LOS ANGELES, Calif. – The City of Costa Mesa today halted enforcement of its anti-solicitation ordinance in response to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, MALDEF and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. The suit was brought on behalf of day laborers represented by the Asociacion de Jornaleros de Costa Mesa and the Colectivo Tonantzin.

It alleges that the ordinance violates the First Amendment not only because it prohibits day laborers’ constitutionally protected speech, but because it also impermissibly censors a wide range of other individuals and groups, including small businesses that use handheld advertising on public streets, homeless individuals soliciting contributions, and persons engaging in fundraising activities, such as students who attempt to get the attention of passing motorists for car washes.

The city of Costa Mesa agreed to place a moratorium on enforcement of the ordinance pending a decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on a challenge to a similar anti-solicitation ordinance in the city of Redondo Beach.

“It shouldn’t have taken a lawsuit for the city to understand that this ordinance was constitutionally questionable,” said Hector Villagra, ACLU/SC legal director. “Nonetheless, we are pleased that the city has placed a moratorium on this ban of free speech.”

Gladys Limon, MALDEF staff attorney, stated, “This decision ensures that day laborers and prospective employers can continue to exercise their full right to peacefully solicit employment in public areas, without fear of harassment or threatened enforcement of the ordinance by Costa Mesa police officers.”

Ahilan T. Arulanantham is director of immigrant rights and national security for the ACLU/SC. He wrote this piece for the American Constitution Society.

The Supreme Court heard argument earlier this week in Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder, an extremely important First Amendment case involving the criminal prohibition on so-called "material support" to designated terrorist organizations. Although plaintiffs' attorney Professor David Cole did a superb job of focusing the Court's attention on how the law prohibits pure political speech, lurking not far in the background was the law's effect on humanitarian assistance. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is often a key swing vote on the Roberts Court, devoted his first question to that issue, asking whether the government could "forbid any person from giving tsunami aid to one of these organizations."

This was not an abstract hypothetical; I spent several weeks in my ancestral home of Sri Lanka doing relief work in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami. While there I saw first-hand how humanitarian organizations could not help many of the victims because they lived in territory controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, one of the State Department's designated terrorist organizations. (I wrote about my experience in an ACS Issue Brief, "A Hungry Child Know No Politics:" A Proposal for Reform of the Laws Governing Humanitarian Relief and "Material Support" of Terrorism.)

As the questioning returned to that issue several times, at least some of the justices seemed open to Solicitor General Elena Kagan's argument that Congress could ban such humanitarian aid consistent with the First Amendment. As Justice Kennedy put it, "if you get tsunami money that frees up your other assets for terrorist money." Professor Cole countered by focusing on some of the obvious weaknesses in the argument: if Congress can ban any support that is "fungible" with money that a designated group might otherwise spend, then what about legal support? The answer, said Kagan, was "yes . . . to the extent that a lawyer drafts a brief for the PKK or the LTTE . . . that would be prohibited."

That response did not go over well. Justice Kennedy asked if Kagan would "stick" to that view, and when she did, Justice John Paul Stevens said that meant Professor Cole's activity in this very case must be unlawful. After Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed yet more skepticism, Justice Stephen Breyer said what others were clearly thinking: "I'm more worried about the lawyer." The specter of punishing people who form so intricate a part of the Court's daily activities obviously troubled several of the justices.

As an attorney who represents people charged with terrorism offenses on a regular basis, I too am worried about us lawyers, and was glad to see that I'm not alone. Yet the Court's sympathy for that particular class of victims struck me as rather odd. I could not help but wonder if the justices, and Kagan for that matter, would have been so sanguine about allowing the government to ban pure humanitarian assistance if they had been as close to relief workers as they were to lawyers. Would they have accepted a proscription on vital assistance to tsunami victims if they had seen the devastation I saw the day after that giant tidal wave killed 30,000 Sri Lankans in a matter of minutes? Surely if they had looked into the eyes of the children who had lost their parents in the blink of an eye, or seen the desperation on the faces of refugees who needed drinking water at the camps I visited, they would not have allowed Congress to prohibit relief groups from giving aid to the people who could most efficiently deliver it to the victims, even if they happened to be humanitarian workers who were members of the LTTE.

While the LTTE no longer controls territory in Sri Lanka, the material support laws at issue in Humanitarian Law Project continue to vex humanitarian groups around the world. The American Civil Liberties Union (for whom I work as an attorney) filed an amicus brief on behalf of nine humanitarian organizations, including the Carter Center, the Christian Peacemakers, and Human Rights Watch. The groups teach conflict resolution, provide humanitarian aid, and engage in various other activities that require them to work with designated terrorist organizations. These groups told the Court that they may be forced to severely curtail many of their activities because of the material support laws, and asked the Court to recognize that the First Amendment protects their right to provide humanitarian assistance that is intended to promote non-violent, humanitarian purposes, even if it also constitutes "material support" to the designated terrorist groups under the broad language of the Patriot Act.

As I remembered the people I had seen suffer in Sri Lanka, it filled me with great sadness to watch President Barack Obama's hand-picked representative to the Supreme Court defend a position so blind to the needs of innocent civilians. Twenty years ago, President Reagan famously authorized food aid to the Communist dictatorship in Ethiopia at the height of the Cold War, proclaiming that "a hungry child knows no politics." He could just as easily have been referring to the children of Pakistan, Colombia, Iraq, or any number of other countries today, where humanitarian groups have sought to ameliorate the misery suffered by civilian victims of war and natural disaster. The Red Cross has enshrined that same principle in its own Code of Conduct, which states that "the humanitarian imperative comes first. The right to receive humanitarian assistance, and to offer it, is a fundamental humanitarian principle which should be enjoyed by all citizens of all countries." We can only hope that Justice Kennedy and his colleagues will remember those widely-revered words, and those of the president who appointed him, as they consider how to resolve this important case.

Massive teacher layoffs at three Los Angeles Unified School District middle schools have deprived thousands of low-income students and students of color of their legal right to an education consistent with prevailing statewide standards, a team of civil rights attorneys said in a class-action lawsuit filed today.

The lawsuit targets the state and LAUSD for carrying out budget cuts last year that disproportionately affected the three schools, decimating their teaching staffs. While many schools around the state lost zero teachers to the budget crisis, more than half of the teaching staffs at Gompers, Liechty, and Markham middle schools lost their jobs as permanent teachers. At Liechty, fully 72 percent of the teachers received layoff notices; at Markham, the layoffs included almost the entire English department along with every 8th grade history teacher.

The lawsuit was filed in superior court by the ACLU of Southern California, Public Counsel Law Center and the law firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP, on behalf of students at the three schools.

“At a time when California is already 46th in the nation in per-pupil spending -- and is about to drop lower -- our state and school district have chosen to balance their budgets by decimating the teaching corps at schools like Gompers, Liechty and Markham, schools which serve nearly exclusively students of color from low-income families,” said Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel for the ACLU/SC. “Every student knows that you don’t reform a school by removing great teachers. If government can bail out the bankers of Wall Street, then it can bail out the children of Watts and Pico-Union.”

Last year California slashed its education budget and LAUSD sent layoff notices to thousands of teachers. Because state and district policies allowed an overwhelming number of the newest teachers to be hired at the highest need schools, Gompers, Liechty and Markham suffered enormous and disproportionate impacts on their teaching staffs.
“The state and school district turned back the clock to the bad old days when some kids had opportunity and others had none,” said Catherine Lhamon, director of impact litigation at Public Counsel Law Center. “We know better, and our Constitution guarantees better, for all students. This suit stands up for our children, and seeks to end the all-too-predictable decimation of their educational chances.”

Because of the layoffs, a high percentage of positions in core academic subjects at all three schools were staffed by a series of temporary replacements or rotating substitutes. Some students have had six to 10 different teachers in the first four months of the current school year. This level of instability prevents teachers and students from establishing ongoing relationships that foster trust and respect and lead to improvements in academic motivation and performance. The instability also precluded the possibility of a stable teaching corps, which studies have consistently demonstrated to be essential to effectively providing students with a successful education.

This suit is about how it’s wrong for us to have so many different teachers and not really to be learning,” said Sharail Reed, an 8th grader at Markham. “In my history class this year I had so many different teachers that it was a blur. They would write their names on the board and the next day the name would be erased because the teacher would be gone. I’m part of this suit because I’m standing up for what I believe and what I know is right.”

In the end, the teacher layoffs caused educational efforts at Gompers, Liechty, and Markham to fall below the state constitutional guarantee that all students will receive a basic education consistent with prevailing statewide standards.

Anticipating another round of threatened layoffs at LAUSD, the lawsuit seeks a preliminary injunction preventing the state or LAUSD from laying off teachers at the three schools for the 2010-11 school year. Among other things, the lawsuit also seeks a permanent injunction directing the state and LAUSD to allocate funds and oversight that will enable the three schools to develop an effective and stable faculty for the more than 5,000 current and future students at Gompers, Liechty and Markham.

“For a student, there is nothing more important about school than the quality of the teachers,” said Jack Londen, a partner at Morrison & Foerster. “At the schools described in the complaint, teacher layoffs are being imposed and handled in ways that lower the ceiling on students' prospects in life. What this case challenges is a clear denial of a fundamental Constitutional right to educational opportunity in California.”