According to a report in the New York Times on newly released federal data, roughly 300 immigrants are currently being held in solitary confinement at the 50 largest facilities throughout the United States immigration detention system — the largest such system of any in the world. Many of these detainees are being held on civil as opposed to criminal charges, and thus are “not supposed to be punished; they are simply confined to ensure that they appear for administrative hearings.”

On any given day, about 300 immigrants are held in solitary confinement at the 50 largest detention facilities that make up the sprawling patchwork of holding centers nationwide overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, according to new federal data.

Nearly half are isolated for 15 days or more, the point at which psychiatric experts say they are at risk for severe mental harm, with about 35 detainees kept for more than 75 days.

While the records do not indicate why immigrants were put in solitary, an adviser who helped the immigration agency review the numbers estimated that two-thirds of the cases involved disciplinary infractions like breaking rules, talking back to guards or getting into fights. Immigrants were also regularly isolated because they were viewed as a threat to other detainees or personnel or for protective purposes when the immigrant was gay or mentally ill.

Of those immigrants being held in solitary confinement, 11 percent where mentally ill, 46 percent were held for 15 days or more, 21 percent were held 45 days or more, and 11 percent were held 75 days or more.

Solitary confinement generally involves holding prisoners for 23 hours a day in a small, windowless cell with a steel door. The one allowed hour of recreation usually takes place in similarly small enclosures that are indoors or lined with fencing — “similar to an indoor dog kennel,” as the Times put it. Access to phones, lawyers, outside communication, or even showers is often strictly limited. Solitary confinement is widely considered a psychologically damaging and dangerous form of confinement, and earlier this year the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced it will be carrying out a study of the practice. One federal court has already determined that solitary confinement of the mentally ill, at least, amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

The overall population of immigrants in detention has exploded by 85 percent since 2005, and now stands at roughly 400,000. At the same time, there are more than 80,000 people in solitary confinement throughout then United States at a given moment — again, the largest number of any country in the world.

A racist hate group at Towson University has announced plans to conduct its own nighttime police patrols on campus.

Founded last year, the White Student Union has stirred significant controversy already. The organization has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In addition, its founder, Matthew Heimbach (who goes by the title “Commander Heimbach”), and fellow organizer Scott Terry interrupted a minority outreach panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference this month in order to defend slavery, noting that slaveholders provided blacks with food and shelter. Terry later told ThinkProgress that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa” and he’d be “fine” living in a society where blacks are permanently subservient to whites.

The Towerlight has more on the vigilante plan:

The controversial White Student Union has resurfaced on Towson’s campus with plans to conduct random nighttime patrols, which members say are for students’ protection.

Some members of the group, equipped with flashlights, will conduct on-campus safety walks, and female members will carry pepper spray in an attempt to protect students from various crimes like sexual assaults and robberies, WSU President Matthew Heimbach said. [...]

Heimbach said female members have also been enrolling in self-defense classes, and members have been going to local gun ranges as a group, but not in a “military way,” Heimbach said.

He said group members would carry no weapons on the nighttime walks.

One need look no further than the White Student Union’s blog to see why their vigilante operations could turn problematic. In a blog post last month entitled “Black Crime Wave Continues!“, the group writes:

The frequent robberies, sexual assaults, and acts of vandalism at Towson University are not often reported in the local media. For those who are not Towson students it seems hard to fathom that every single day black predators prey upon the majority white Towson University student body. White Southern men have long been called to defend their communities when law enforcement and the State seem unwilling to protect our people.

As a result, the post reads, “The WSU executive board has unanimously approved to make it mandatory for all female WSU members to begin taking some form of unarmed self defense training over the next month.”

Though no Towson faculty would sign on as a sponsor for the WSU, the administration allows the group to use university resources. As the group bragged in September 2012, it is “excited to report that it has taken one step closer toward becoming recognized by Towson University,” pointing to its profile on a university website.

The Associated Press reports a federal judge blocked a Missouri technical college from drug-testing its students on Friday for a second time, following a higher court’s decision reversing a previous decision as too broad.

U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey in Jefferson City granted a preliminary injunction that temporarily prevents Linn State Technical College from screening all first-year students and some returning students for cocaine, methamphetamines, oxycodone and eight other drugs.

The two-year school also cannot report the test results from September 2011, when it began the program and collected urine samples from 500 students before the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri filed suit on behalf of six students. The lawsuit claims the program violates students’ Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful searches and seizures.

Under the Linn State policy students new to the institution must pay $50 and submit to drug test for a broad range of substances — refusing results in the student being dropped from the college. A student who tests positive for drug use could remain enrolled if they test clean 45 days later, complete an online drug-prevention course at student cost of $35 or other “appropriate activities,” and may be referred for professional assistance. A federal appeals court overturned and an earlier restraining order from Laurghrey in January that sought to protect current and future students, calling it too broad, leading the ACLU to file a narrower complaint on behalf of current students.

The Supreme Court has upheld mandatory drug testing for high school athletes and for those in jobs that pose a significant threat to public safety if done under the influence. While Linn State claims that as a technical college their students operate heavy machinery and drug testing is needed to keep them safe, none of the six plaintiffs in the ACLU case operate heavy machinery as part of their academic program — instead, they work on programs like Electronics Engineering Technology and Design Drafting Technology that involve sitting at a drafting table or in front of a computer.

While the mandatory drug testing program at Linn State is the only such program that the ACLU is aware of at a public college or university in the country, blanket drug testing proposals for welfare recipients have become increasingly common despite their dubious legal standing. In February, a federal appeals court unanimously upheld a decision to fault a Florida law that would require all state welfare applicant to be drug tested.

In Meridian, Mississippi, known for its particularly egregious practices that criminalize student discipline, kids have been put behind bars for wearing the wrong color socks or being late to school. The city has become the center of a recent national trend in which minority students are disproportionately subject to arrests, interrogations and time in juvenile detention for school behavior violations. But Meridian also has a history of discrimination, and has been subject to DOJ monitoring since 1967, when a court ordered the school to desegregate, and implemented a plan that remains in place. In conjunction with that monitoring, the Department uncovered that African Americans in the majority-black district received significantly harsher punishments for the same offenses and were more than five times more likely than whites to be suspended from class. On Thursday, the city school district and DOJ reached an agreement to curb some of the most egregious practices in what has become known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

The 44-page consent decree prescribes a broad range of reforms, including banning suspension or any other “exclusionary disciplinary consequence” for a dress code violation or single incidence of tardiness, and prohibiting school officials from involving law enforcement officers except when required by law or necessary to ensure student safety.

If approved by a federal judge, this agreement would settle claims by the DOJ’s Educational Opportunities Section with the school district, but it does not affect a separate ongoing DOJ lawsuit against the city and several other state counties and departments that alleges children are punished “so arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience.”

Officials on a press call Friday hailed the agreement as “landmark” but conceded that Meridian is just one of many jurisdictions both within Mississippi and around the country that are criminalizing school discipline.

“Unfortunately, today across the country, students are being pulled off the path to success by harsh disciplinary policies that are excluding students from school for minor disciplinary infractions,” said the DOJ’s Jocelyn Samuels. “Students are being suspended, expelled or even arrested for school uniform violations, talking back to teachers or laughing in class.” Studies have found that these policies don’t make schools safer, and instead funnel kids out of school and into the criminal justice system.

When a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit struck down a Michigan ballot initiative banning affirmative action in university admissions last July, we predicted it would soon be struck down by the full Sixth Circuit. It’s not that the decision was wrong — there are actually two Supreme Court opinions that prohibit states from forcing racial minorities to jump through unique hoops to enact a law which benefits them as a group — it’s just that these aren’t the sort of precedents that the conservative majority on the Sixth Circuit are likely to follow, or that this Supreme Court is likely to uphold.

This prediction turned out to be wrong. When the full Sixth Circuit convened to hear the case, two conservatives were recused and one of the court’s partially retired liberals was allowed to rehear the case due to a quick in the court’s rules. As a result, the panel’s decision was barely upheld on an 8-7 vote.

Today, racial diversity’s luck probably ran out — the conservative Roberts Court announced that it will hear this case. Given this Court’s general hostility to efforts to promote diversity and cure the legacy of longstanding discrimination, it likely that the Roberts Court will do what the dissenting judges in the Sixth Circuit called for, and uphold the ban. After all, this is the same Roberts Court that once claimed that an effort to desegregate public schools violates the Constitution.

If there is any silver lining for supporters of racial diversity in the Court’s decision to hear this case, it is that it suggests that a pending decision challenging the University of Texas’ admissions program may not be as sweeping as the most conservative justices would hope. The Court is widely expected to strike down much of Texas’ diversity policy in that decision, but there would be no need for the Court to hear a second affirmative action lawsuit if they were not planning some resolution of the Texas case that leaves open some possibility of racial diversity programs surviving in some form.

One way or another, marriage equality is coming to the United States. A recent poll shows support for equality at 58 percent, up 21 points from just a decade ago, and a massive 81 percent of adults under 30 support treating same-sex couples just like any other. The Supreme Court should strike down the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California’s equally anti-gay Proposition 8 because they are unconstitutional, but one way or another, marriage equality is happening. And it is happening soon.

Perhaps for this reason, two leading conservatives published columns last week advocating a way the Supreme Court could strike down DOMA while doing maximal damage to the social safety net. Five days after anti-science columnist George Will published a piece seeking to discredit the social science supporting marriage equality, Will endorsed a radical misreading of the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment that would lead to DOMA being struck down. One day later, Michael McConnell, a former federal judge and leading socially conservative law professor, made the same argument in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s McConnell’s version:

[T]he court need not base its decision in Windsor on the merits of the same-sex marriage question. The leading argument against DOMA all along has been that the federal government lacks authority under the Constitution to create and enforce a definition of marriage different from that of the state in which a couple resides. It is hard to think of an issue more clearly reserved to state law under constitutional tradition than the definition of marriage.

The court has held that “regulation of domestic relations” has “long been regarded as a virtually exclusive province of the States” (Sosna v. Iowa, 1975). In the past, the court has recognized a “domestic relations exception” to federal judicial power. Although the legal question is close, the court could take the same path in Windsor—holding that DOMA improperly intrudes on the reserved powers of the states.

This is constitutional gobbledygook. McConnell and Will are both arguing that, because the Constitution does not give the federal government power over “domestic relations” it follows that DOMA exceeds Congress’ lawful powers. This is similar to the argument conservatives raised against the Affordable Care Act, and it is also compete nonsense.

Federal law grants married couples numerous financial benefits that unmarried individuals do not enjoy. Married couples pay taxes at different rates than single people. They are exempt from estate and gift taxes that apply to their spouse’s property. They receive certain benefits under Social Security, Medicare and other federal programs, and so forth. These financial benefits are constitutional because the Constitution gives Congress the power “to lay and collect taxes . . . and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States” — what lawyers call the “tax and spending power” — and the power to tax and spend necessarily includes the power to decide who pays what taxes and who receives what benefits. DOMA does not, as Will and McConnell suggest, define the meaning of “marriage” for the entire nation. Rather, it mostly just defines the meaning of the word “marriage” for the purpose of determining who is eligible for federal benefits that are given only to married couples.

If Congress does not have the power to decide who pays what tax rates and who receives what federal benefits, than the entirety of America’s safety net could be in danger. Retirement programs like Social Security cannot exist unless the government can limit it to persons of retirement age. Veterans benefits cannot exist unless the government can limit them to veterans. Even progressive taxation is in jeopardy under Will and McConnell’s theory, because the government must have the power to decide who pays more and who pays less taxes.

In other words, if the Supreme Court embraces Will and McConnell’s misreading of the Constitution, it could radically rework America’s social contract and leave most Americans much worse off as a result.
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Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear the first of two cases which could end discrimination against same-sex couples and ensure that all Americans can marry the person they love. Whatever happens in those two cases, one thing is all but certain: Justice Antonin Scalia will vote to maintain marriage discrimination, and he will spend much of this week’s oral arguments making insulting comments about LGBT Americans. Here are some of the most offensive things Scalia compared to homosexuality in his past opinions:

• Murder, Polygamy and Cruelty to Animals: In Romer v. Evans, the Court held that Colorado could not enact a state constitutional amendment motivated solely by animus towards gay people. Scalia saw no problem with laws enacted with such a motivation — “The Court’s opinion contains grim, disapproving hints that Coloradans have been guilty of ‘animus’ or ‘animosity’ toward homosexuality, as though that has been established as Unamerican. . . . I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible–murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals–and could exhibit even ‘animus’ toward such conduct.”
• Drug Addicts and Smokers: In the same opinion, Scalia suggested that a law which relegates LGBT people to second-class status is no different than any other law “disfavoring certain conduct.” Anti-gay laws, in Scalia’s view, are no different than laws disfavoring “drug addicts, or smokers, or gun owners, or motorcyclists.” His decision to include “gun owners” on this list is somewhat ironic, considering that he would later write the Supreme Court’s opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller which held for the first time that there is an individual right to own a firearm.
• Prostitution and Heroin Use: Dissenting in Lawrence v. Texas, Scalia rejected the idea that an outright ban on “sodomy” violates the liberties protected by the Constitution. Such a ban, “undoubtedly imposes constraints on liberty,” Scalia wrote, but “so do laws prohibiting prostitution” or “recreational use of heroin.”
• Incest, Adultery, Obscenity and Child Pornography: Rejecting the Lawrence majority’s conclusion that private sexuality between consenting adults receives “substantial protection” under the Constitution, Scalia responded “[s]tates continue to prosecute all sorts of crimes by adults ‘in matters pertaining to sex’: prostitution, adult incest, adultery, obscenity, and child pornography.”
• Bestiality: Later in the same opinion, Scalia argues that gay sex can be criminalized because some people find it immoral — “The Texas statute undeniably seeks to further the belief of its citizens that certain forms of sexual behavior are ‘immoral and unacceptable,’ the same interest furthered by criminal laws against fornication, bigamy, adultery, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity.”
• Having a Roommate: For all his over the top rhetoric, Scalia’s cruelest dig on same-sex couples may be his most subtle. In a discussion about what the anti-gay Colorado amendment in Romer does and does not prohibit, Scalia suggests that the bond between two men or two women in a committed relationship is no greater than the bond between two “roommates”: “The amendment prohibits special treatment of homosexuals, and nothing more. It would not affect, for example, a requirement of state law that pensions be paid to all retiring state employees with a certain length of service; homosexual employees, as well as others, would be entitled to that benefit. But it would prevent the State or any municipality from making death benefit payments to the ‘life partner’ of a homosexual when it does not make such payments to the long time roommate of a nonhomosexual employee.”

After writing all of these lines, Scalia concludes his Lawrence dissent with a plea that he is not in the least bit anti-gay. “Let me be clear,” Scalia writes, “that I have nothing against homosexuals.”