These surveillance towers would transform our communities, threatening the privacy and civil liberties of community members, damaging local economies, and accelerating the militarization of our region. For all of these reasons, the ACLU has voiced loud opposition to this plan, joined by hundreds of concerned Vermonters and Vermont's Attorney General.

Border communities on both the northern and southern borders are some of the safest in the country. And yet, we have seen small towns transformed by border militarization to the point they now look and feel like war zones.

That's why we are asking every resident of Vermont to contact Vermont's Congressional delegation and urge them to oppose border militarization and the surveillance towers.

Border Patrol is a self-styled federal paramilitary force, responsible for extensive, documented human rights abuses nationwide, with a corrupt and toxic internal culture and zero meaningful oversight or accountability.

It's difficult to overstate how dangerous the Border Patrol has become, and it's clear the agency isn't going to change. As with our federal immigration policies, it's time to advance alternatives far more reflective of our laws and values, our shared humanity, and respect for human rights.

Vermonters don't want 200-foot-tall surveillance towers in their towns and don't want those towers operated by a notoriously abusive federal agency like the Border Patrol, and the ACLU will fight to stop these towers from being built.

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As we look to the future, the ACLU unites behind the profound fight that groups like Movement for Black Lives have been leading: the fight for a completely reimagined vision of the role, presence, and responsibilities of police in America.
 
The fight will be complex, but in practice what we want can be clearly stated: We need to fundamentally change the role of police in our society, and that role has to be smaller, more circumscribed, and less funded with taxpayer dollars. Money saved from reducing the size and scope of police departments must be reinvested into community-based services that are better suited to respond to actual community needs. Doing so will foster improved safety and health outcomes, and present opportunities in Black communities, where decades of underinvestment in everything except police has helped fuel a mass incarceration crisis.

WHAT COMES NEXT

The ACLU and a diverse group of Vermont-based organizations have released this ten-part action plan for police reform in Vermont. 

We are calling on lawmakers to take bold action with this ten-part action plan to limit the unchecked power of police and make much-needed investments in Vermont communities.

Our Vision for to transform policing can be accomplished for a fraction of what we currently spend. Current police budgets are enormous, totaling more than $115 billion per year, collectively. Spending on police and the criminal legal system has dramatically outpaced expenditures in community-based services that help people build stable, safe communities. We have an obligation to change this paradigm and support efforts in Black and Brown communities to develop and build community-controlled institutions and interventions that have been proven to improve public safety and health more effectively than oppressive, terrifying, ineffectual, and deadly modern policing.

Reducing funding to police departments and reinvesting those funds into Black and Brown communities are necessary steps to prevent further harm and to restore the promise of our Constitution for all people.
 
The ACLU will work across the country to support Black- and Brown-led community organizations to implement a three-part formula to bring an end to our country’s long nightmare with police violence:

• Prohibiting police from enforcing a range of non-serious offenses, including issuing fines and making arrests for non-dangerous behaviors, thus eliminating many of the unnecessary interactions between the police and community members that have led to so much violence and so many deaths;
• Reinvesting savings from the current policing budgets into alternatives to policing that will keep local communities safe and help them thrive;
• Implementing enforceable legal constraints so that there will be only rare instances in which police officers can use force against community members.

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In January of 2018 the ACLU of Vermont launched Smart Justice Vermont, a campaign committed to transforming our nation’s criminal justice system and building a new vision of community well-being, public safety, and justice. Smart Justice Vermont is dedicated to cutting the incarcerated population in half and challenging systemic racism in the criminal justice system.

Learn more at the Smart Justice campaign page.

We all want to live in safe and healthy communities, and our criminal justice policies should be focused on the most effective approaches to achieving that goal. But the current system has failed us. It’s time for Vermont and the rest of the country to dramatically reduce its reliance on incarceration and invest instead in alternatives to prison, including approaches better designed to break the cycle of crime and recidivism by helping people rebuild their lives.

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The ACLU continues to champion freedom of expression in its myriad forms—whether through protest, media, online speech, or the arts—in the face of new threats to free speech. For example, new avenues for censorship have arisen alongside the wealth of opportunities for speech afforded by the Internet. The threat of mass government surveillance chills the free expression of ordinary citizens, legislators routinely attempt to place new restrictions on online activity, and journalism is criminalized in the name of national security. The ACLU is always on guard to ensure that the First Amendment’s protections remain robust—in times of war or peace, for bloggers or the institutional press, online or off.

Over the years, the ACLU has frequently represented or defended individuals engaged in some truly offensive speech. We have defended the speech rights of communists, Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, accused terrorists, pornographers, anti-LGBT activists, and flag burners. That’s because the defense of freedom of speech is most necessary when the message is one most people find repulsive. Constitutional rights must apply to even the most unpopular groups if they’re going to be preserved for everyone.

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Closing off available beds in the state's emergency housing program and forcing people on to the street is a policy choice, not an inevitability. These policies directly harm vulnerable Vermonters who rely on the emergency housing program as a means of shelter, and it betrays our shared values of compassionate, responsive government and strong, supportive communities. 

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When the government has the power to deny legal rights and due process to one vulnerable group, everyone’s rights are at risk. Using targeted impact litigation, advocacy, and public outreach, the ACLU is dedicated to expanding and enforcing the civil liberties and civil rights of immigrants and to combating public and private discrimination against them.

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Through litigation, lobbying, public education, and organizing, we work to build a country where our communities can live openly without discrimination and enjoy equal rights, personal autonomy, and freedom of expression and association.

The ACLU has a long history of defending the LGBTQ+ community. We brought our first LGBTQ+ rights case in 1936 and founded the LGBT Project in 1986. Today, the ACLU brings more LGBTQ+ cases and advocacy initiatives than any other national organization does. With our reach into the courts and legislatures of every state, there is no other organization that can match our record of making progress both in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion.

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