiting "public lewdness" and "solicitation" to discriminatorily target gay men who are cruising in public places for private and consensual sex partners, mainly by posing as undercover gay men, flirting with and entrapping unsuspecting victims – again, violations of equal protection under the law.

For example, courts found that the Long Beach police department illegally targeted only gay men while “allowing those interested in engaging in [lewd] heterosexual sex acts to proceed unfettered.” Further, a 2011 study found that LGB youth were 53 percent more likely to be stopped by the police, 60 percent more likely to be arrested before the age of 18, 90 percent more likely to have had a juvenile conviction and 41 percent more likely to have had an adult conviction than their heterosexual peers–when controlling for race, socioeconomic status and criminal behavior.

Worse still is the situation for transgender and cisgender women who engage in sex work. They are disproportionately targeted for arrest because of their gender and failure to conform to stereotypes about how women should look and behave.  Their male customers, on the other hand, are rarely charged – California data on prostitution related arrests in the last year and over a 10-year period reveals the same alarming gender disparity: two-thirds of those arrested are women but only one-third are men.

The ACLU has long opposed the criminalization of sex work because we believe the Constitution protects the rights of consenting adults to engage in private, consensual sexual activity without fear of criminal penalty. In other words the Constitution protects an adult’s personal decision to engage in intimate, sexual activity with another adult whether the intimacy is built on love, desire or done in exchange for money or other things of value like shelter, food or necessities. At a minimum, restrictions on that right must receive a high level of constitutional scrutiny before they can be allowed to stand.

The ACLU and an array of civil rights, legal and social services organizations argue these points in a friend-of-the-court brief filed last week with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is hearing a constitutional challenge to California’s statute that prohibits solicitation and engagement in sex work for both buyers and sellers of sex.

Precedent supports our argument. In 2003, the Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws as unconstitutional. That ruling was based on three important principles that consenting adults have:

• the right to private sexual intimacy,
• the right to form and make decisions about intimate relationships that are sexual in nature and
• the right to privately engage in intimate conduct in one’s own bedroom.

The court recognized “an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.” It also said that the “state cannot demean [people’s] existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.” We believe all these principles apply to an adult’s personal decision to engage in sexual activity with another adult in exchange for money, shelter, food or necessities. As the sodomy ruling–as well as the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling–make clear, moral disapproval of certain conduct–including sex work–alone cannot justify its criminalization.

Discriminatory enforcement of sex work-related laws also exposes LGBTQ people and women to much higher rates of violence at the hands of police. Transgender people are nearly four times more likely and transgender people of color six times more likely to experience physical and sexual violence from the police. A 2014 survey showed that 59 percent of transgender youth and 12 percent of LGB youth had been asked by law enforcement officers for sexual favors, and 50 percent of transgender youth and 22 percent of LGB youth reported being called slurs by law enforcement.

Joining us in our friend-of-the-court brief is a broad coalition of groups who also care deeply about the discriminatory enforcement of sex work laws and serve people negatively impacted by laws that criminalize sex work: API Equality-LA, Bienestar, Black Women for Wellness, California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc., California Women’s Law Center, Equality California, Familia: Trans Queeer Liberation Movement, Free Speech Coalition, Gender  & Sexualities Alliance Network, Gender Justice LA, Justice Now, Los Angeles LGBT Center, National Center for Transgender Equality, Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project, Translatin@ Coalition, Transgender Law Center and the Transgender Service Provider Network.

We hope this brief sends a strong signal to the court that it should apply a high level of constitutional scrutiny to California’s criminal statute penalizing solicitation and sex work and bear in mind the dark history and the current reality of discriminatory enforcement as it considers the case. More generally, courts may start to more deeply examine how laws used to ensnare suspected sex workers are discriminatorily enforced on the ground.

As the Supreme Court said when it recently struck down laws banning same-sex couples from marrying, “the nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times.”

Melissa Goodman is director of the LGBTQ, Gender & Reproductive Justice Project at the ACLU of Southern California and Maria Carmen Hinayon is UCLA POP law fellow at the ACLU of Southern California.