This week, a state court judge in Orange County declared the end of a landmark lawsuit called Campbell v. Barnes. The suit was filed last summer at the height of the pandemic and sought the release of people in the county’s jails due to the unsanitary and crowded conditions, which put incarcerated people and staff at serious risk due to the spread of COVID-19.

The case is over, because the court found that OC Sheriff Don Barnes had substantially complied with a December order that had told him to reduce the jail population by 50 percent in all congregate living areas. The judge correctly asserted that people living in those areas couldn’t safely socially distance from one another. The court also ordered the jail to continue to take all necessary measures to ensure social distancing “until the current COVID-19 emergency is declared terminated.” This was one of the strongest court orders in the nation against a jail, prison, or immigration detention center during the pandemic.

When the ACLU and our partners filed the case last summer, more than 5,000 people were held in the massive jail system in a mixture of cells and large barracks-like dormitories where the virus easily spread like wildfire. But due to a combination of the court’s order requiring the jail to reduce the population density, local police issuing citations in lieu of arrests for low-level or non-violent offenses, fewer people incarcerated in the jail due to poverty and inability to pay bail, and early releases and time credits for people with limited time left to serve on jail sentences, the population of the OC Jails reached a historic 10-year low.

When the state first ordered the reduction, Sheriff Barnes and other elected officials did the rounds on TV denouncing the judge’s order and threatening that mayhem would ensue in the OC, and result in a wave of lawlessness and re-arrests. But that simply didn’t happen. The measures that were used to reduce the jail population were shown to be safe both in terms of public health and public safety.

Epidemiological studies of urban jails found that a 10 percent reduction in in the jail population was associated with a 56 percent decrease in transmission of the virus, leading the scientists to conclude that decarceration should be “a primary strategy for COVID-19 mitigation in jails.” Moreover, while some violent crimes have increased across the country in the past year, there is little evidence that people on release are behind the crimes, and the number of people accused of shootings or homicides are a fraction of the jail population.

Our mass incarceration crisis has been destroying our communities for decades, but the pandemic made its depravity and senselessness impossible to ignore.

Indeed, as the OC reduction order comes to an end at the hoped-for waning of the pandemic, the court-ordered reductions show that mass incarceration — with its tremendous societal and monetary costs — is not only unnecessary, but also horrifically damaging, especially to people of color and low-income communities. This is true not only in the OC, but in jails and prisons across the country.

For over a year, the COVID crisis has posed an urgent and imminent threat to incarcerated people who cannot socially distance or protect themselves from the virus through prescribed mitigation measures. Across the country, in response — albeit not to the degree needed to truly ensure public safety — criminal legal systems rethought their practices and departed from the status quo.

As the case ends and the pandemic begins to wane, it is critical that our policing, jail admissions, and prison sentencing systems do not return to business as usual — both in the OC and in communities across the U.S. We must end our addiction to the criminalization of poverty, mass incarceration, and endless construction of jails and prisons to lock up more people, disproportionately people of color.

COVID-19 showed us that we are able to change even our most ingrained habits and behaviors quickly when the need is urgent. Our mass incarceration crisis has been destroying our communities for decades, but the pandemic made its depravity and senselessness impossible to ignore. We are faced with an opportunity and a mandate: We must apply the same urgency to ending our mass incarceration crisis that we applied to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe during the last year.

For example, prior to the pandemic, the OC planned a huge expansion of almost 900 new jail beds to the James A. Musick jail near Irvine. As infection rates increased in the jails amid the pandemic, county supervisors approved the expansion contract without discussion in May 2020. For almost two years, the Musick jail has sat empty, wasting taxpayer dollars despite historic low bookings and daily population.

Thanks to community pressure led by impacted families and the Stop the Musick Coalition, a year after county supervisors approved the contract, the Irvine City Council unanimously passed a resolution opposing the expansion of the jail.

We must continue to work in solidarity with incarcerated people and community groups to defeat the planned expansion of the Musick jail. This is our opportunity to invest in community care and reshape our collective approach to justice. We need you.

Learn more: Tune-in to the Stop the Musick Coalition’s workshops on gender and racial disparities in OC jails and the harms of jail expansion.

The cruelty of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency was on full display this past year. The agency refused to take vital measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 in its detention centers, even in the face of its own experts’ findings that the crude facilities were “tinderboxes” for the disease.

Detained immigrants — compelled by the specter of illness and death in ICE’s jails — brought ICE to court over the inhuman conditions, with representation from the ACLU and its affiliates throughout California and around the country. Their actions led to findings that ICE was imprisoning medically vulnerable seniors in cramped, over-crowded cells; withholding COVID-19 tests to avoid having to deal with positive results; and retaliating against dissent by various means, including threatening to cut off access to soap.

Judges ruled that the conditions in ICE facilities were “inconsistent with contemporary standards of human decency.” And they ordered ICE to let people go. (See our timeline.)

Before the ACLU’s lawsuits were filed, there were more than 42,000 people detained nationwide each day. At its lowest point during the pandemic, this number fell to just over 13,000 people detained nationwide each day. In California, there were more than 3,000 immigrants detained at the Adelanto, Mesa Verde, Yuba, Otay Mesa, and Imperial detention centers. Today, there are fewer than 1,000. And despite baseless outcries by government officials and the for-profit companies that operate the detention centers that drastically reducing the population of the centers would lead to havoc and widespread lawlessness, just the opposite happened.

Released immigrants, many of whom went home to their families, overwhelmingly complied with their court-ordered release conditions. Indeed, these releases offered a blueprint for a new future where instead of languishing in cruel, senseless detention, immigrants could retain their liberty and dignity while their immigration cases move forward.

Their stories are testament to the viability and urgency of a world without unjust immigrant detention. To cite three examples:

• Adrián Rodriguez Alcantara and his partner Yasmani Osorio Reyna (pictured) are Cuban asylum seekers who first arrived in the U.S. in January 2020. The couple fled Cuba — where Adrián coordinated overseas medical mission trips and Yasmani worked at a radio and television agency — in search of the right to love each other freely. They were detained in the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego for three months during the beginning of the pandemic while they waited for their asylum claims to be heard. As an individual with HIV, Adrián lived in constant stress and fear that he would contract COVID-19 and not make it out of Otay Mesa alive. Adrián and Yasmani were released on April 30, 2020, after filing a class action lawsuit seeking their release and the release of others in the facility. Their courage protected not only themselves, but nearly one hundred other medically vulnerable individuals whose releases were secured through the lawsuit.
• Sithy Bin was born in a Cambodian refugee camp and arrived in the U.S. as a toddler. Following the completion of 15 years on a 40-years-to-life sentence, after which a judge determined his exemplary conduct in prison had earned him a second chance, he was transferred to ICE custody at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Facility in Bakersfield. There, he was closely confined with other men in his unit, none of whom received COVID-19 tests during his time in Since his release he has become a program administrator at Inglewood Wrapping Arms Around the Community, a nonprofit that offers community services and re-entry programs for marginalized people. He does social media work for a church ministry and attends Pacific Oaks College where he is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in human development.
• Alejandro Jeronimo Osorio, originally from Mexico, has lived in the U.S. for nearly 30 years. He has diabetes, hypertension, and asthma, conditions that put him at heightened risk of serious illness or death from COVID-19. He was released by court order in September 2020, with the judge finding that Alejandro, who had completed extensive rehabilitation programs following misdemeanor convictions, posed neither a danger nor a flight risk, and that his continued detention during the pandemic was likely unconstitutional. Two weeks after his release, Alejandro was granted custody of his three children, including a son who has a serious heart condition that recently required surgery. Alejandro was relieved he was able to be there to care for his son, as well as provide support for all his children.

Read more stories.

Today, the Biden administration is faced with a choice. It can follow in the footsteps of the Trump administration and refill the now-empty jail cells. Or it can acknowledge what government studies have shown for years and what the experience of the past year has proven beyond doubt — that in the vast majority of cases, detention is not only cruel, but unnecessary to ensure immigrants’ presence at civil immigration proceedings. Humane, community-based alternatives to detention are more than capable of securing their presence while preserving individual liberty and dignity, and keeping families together.

So far, however, the signs from Washington are not good. Immigration detention numbers are rising, and the Biden administration persists in defending ICE’s cruelty in court. The government has yet to commit to protect people who were released due to COVID-19 from re-detention. It is not too late, but we need to act now.

Those of us who believe in a world without unjust immigrant detention must raise our voices and call on Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas to shut down ICE facilities immediately, before their cruelty wreaks havoc on yet another generation.