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Photo illustration by Elizabeth Brown. Photo from Getty Images

Honolulu Police Keep Putting Homeless People in Jail. Honolulu is flouting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance by continuing to dismantle homeless encampments during the COVID-19 pandemic, though it does not have nearly enough shelter space. Although Hawaii’s chief justice has directed judges to work with police and prosecutors to reduce jail populations during the coronavirus outbreak, Honolulu police have continued to put homeless people in jail for petty, victimless offenses. Since April 21, Honolulu police have conducted at least 23 sweeps, citing, arresting, and displacing Honolulu’s homeless population in the middle of a global pandemic.

Video Captures Poor Conditions at Louisiana Poultry Plant Where Prisoners Are Sent to Work. Despite COVID-19 concerns, Louisiana’s prisoners are still doing dangerous, menial jobs in work-release programs. A video shared with The Appeal shows workers at the DG Foods poultry plant in Bastrop, a small town of about 10,000 people in Morehouse Parish, using a dirty bathroom with standing water on the floor, soap missing from dispensers, and seats ripped from toilets and thrown onto the floor. But the workers can’t quit and fear retaliation from authorities. This work-release program is one of several still in operation throughout the state despite the pandemic. And workers and advocates fear that more people will get sick.

A Transgender Woman’s Attorneys Fear She Won’t Survive her 60-Month Sentence. New York attorneys have launched a campaign to release transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary prisoners during the pandemic. One of them is A.A., who was convicted in 2018 of attempted burglary in the second degree and sentenced to 60 months. Housed in a men’s prison even though she is a woman, she has been sexually assaulted by both prisoners and correctional officers, according to Legal Aid. A.A. also has HIV, which puts her health at great risk should she contract coronavirus.

Leonel Frage, 60, after a special court hearing helped him register to vote under Florida's Amendment 4 in November in Miami. [Zak Bennett/AFP via Getty Images] 

Political Report: COVID-19 Stalls Efforts to Help People With Felony Convictions Register to Vote. Nearly 2 million people have had their voting rights restored since 2018 thanks to new reforms adopted by six states. But the pandemic has posed serious challenges to the efforts that voting rights groups had planned to reach these new voters and help them register. Registration drives usually consist of in-person events and public interactions, which are now sidelined. In addition, some states pile on additional hurdles that the newly enfranchised must overcome. These include figuring out if they are even eligible to vote amid insufficient state information and taking extra administrative steps to register. These government-imposed burdens are threatening to keep people from exercising their right to vote in a key election year.

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Political Report: How ICE Is Using Private Contractors to Dodge Local Democracy. The Trump administration’s draconian immigration enforcement has triggered growing pro-immigration activism around the country, and with it, increasing public pressure on elected officials to re-evaluate their relationships to immigration detention. In response, ICE is creating a new playbook. The agency is viewing state and local efforts to block or limit its detention operations as temporary hiccups that it can overcome by pursuing direct contracts with its favored private providers. This allows it to circumvent local activism and “eliminate constituents in local governments or city governments,” as César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at the University of Denver, put it. Instances of this plan have proliferated in recent years in California, Michigan, and Texas.

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The Daily Appeal is an editorially independent project of The Justice Collaborative, which is a fiscally sponsored project of Tides Advocacy

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