The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has failed to reform its substandard medical care practices, contributing to poor outcomes for immigrants in the agency’s custody—including eight deaths in detention facilities between 2010 and 2012, according a new report released by a trio of grantees: the ACLU, Detention Watch Network and the National Immigrant Justice Center. “Instead of forcing changes in culture, systems, and processes that could reduce future deaths,” the report states, commenting on a blown opportunity for reform, “ICE’s deficient inspections system essentially swept the agency’s own death review findings under the rug.”

Undocumented workers were the focus of much of the fallout from Thursday night’s GOP presidential debate, as analysts chewed over the impact of Marco Rubio’s attacks on frontrunner Donald Trump’s hiring record for several major projects. A new poll from NBC News/Survey Monkey shows that 55 percent of Trump’s supporters believe the undocumented should be deported; 87 percent said they back Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the country.

Both sides in the government vs. Apple battle, pitting law enforcement security interests against consumer privacy, took steps to escalate the conflict further. Apple filed its brief opposing the FBI’s request for cooperation in hacking into a slain San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, mounting a First Amendment defense and pointing out that it has complied with numerous government calls for cooperation in investigations past; it’s the bureau’s posture that has changed, not the company’s, Apple argues. Its lawyer, former Bush administration solicitor general Ted Olson, said ratifying the government’s position could lead to “a police state.”  And Apple announced it had hired a developer who played a prominent role in the creation of a secure chat app called Signal—billed in the tech press as Edward Snowden’s preferred and winner of high marks on grantee the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Secure Messaging Scorecard.”  

Meanwhile, the Obama administration signaled it was close to loosening restrictions on cell phone and email traffic gathered in by the National Security Agency, allowing it to share the information with a wider array of intelligence offices without taking any intervening steps to protect the privacy of the data in question. According to The New York Times’ account, this prospective change would cover a wide variety of types of data, including “bulk collection of satellite transmissions, communications between foreigners as they cross network switches in the United States, and messages acquired overseas or provided by allies.” The change was immediately denounced by the ACLU among other privacy advocates.  

In Georgia, legislation creating driver’s licenses and state IDs with special fonts and colors for immigrants who have work permits under the DACA program moved through a state Senate committee. Advocates, including the Atlanta chapter of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, decried the bill as stigmatizing immigrants.

Among other grantee activities:

--MoveOn.org arranged a campaign to have constituents drop by the state offices of members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, giving them a copy of Article II of the Constitution and urging the members to fulfill their obligations to give President Obama’s nominee to replace Scalia a fair hearing.

--Center for American Progress’s ThinkProgress posted a piece sifting Obama’s public utterances about the Scalia vacancy to try to glean what sort of nominee the president might be looking for, and where his picks fit philosophically.

--America’s Voice was among the grantees cheering introduction of legislation in the House—“the Fair Day in Court for Kids Act”—that would help ensure access to legal counsel for children involved in immigration proceedings.

--The American Immigration Council published a new report on the roots causes of the surge in Central American refugees seeking to cross into the US—and why the Obama administration’s ICE raids are not deterring them. The council also published an article analyzing the impact of Justice Scalia’s death on the Supreme Court’s deliberation and decision-making in US  v Texas, the legal challenge to Obama’s immigration executive actions.