10 signatures reached
To: U.S. Representative Salud Carbajal (CA-24)
Ban Convicted Civil-Rights Abusers From Positions of Public Trust
Congress must pass legislation permanently disqualifying any government employee, law-enforcement officer, military member, intelligence employee, or government contractor convicted of intentionally violating constitutional or civil rights under color of law from ever again holding a security clearance, public-trust position, or national-security-sensitive position.
These individuals must also be permanently barred from government roles involving law enforcement, corrections, immigration enforcement, intelligence, weapons, detention, surveillance, or access to classified information and sensitive government databases.
The legislation must establish a secure national disqualification registry available to government hiring, contracting, licensing, and security-adjudication authorities. Federal agencies must be prohibited from waiving these restrictions, and state and local agencies receiving federal law-enforcement or homeland-security funding must enforce equivalent bans.
Eligibility should be restored only if the underlying conviction is reversed or vacated and the individual is subsequently acquitted or the charges are dismissed.
Anyone who intentionally abuses public authority to violate another person’s constitutional rights has demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with government power. If you cannot be trusted with another person’s constitutional rights, you cannot be trusted with the nation’s secrets, weapons, surveillance systems, detention authority, or public trust.
Why is this important?
Government power can take away a person’s freedom, privacy, livelihood, and even life. The people entrusted with that power must be held to a higher standard—not protected by a lower one.
Civil-rights violations are not paperwork errors. They include unlawful arrests and detention, excessive force, torture, illegal surveillance, retaliation against protesters and journalists, evidence fabrication, and deliberate denial of constitutional protections. When officials commit these acts and later obtain another badge, government contract, security clearance, or sensitive position, the system exposes the public to the same danger again.
I previously held a Top Secret–Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance while supporting national-security programs. Clearance holders can lose eligibility for dishonesty, criminal conduct, poor judgment, or unwillingness to follow rules because those behaviors demonstrate that they cannot be trusted. An official who intentionally violates someone’s constitutional rights has demonstrated those same disqualifying traits in the most direct way possible.
Federal law already makes willful deprivation of constitutional rights under color of law a crime. But conviction does not consistently create a permanent, government-wide prohibition against holding another position of authority or trust. Losing one job is meaningless if the offender can simply move to another agency, contractor, police department, correctional facility, or sensitive government position.
This proposal applies only after a criminal conviction and allows eligibility to be restored if that conviction is overturned and the person is acquitted or the charges are dismissed. It protects due process while protecting the public from proven abusers.
A government that returns coercive power to convicted civil-rights violators is telling victims that their rights matter less than an offender’s career. Constitutional rights must carry real consequences when government officials deliberately violate them.
If you cannot be trusted with another person’s constitutional rights, you cannot be trusted with the nation’s secrets, weapons, surveillance systems, detention authority, or public power.