LOS ANGELES, Calif. - A U.S. citizen who was illegally detained and twice deported to Mexico said immigration officials refused to believe his claim of citizenship, even when his mother traveled to the border to show Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents his birth certificate.

Guillermo Olivares of south Los Angeles was being held in a detention facility in San Diego earlier this month until an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California presented his birth certificate along with school and vaccination records to immigration authorities. Olivares was released later that same day.

'They didn't believe me,' a frustrated Olivares said of his numerous encounters with immigration officials. 'It seemed like there was nothing else I could do.'

Olivares' mother, Eduvina Romero, echoed his story, explaining that she and her son repeatedly showed border immigration officials his birth certificate, to no avail. 'They would never listen. It felt so unfair that they could simply disbelieve my son's citizenship without giving us any chance to prove that what we said was true. It made me panicked and anxious,' she said. 'I just wanted my son to be able to come home.'

Olivares is not the first U.S. citizen to be illegally deported. Pedro Guzman of Lancaster was deported to Mexico in 2007 and spent nearly three months lost in that country while family members desperately searched for him. In addition, Sens. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Robert Menendez of New Jersey recently sponsored the Protect Citizens and Residents from Unlawful Raids and Detention Act (S. 3594), to protect the rights of U.S. citizens and legal residents who get caught up in immigration raids.

Olivares was not picked up in such a raid, but the egregious violation of his rights as an American citizen dramatically demonstrates the same problem: that federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials routinely disregard the Constitution when enforcing federal immigration law.

'If ever there was evidence of the fundamental flaws in our immigration system, it is the fact that a U.S. citizen was deported twice and denied entry into the United States on numerous occasions without any due process of law,' said Jennie Pasquarella, staff attorney for the ACLU/SC. 'ICE officials repeatedly ignored his certified birth certificate, which they could easily have corroborated, and instead simply refused to believe him. It is inconceivable that this would have happened were he not Latino.'

Olivares was born in the Los Angeles area, and had never lived outside the United States until he was forced to live in Mexico after ICE deported him in 2007 and refused to allow him to re-enter. But his ordeal began in 2000, when border agents questioned the veracity of his birth certificate and whether it belonged to him when he was returning into the United States at the Tijuana border crossing. The agents refused to let him enter his own country. A week later, however, Olivares' mother met him at the border crossing with a certified copy of his birth certificate, and Olivares and his mother re-entered the United States without incident.

In 2007, while Olivares was serving time in state prison, agents from the Department of Homeland Security approached him and told him he was a Mexican citizen and would be deported. Olivares insisted that he was a U.S. citizen, but eventually - not fully understanding his rights as an American citizen - he was coerced into signing papers that were never explained to him and was deported to Mexico.

He then attempted to cross back into the United States, but border guards refused to let him enter. He felt he had no choice other than to live for a time with his mother's family in Jalisco. But in June 2008, upon learning that his father in Los Angeles was gravely ill, Olivares again tried to cross the border legally, presenting a certified copy of his birth certificate. After being rebuffed, he crossed illegally, but was picked up by the U.S. Border Patrol. On September 2, 2008, he was deported for a second time to Mexico, on the day his father died.

In September, Olivares - accompanied by his mother -- tried yet again to re-enter the United States legally from Tijuana. Once again, immigration officials rejected his birth certificate. However, this time he refused to sign his name to the papers foisted upon him and demanded to see a judge. As a result, ICE put Olivares in removal proceedings and detained him at the Otay Mesa Immigration Detention facility in San Diego. The family then contacted the Coalition for Human Immigrants' Rights of Los Angeles, which in turn contacted the ACLU/SC. On October 9, ACLU/SC staff attorney Jennie Pasquarella advised ICE that it had no authority to detain Olivares because he was a U.S. citizen, and presented his birth certificate and other documentation demonstrating his citizenship. He was released later that day.

'There's something fundamentally wrong with the system if border guards can effectively deprive you of your citizenship by simply disregarding a valid birth certificate,' said Pasquarella. 'ICE officials obviously used race and ethnicity as a basis for enforcing our nation's immigration laws, rather than taking a few minutes to verify Mr. Olivares' legal status.'

A hearing in federal immigration court in Olivares' case has been set for Jan. 6, 2009, at which Olivares will seek to terminate the removal proceedings against him.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. - A new report commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California shows that black and Hispanic residents are stopped, frisked, searched and arrested by Los Angeles Police Department officers far more frequently than white residents --dramatically demonstrating that the LAPD must do more to eliminate bias from its policing.

The report, authored by Professor Ian Ayres, an economist and law professor jointly appointed at Yale Law School and Yale School of Management, is based on a fresh analysis of the LAPD's own data. The report concludes that the racial disparities aren't explained by differing crime rates in predominantly black or Latino neighborhoods, or the likelihood that a search of a person of color will yield evidence of a crime.

'The results of this study raise grave concerns that African Americans and Hispanics are over-stopped, over-frisked, over-searched and over-arrested,' Ayres said in his report. 'These stark statistics'_give a numeric lens for the lived experience of '_driving while black - or '_driving while Hispanic.''

Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, said that 'the Los Angeles Police Department has taken several significant steps in recent months to address racially biased policing. However, as this analysis of data provided to us by the department shows, there's a lot more that should be done. We look forward to working with the department to institute improved training and other procedures that will keep the LAPD moving toward the goal of eliminating any bias in its work.'

In 2006 the LAPD released a study by the Analysis Group that examined the post-stop actions of its officers. That study -- based on 810,000 field data reports completed by LAPD officers nearly every time they stopped a vehicle or pedestrian between July 1, 2003 and June 30, 2004 -- concluded that when analyzed division by division, there was no consistent pattern of racial disparities across all divisions or races.

The LAPD provided the data on which the Analysis Group's 2006 report was based to the ACLU/SC, pursuant to a request under the California Public Records Act. At the request of the ACLU/SC, Ayres re-examined the data and found severe racial disparities, even after he controlled for crime rates and a host of other factors.

'This study shows that people of color in Los Angeles have a markedly different experience with LAPD. They're subjected to stops, frisks and searches more often than can be justified by crime patterns in different neighborhoods,' said Peter Bibring, a staff attorney for the ACLU/SC.

Ayres also found questionable assumptions and limitations in the methodology of the Analysis Group's report, and developed new ways of examining the data for evidence of whether it reflected racial profiling. Among his conclusions:

• African Americans and Hispanics were more than twice as likely to be ordered out of their vehicles than whites, and were vastly more likely to be frisked, asked to submit to a search, searched and arrested. These disparities remained statistically significant even when Ayres controlled for crime rates, poverty rates and other demographic information about the area where each stop occurred.
• Although African Americans and Hispanics were more likely to be frisked or asked to submit to a consensual search, officers were actually less likely to discover evidence during these frisks or searches. Ayres observed, 'It is implausible that the higher frisk and search rates were justified by higher minority criminality, when these frisks and searches were less likely to uncover weapons, drugs or other types of contraband.'
• Individual officers who arrested disproportionately more African Americans generally also arrested disproportionately more Hispanics.
• Racial disparities in arrest rates for stopped African Americans were smaller when the stops were conducted by African American officers.

In recent months, the LAPD has made revisions to its protocol of racial profiling investigations, and has considered additional anti-bias training. The ACLU/SC applauds this recent attention, but recommends that the LAPD take additional steps, including giving the civilian Inspector General real-time oversight of racial profiling complaint investigations, and the power to send them back to the department to be improved if necessary. The ACLU/SC also believes that the LAPD should conduct regular analyses of the data on stops that it already collects, to identify officers or units with unjustified racial disparities, and that improved anti-bias training should be provided departmentwide.

Such measures, along with improved training, early warning systems and complaint procedures, could make the department a model for rooting out racially biased policing.

CHICAGO - Congress and the Bush White House overstepped their constitutional authority and violated the rights of millions of customers when they passed and approved legislation granting sweeping immunity to telecoms that collaborated in illegal spying. That assertion is contained in a court filing today by three California affiliates and the Illinois affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, along with other interested parties in cases consolidated in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The ACLU lawsuits filed on behalf of dozens of plaintiffs - including renowned Chicago journalist Studs Terkel, former California Congressman Tom Campbell, journalist Robert Scheer and actor Richard Belzer -- challenge the unlawful collaboration of major telecommunications' companies - including AT&T - with the Bush administration's warrantless dragnet surveillance of electronic communications and records.

'Under our constitutional system, Congress and the Executive Branch do not determine whether actions taken by the Executive violate basic constitutional rights,' said Harvey Grossman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and co-lead counsel for the cases combined in the San Francisco court. 'Since Marbury v. Madison, we have recognized that only a court can determine the meaning of the Constitution - it is simply not a power granted to the Congress and the President.'

This filing is in response to passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008, which mandate that courts dismiss any cases against AT&T or other telecommunications' companies if the Attorney General chooses to file a secret certification attesting that the executive branch told the phone companies that the surveillance was lawful. Under the immunity provisions, the federal court does not determine whether the spying was in fact legal, but only that the representation of legality was made by the executive branch. The Attorney General has filed such a certification in these cases. This certification, according to the ACLU, is not surprising, since the Attorney General argued for immunizing the telecoms -- in public statements and in testimony before Congress -- before the law was passed.

'It's hard to believe that the Attorney General, who argued that immunity must be granted, has fairly and completely weighed the interests of our clients,' said Ann Brick, staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California. 'He has asked the court to dismiss their cases without determining whether any constitutional rights were violated.'

The brief filed today argues in its 1972 'Keith' decision, the Supreme Court ruled that domestic security surveillance requires prior judicial approval in the form of a warrant. The effect of the new immunity law is to overturn Keith and to dispense with this judicial gate keeping, and instead to substitute the opinion of the executive branch that the spying is lawful. Thus, the Congress and the White House have unconstitutionally encroached on the well-recognized authority of the courts to determine when a constitutional violation has occurred.

'Instead of changing the law as is its prerogative, Congress simply attempted to substitute a Bush administration interpretation of the Constitution for established law,' said David Blair-Loy, legal director of the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties. 'This creates a clear and unquestionable violation of our fundamental principle of separation of powers.'

Another area of grave constitutional concern for the ACLU is the FISA Amendments overly-broad grant of authority to the Attorney General to censor what materials drawn from the government's certification can be released in a public decision. The ACLU brief notes that under the First Amendment - and separation of powers required by our Constitution - only a court, not the Attorney General or Congress, can determine what information can be presented in a decision related to a civil proceeding.

'There is a critical First Amendment right to ensure that the public can access materials filed with our courts,' said Peter Eliasberg, managing attorney of the ACLU of Southern California. 'Courts must decide what materials can be kept from the public, not a political appointee like the Attorney General, who may be more interested in protecting a particular administration than the public's right to know.'