In a recent call with other Asian American Pacific Islander staff at the ACLU, we used an ice breaker to ask about peoples’ comfort foods. Everyone’s responses had me reflecting on the power of food long after I clicked “Leave Meeting.”

At their best, the kitchen and dinner table are sacred spaces with no place for judgment. Eating with one’s hands is not gawped at: we can relax into the artistry of constructing the Perfect Bite and lipping jasmine rice off our fingertips in a benediction to the hands that feed and support us. There is no pressure to apologize for the aroma of kimchi or the jaw-tingling piquancy of fish sauce. The microwave — and the leftover scents it produces — is no battleground.

But during COVID-19, we have lost a vital ingredient: people. Without that vital component of others to sit and share a meal with, authenticity feels substituted into submission. And, in being mindful of the privileges I hold, that “lost” applies to some of us outside of a rhetorical loss, and that grief over family members is another crushing burden some must carry on top of everything else.

In grappling with the initial shutdown, I turned to the grocery store as one of the last frontiers of “I can do this” in such a poorly managed catastrophe. It was one of the scarce ways to organically interact without the stiff choreography imposed by Zoom invites. Trips to the grocery store were a coping mechanism to fill this bereavement, to try getting something when nothing was the safest choice.

But even while more and more anti-AAPI assaults and killings make the news and surface on social media, I recognize a certain cruelty in backing my dad’s advice to my Filipino mother that avoiding trips to the grocery store is the safest choice. (At least, advising no trips without my white dad — and no, the layers in leaning on whiteness as a literal shield in this specific context is not lost on me, either.) Despite my mixed feelings, I have leaned into this advice because I, similarly to other AAPI people in the U.S. and in this very organization, am scared. I am desperate.

In a world where so much control has been ripped away, suggesting to my mom that she sequester herself and avoid leaving the house even for something as vital as grocery runs feels like the only thing I can do — even as I recognize the subtler violence in asking her to do this given how cooking is soul work for us both. Food has always been a shared medium for us. It appears in the earliest memory I have with her when I sweated out a fever as a small child: the perfume of smashed garlic cloves clung to her cool fingers as she pushed my hair from my forehead. “The garage is your dad’s kingdom,” she told me on a recent call while grinning knowingly at me over her glasses. “But the kitchen is mine.”

Telling her not to go to the grocery store for fear of violence because of her identity as a Filipina woman feels like a severance and another casualty of this pandemic to grieve. And I am mindful that while the terror that my mom gets home safely from the grocery store remains in the realm of anticipatory grief for me, Vilma Kari’s family cannot say the same.

I know I’m not alone in saying: I am exhausted. Acknowledging this shared reality is a conjugation drill in a pandemic dialect: I am exhausted. You are exhausted. We are exhausted.

In search of a palliative, I find myself returning to the words offered by Professor Anne A. Cheng in her recent New York Times opinion piece “What This Wave of Anti-Asian Violence Reveals About America.” Professor Cheng concludes:

“All we can do is to continue to tell our truths, to know, even just for ourselves, that we are here.”

I am terrified to admit this, but I will tell you one of my truths: I don’t know what the plan is. I don’t have a policy proposal, or a litigation strategy. But I know that I can do what I can in my day-to-day, and ask the important questions to those in my community: how are you doing? Can I get you something to eat?

And as for the rest of Professor Cheng’s quote, where is here? For myself, it’s standing in my kitchen with a knife in hand, chopping onions while letting myself fall into the dreamy nostalgia of muscle memory. It’s measuring out Datu Puti soy sauce, lime, sugar, garlic, and red pepper flake for sawsawan that I use with dumplings or scallion pancakes later in the week. Here demands presence in my hands to make a red chile marinade and connect with my roots as a mixed Filipina from New Mexico. Here means going back to food not just as an escape, but as a return to a site of power, self-affirmation, and community. And, ultimately, a place where we can all be free.

On May 3, 4, and 5, 1971, more than 13,000 people were arrested in Washington, D.C.—the largest mass arrest in U.S. history.

Many of them had come to Washington to demonstrate against the War in Vietnam. Some planned to block streets and bridges. The Nixon administration decided to be proactive, and arrest anyone who looked like they might try to do such a thing. (Most arrests were made by D.C. police, but the decisions were made right in the White House.) As a result, 7,000 people were arrested on May 3—including a few people who were blocking streets and bridges, and thousands of people who were demonstrating legally, or walking to school or work, or watching from the sidelines. Basically, if you were in downtown D.C., you were liable to be arrested—including undercover police officers who were arrested because other officers didn’t know the code word signifying “I’m a cop.”

More than 2,000 were arrested on May 4 while demonstrating on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the Justice Department, and on May 5 more than 1,200 were arrested on the Capitol steps, where they had been invited by Reps. Ron Dellums and Bella Abzug, who watched their audience arrested out from under them as they were addressing the crowd.

Normal arrest and booking procedures went out the window. The police kept hardly any records that would enable them to show the legal basis of an arrest—and for most people there was no legal basis. Thousands of arrestees were detained in outdoor fenced areas, and in the old D.C. Coliseum, where they slept on the floor. The court system was also thrown into chaos.

The D.C. Public Defender Service and the ACLU rushed to court to secure the immediate release of the detainees. Many were released fairly quickly, but those who refused to give their names or fingerprints were held, in some cases, for several days.

The ACLU-DC—then known as the ACLU of the National Capitol Area—quickly filed a class action seeking to have the arrest records of all 13,000 people expunged, except for the 79 who were actually convicted of crimes. That case succeeded, and the federal court issued an order providing that those people had never been arrested, only “detained,” and that they could deny, even under oath, that they had been arrested on those dates. That order remains a model for expungement orders in D.C. to this day.

Prosecutors selected eight of the people who had been arrested on the Capitol steps and brought them to trial in August 1972. After a 13-day trial it took the jury less than four hours (including lunch) to acquit all eight. Charges against the remaining arrestees were dropped soon afterwards.

The ACLU then filed three additional class actions seeking damages for people who had been falsely arrested and wrongfully detained on May 3, May 4, and May 5. Unfortunately, the courts found that the facts regarding the people arrested on May 3 and 4 were not sufficiently uniform to justify a class action. Nevertheless, scores of people who came forward and identified themselves were able to obtain compensation in settlements. The case on behalf of the Capitol Steps arrestees, called Dellums v. Powell, was certified as a class action, and after trial, the jury awarded the class members $12 million in damages (about $61 million in 2021 dollars), which was said to be the largest verdict in a case that didn’t involve a major corporation. But the court of appeals thought that was too high and sent the case back for a new trial on damages; the parties then settled for about $2 million (more than $10 million in 2021 dollars).

Rep. Dellums went on to become the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and after retiring from Congress was Mayor of Oakland, California from 2008 to 2011. Dellums v. Powell remains a landmark case about the ability to obtain monetary damages for violation of one’s First Amendment rights. ACLU-DC is relying on that precedent even now, in our class action lawsuit on behalf of people who were protesting peacefully in Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020, when scores of federal officers attacked peaceful protestors with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a baton charge prior to President Trump’s walk to St. John’s Church to stage a photo-op holding a Bible.

In President Biden’s address to Congress Wednesday, he urged the country to work with his administration to “root out systematic racism in our criminal justice system.” As we observe the president’s first 100 days, we have a suggestion that would go a long way towards addressing systemic racism in D.C.’s criminal justice system. And it doesn’t even require an act of Congress.

On February 6, 2019, then-United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jessie K. Liu, announced a new initiative: the U.S. Attorney’s Office would begin bringing certain gun cases, known as “felon-in-possession” cases, in federal court rather than the local D.C. Superior Court. On the surface, charging crimes in one court over the other may appear to be just a technical quirk of D.C.’s governance, which gives federal prosecutors authority over both federal and local crimes. But federal prosecutors’ decision to move local crimes out of local courts came with far more nefarious consequences.

When prosecutors take cases to federal court, it isn’t just a different building—it’s a different law altogether. In practice, the federal felon-in-possession law subjects individuals to harsher sentences on average than its D.C. counterpart. From July 2017 to July 2018, the median sentence for a felon-in-possession charge in D.C. Superior Court was two years—a number that fell to 16 months after the D.C. Sentencing Commission amended how it calculated sentences for felon-in-possession cases. By contrast, the average sentence in federal court is nearly 5 1/2 years—four times more than D.C. courts. Add in the fact that individuals charged in federal court are also more likely to be detained before trial, and the difference comes into sharp focus: get charged in federal court, spend more time in cells.

The U.S. Attorney’s felon-in-possession policy is an intentional maneuver around D.C. policies on incarceration. In the past few years, the D.C. Council and residents have pushed to reduce the incarcerated population, including through legislation like the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act (allowing youth offenders who have served 20 years to request a sentence reduction), the Youth Rehabilitation Act (permitting judges to waive some mandatory minimums), and the Second Look Amendment Act (further expanding the category of individuals who can request a sentence reduction). These shifts reflect D.C.’s divesting from incarceration as a solution to violence. The U.S. Attorney’s Office has fought this shift every step of the way.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office was the lone dissenting vote when the D.C. Sentencing Commission voted in 2018 to change how sentences for felon-in-possession cases were calculated and thereby reduce sentences in D.C. court. D.C. judges, attorneys, and residents were all in favor. Rather than accept the clear wishes of District authorities and residents, the U.S. Attorney’s Office instead announced their new charging policy, moving cases out of D.C. courts into federal courts where they are not bound by D.C.’s sentencing guidelines and laws.

Many D.C. leaders opposed the federal government’s end-run around local policies. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine came out strongly against the new charging policy, stating that it “intentionally sidesteps our local courts, thus denying offenders the benefits of [D.C.] reforms, and reverts to a failed federal tough-on-crime approach.” The D.C. Council called for the policy to be “immediately abandon[ed.]” But local lawmakers and community members have no authority to change the policy, because the U.S. Attorney is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate—where D.C. residents have no representation. Thus, D.C.’s years-long efforts to reduce overincarceration were ignored, in one fell swoop, by an unelected federal official.

From the outset, the effect of the policy was to impose longer sentences on Black defendants. In D.C., Black people make up around 47 percent of the District’s population but 97 percent of those charged with being a felon in possession. And the policy was even worse than it appeared, because the U.S. Attorney’s Office targeted Black residents. Despite having initially presented it publicly as a District-wide policy, federal prosecutors later stated in a court filing that it was only implemented in police districts 5, 6, and 7, three majority-Black districts in D.C. —While Black people make up only 7.53 percent of residents in police district 2, for example, they make up 92.79 percent of residents in police district 6. The move was so egregious, the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s own Black prosecutors opposed it.

In September 2020, after the geographic focus became public, the U.S. Attorney’s Office ended that focus and began applying the policy throughout the District. But the Office refused to end the policy outright, despite the outcry. Even after a change in administration, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, now led by President Biden’s appointee Channing Phillips, again refused to end the policy.

It is past time for the U.S. Attorney’s Office to end its felon-in-possession policy, one that has been tainted from the start by racially disparate effects and (initially secret) racist geographic targeting, and which continues to harm the people of D.C. Beyond that, the fact that an unelected federal official can even make these decisions about local criminal prosecutions underscores that, in D.C., a city with a plurality Black population, statehood is a racial justice issue. Days after taking office, President Biden committed to fighting mass incarceration and the “significant costs and hardships” it causes. Incarceration, his order stated, “does not make us safer.” D.C. residents and lawmakers know this. It is why they have shifted to reducing incarceration, including through legislation that federal prosecutors continue to flout by applying this policy.

The continued use of this policy subjects Black people in D.C. to harsher sentences, and does so against the explicit wishes of local leaders and residents. It is a slap in the face of their efforts and must be ended now.