The ACLU of Colorado opposes and our state constitution bans the funneling of public school money to private, religious schools. We have fought private school vouchers in Colorado, most recently when the Douglas County School Board tried for years to implement the “Choice Scholarship Program,” a scheme that would have granted a select few parents a voucher to pay some of the tuition that was needed to send their kids to exclusive private schools, almost all of which were religious. The program was rejected by the State Supreme Court and became so unpopular with Douglas County voters that, last November, they elected a new school board that ran on a promise to disband it.

As the Douglas County election showed, school vouchers are becoming increasingly unpopular as voters learn more about them and the harm they do to kids in public schools. So, their proponents are now trying to rebrand them. Their latest scheme is called “Education Income Tax Credits for Nonpublic School” aka Senate Bill 18-083, which is now moving through the state legislature.  

But a voucher by any other name is still a voucher if it subsidizes private school tuition with taxpayer dollars.

Senate Bill 18-083 “establishes a private school tuition income tax credit…that allows any taxpayer to claim a credit when the taxpayer enrolls a qualified child in a private school or the taxpayer provides a scholarship to a qualified child for enrollment in a private school.” 

Sound familiar? Education experts call them neo-vouchers and back-door vouchers, but it is the same private school voucher program that the Colorado Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional and that voters in Douglas County overwhelmingly rejected, only SB 18-083 would spread it statewide.

Just like the Douglas County voucher scheme, tuition tax credits would be used to fund schools that require religious tests, oaths, and teach a single religious point of view. Schools that would benefit from this legislation are not held to the same standards as public schools. They can reject children with physical and developmental disabilities and discriminate against children who already struggle with being treated differently.  

As a parent of two public school students in Douglas County, I helped fight the voucher program from the start because vouchers defund public schools and threaten a student’s right to a fair, appropriate and equitable public education.  I have watched as funding has dwindled in our public schools leading to a loss of programming and high quality teachers fleeing the profession.  School vouchers in any form, whether they be tax credits, education savings accounts or the type of program voters rejected in Douglas County, take money from a system that is starving.  The vast majority of parents in Colorado choose a high quality public education for their children.  Tax credits harm that choice.

Parents are free to send their kids to private, religious schools if they wish, but Colorado taxpayers should not be forced to pay for it. This latest tax credit scheme forces us all to pay for private, religious schools across the state, and the legislature should reject it.

As Donald Trump read his State of the Union address, offering DACA recipients as a bargaining chip for his wall, along with stingier limits on legal immigration and funding for a more vicious immigration enforcement regime, a victim of that regime, Audemio Orozco-Ramirez, sat in the for-profit GEO detention facility in Aurora, Colorado, facing imminent deportation.
Audemio has a wife and seven children in Vida, Montana, where he has worked as a ranch hand and lived for 20 years. Six of his children, ages 4 to 19, are U.S. citizens, and one is a DACA recipient who remembers no other home but in America. In 2013, Audemio was detained by ICE, merely as a passenger in a traffic stop, and placed in a local jail where he was raped. He won a settlement from the government for the sexual assault, and was given a work permit. As a victim of a crime who cooperated with law enforcement, Audemio is eligible for U visa, which would block his deportation, but his application has never been responded to. His role as a community leader and activist grew, but last August, in a routine check-in with ICE, he was unexpectedly detained and shipped to Colorado for deportation. His appeal failed just last week, and he could be deported any day.
In Colorado and across the nation, ICE deportations are reaching new heights of arbitrariness, hypocrisy, vindictiveness and pure cruelty. Policies from the latter years of the Obama administration that focused immigration enforcement on people convicted of serious crimes have largely been dropped in favor of arbitrary deportation of anyone who can be deported, and even deportations in retaliation for community activism. Audemio is an example of that retaliation, along with Eliseo Jurado, recently detained in Boulder, Colorado because his wife is in sanctuary at a local church, or Ravi Ragbir, detained for his activism in New York, also at a routine ICE check-in. ICE director Thomas Homan has doubled down on remarks that undocumented immigrants “should be afraid,” making clear that generating fear is the goal. ICE is purchasing license plate data from private companies, hanging out at courthouses, making random raids, and targeting peaceful and highly valued members of our communities. ICE is ripping families apart with unmitigated cruelty, creating nothing less than a modern-day reign of terror across America.
The Trump administration likes to claim that safety is the goal, and its propaganda aims to stoke fear of immigrants by highlighting a handful of cherry-picked crimes that immigrants have committed, a technique that could be used to demonize any group of people in the world. Imagine, for example, a campaign against left-handed people. Just find a few crimes someone left-handed committed, trumpet those examples to label left-handed people as dangerous, and call for the elimination of those sinister left-handers. If someone objects, say, “What, don’t you care about the victims of left-handed crimes?” This same technique was used in 1930s Germany where lists of crimes committed by Jews were published to help turn public opinion against them. It is a despicable and highly misleading technique that was on display once again in the State of the Union address.
In truth, America’s undocumented immigrants are significantly less likely to commit violent crimes than other Americans. Some are here to escape violence and suffering, and many came to pursue the American dream, often encouraged to come despite the obstacle of badly-broken immigration laws. These are our neighbors, hard-working and dedicated to their families, and yes, tax-paying as well. Given the economic role of immigration, mass deportations would in fact be an economic disaster for our nation. And not only do arbitrary or retaliatory ICE deportations do nothing to make us safer—they do the opposite. When ICE co-opts local police, it breaks down the relationship between law enforcement and local communities, making everyone less safe.
Safety and economics are false justifications for the ICE reign of terror—the real reasons are clearly rooted in white supremacist fantasies of Making America Whiter Again. Donald Trump shares almost none of the cultural or political philosophy of Norway; the only possible reason he would lift up immigration from Norway in contrast to the “shithole” nations of Africa is that it has one of the whitest populations of any nation. His proposed immigration policies would make our legal immigration system even more restrictive and broken, while wasting vast sums of money on a useless wall and an expansion of ICE and Border Patrol cruelty, violating basic American principles of civil rights and civil liberties. What we need instead is an immediate, clean Dream Act for DACA recipients followed by comprehensive immigration reform with compassionate and sensible enforcement, a path to citizenship for all residents willing and able to follow it, and a legal immigration system without racial bias that works far better than what we have now.
Audemio should be home with his family in Montana, not in a for-profit Colorado detention facility awaiting deportation. He is not a threat to our nation, but the ICE reign of terror that targeted him is.
Nathan Woodliff-Stanley is the executive director of the ACLU of Colorado. Photo of Audemio Orozco-Ramirez via ACLU of Colorado. 

This post originally appeared in The Colorado Independent.

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This week marked the second annual Women’s March and the 45th anniversary of Roe V. Wade. The ACLU of Colorado invited four women to discuss the state of reproductive rights and reproductive justice in the age of Trump. Also, ACLU of Colorado Public Policy Director Denise Maes discusses three bills in the Colorado legislature that threaten reproductive healthcare.

Call to Action: Take 60 seconds and call your Senator to demand a #DreamActNow ⟶ https://www.aclu.org/DreamActTW-Call 

For more information on COLOR go to: http://www.colorlatina.org/

For details on Lobby Day or Women and Family Wednesdays contact Delana Maynes at [email protected]

The Purple State Report is brought to you by the ACLU of Colorado. Our show was produced by Vanessa Michel, Alejandra Garza and John Krieger with original theme music by Pablo Novelas. Additional music by LaDama. If you have feedback or suggestions for future episodes email us at [email protected].