Lenka John was asleep in her home – a tent at a public park – when a cleanup crew rudely woke her up last May, and told her to vacate the park early that same morning. The workers ordered her to leave Meadowbrook Park and told her that if her property was not moved soon, it would be thrown in the back of a trash truck.  

Lenka couldn’t afford to have her life’s belongings thrown in a trash truck, so she started to pack. This proved difficult as she uses a wheelchair and has mobility impairments. She asked the crew for help, explaining her disabilities, but they ignored her. After packing what she could, she began rolling away from the park with her service dog and a few bags. Because of her mobility impairments, she was unable to take all her property with her and had to leave many of her belongings behind. As she left the park, she saw the workers throwing away the property she had to leave behind in the park into the back of a trash truck. This included her walker, a blood pressure cuff, and a folder full of medical records she needed for her disability benefits application. She desperately begged the workers to let her at least retrieve her paperwork, but they told her it was too late—the papers were already in the back of a compactor truck.  

“Without my medical files,” Lenka said, “I had to start the long application process for disability assistance all over again.” 

This is not the first time the City of San Bernardino has attacked its unhoused residents. After months of investigation, the ACLU SoCal found that the city regularly violates the rights of its unhoused residents by seizing and destroying their property with little warning and no recourse. The situation is even worse for people with disabilities, whose requests for assistance and accommodations go ignored. 

Instead of providing unhoused people with safe, affordable homes, the city has embarked on a plan to push them out of sight.

As the city manager put it during a May 3 city council meeting: “Our goal is to bring to you a proposed plan that will allow us to go after these encampments because that’s what people are complaining about.” Since then, the city has forced unhoused people out of at least four parks. In each of these clearances, the city destroyed people’s property and forced them to move. Workers ignored the needs of people with physical disabilities, who make up nearly 20 percent of San Bernardino’s unhoused population. These efforts are poised to expand, as the city seeks to double the number of personnel tasked with seizing and destroying unhoused people’s property. 

For San Bernardino residents with no access to housing and few possessions, losing any property during orders to move can be devastating. Even as temperatures regularly top 100 degrees, the city destroys tents, tarps, and other protection from the elements – often the only shade available to unhoused people. 

The consequences can be especially brutal for people with disabilities, most of whom cannot safely comply with orders to move. Displacements have forced people who rely on wheelchairs into treacherous ravines and roadside encampments that further limit their mobility. Forced displacements also scatter people, leaving case managers unable to locate their clients and setting back community members, like Lenka. 

San Bernardino’s clearances are not only breathtakingly cruel; they are also illegal. It is well established that seizing property and immediately destroying it is a violation of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable seizures.  

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) makes clear that government entities, like the city crews that displace unhoused San Bernardino residents, are required to provide reasonable accommodations when requested by people with disabilities. By refusing to engage in the accommodation process, the city has discriminated against residents with disabilities. The ACLU SoCal is challenging these unlawful practices to ensure that people’s rights are respected regardless of their disability or housing status.  

Thanks to the advocacy by unhoused people and the ACLU SoCal, in January 2024, the U.S. District Court granted our preliminary injunction motion. The court’s order will bar all unhoused encampment removals/displacements throughout the entire City of San Bernardino. The court found that the city’s practice of destroying people’s personal property violates the Fourth Amendment and due process. Importantly, the court also found that the city’s encampment removals and failure to accommodate people’s disabilities violates the ADA.

Lenka hopes the lawsuit will prevent others from going through the hardship she experienced at the hands of the city. “It’s wrong for San Bernardino to violate our rights this way,” she said. “Living outside is hard, and even harder when you have disabilities. The city should be helping us—not hurting us.” 

Learn more about Tyson v. City of San Bernardino. 

In its 100 years, the ACLU SoCal has won key civil liberty victories. But as the co-founder of the ACLU, Roger Baldwin, once said, “The battle for civil liberties never stays won.” 

A prime example of that is the lawsuit, Rutherford v. Pitchess, also known simply as Rutherford. 

First filed in 1975 by the ACLU SoCal, it exposed horrific conditions at the Los Angeles County Jails so dire that they violated the constitutional right against cruel and unusual punishment. Three years later, the judge in the case, William Gray, issued a historic decision that largely agreed. 

Gray took it upon himself to visit overcrowded jails, unannounced, and he described some aspects of them to be “constitutionally intolerable.” He especially railed against the drastically crowded holding cells used for when people in the jails were transported to courts.   

“The sight of from 20 to 54 men being crammed into a fourteen-foot cell is a repelling experience in any society that takes pride in its high concepts of human dignity,” Gray said. “The closest comparison that I can draw to such a spectacle is that of an overcrowded pig pen.” 

He also found it “intolerable” that there were not enough beds for men, forcing them to sleep on mattresses on concrete floors, providing “poor examples of the civilized standards and concepts of dignity, humanity, and decency.”  

Gray mandated that steps be taken to alleviate overcrowding, plus other matters including the lack of clean clothing, inadequate exercise, insufficient time to eat meals, and the lack of telephone access.  

Gray died in 1992, but the Rutherford case unfortunately lived on. 

In 2005, the ACLU SoCal filed court documents saying the county sheriff’s department and board of supervisors were defying the Rutherford decision, especially in the Inmate Reception Center (IRC) where people are processed when they first enter the county jail after an arrest. “Thirty to forty men are being crammed into holding cells so small they must take turns lying down on the hard, filthy floor,” the filing said, with no access to showers or even regular meals.   

Judge Dean Pregerson toured a jail and did not hide his disgust. Calling the conditions “inconsistent with basic human values.” He issued a ruling in 2006 aimed at severely restricting overcrowding and ordering county officials to develop a comprehensive plan to improve conditions. 

Improvements in the name of Rutherford eventually deteriorated. In the summer of 2022, ACLU SoCal Senior Staff Attorney Melissa Camacho walked into the IRC and found conditions had grown even more hellish, including:  

• Dozens of people crammed together, sleeping head-to-foot on the hard concrete floor. 
• People defecating in trash cans and urinating on the floor or in empty food containers in shared spaces.  
• Unhygienic conditions, including floors littered with trash, overflowing sinks and toilets, no access to showers or clean clothes for days, and lack of adequate access to drinking water and food. 
• Failure to provide adequate health care, including failure to provide people with serious medical conditions their medications, or to provide care to people dangerously detoxing from drugs and alcohol.   

A man named Gilbert P. talked with Melissa on his third day at IRC with no mattress, drinking water, and a painful rash all over his body. He said simply, “It is a living hell in here.” The filing especially noted the mistreatment of people with mental illnesses, saying they were chained to chairs for days at a time, where they slept sitting up and had limited access to toilets or drinking water. 

The horrific conditions were so blatant that the county did not challenge the filing, and Judge Pregerson issued a temporary restraining order, prohibiting keeping people in the IRC beyond 24 hours and banning the chaining of anyone to a chair for more than four hours. Jail officials were also ordered to provide functional toilets, drinking water, and medical care.  

Alarmingly, the county could not meet these basic minimal requirements.  

In February of this year, the ACLU SoCal and ACLU National Prison Project filed a motion saying that the county was “massively out of compliance” with Judge Pregerson’s order. 

“After almost five decades of an endless cycle of promises followed by excuses and failures and generations of class members enduring abysmal conditions,” the filing said, “the time for talk is over.”   

Perhaps it was that threat of contempt that helped bring about a historic settlement.  

In June 2023, Judge Pregerson approved an agreement that made permanent several of the items that were in the temporary restraining order. The most extraordinary provision of the settlement went to the very heart of Rutherford — overcrowding. The agreement required that the county create at least 1,925 new community beds in non-jail situations as alternatives to jailing people with mental illnesses. Close to 1,700 of those new placements will be operational within the next two years.  

It’s a revolutionary approach for L.A. County Jails, rooted in a lawsuit that is 48 years old.  

Almost half a century later, one question remains unanswered.  

Will the latest Rutherford filing finally be successful in getting the county to take seriously the lack of “dignity, humanity, and decency” in its jails and stop the senseless overcrowding and needless caging of some of our most vulnerable L.A. County residents? 

ACLU SoCal Chief Counsel Peter Eliasberg answers this question best: “they’re committing to doing that now [but] we will be monitoring closely to see that they do.”

This article is part of the ACLU SoCal's centennial series, exploring the affiliate's long and evolving work and impact in the southland. The series lifts historic milestones and facts documented in the "Open Forum," the ACLU SoCal's newsletter published from 1924 to 2004. This year, in partnership with the California Historical Society, the ACLU SoCal has published and digitized the "Open Forum" in its entirety. Explore the archives and read more about the ACLU SoCal's history.