News & Commentary

Today, we won another victory against one of the most draconian parts of our immigration system: the federal government’s practice of putting immigrants in long-term detention without the basic due process of a bond hearing.

Every day, immigration detainees with severe mental disabilities are denied the basic legal representation they deserve. They slip through the cracks of our immigration system – unassisted, yet incapable of representing themselves. They suffer through unjust proceedings, and many of them are unlawfully deported – separated from their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, often the only people on Earth who know and love them.

For more than one year, the government has refused to turn over information about a key representation it made to the Supreme Court regarding how long it detains certain immigrants during deportation proceedings. It has offered no explanation for its silence.

As a result of a recent court ruling in Rodriguez v. Robbins, the government can no longer lock up immigration detainees for six months or longer without a bond hearing. Since this ground-breaking ruling went into effect, hundreds of immigration detainees in Southern California have had their first opportunity to ask a judge for release on bond.

“Each and every day, we have thousands of people who are deported from this country. We fight against deportations, because deportation destroys families,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), outside the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles on Thursday, June 13.

LOS ANGELES — UCLA Immigration Law professor Hiroshi Motomura led what he described as "a 42-hour immigration course compressed into two hours" at the ACLU of Southern California headquarters last Tuesday.

by Hector Villagra, Executive Director of the ACLU of Southern California Historian Eric Foner has said that "[l]ike all great historical transformations, emancipation was a process, not a single event. It arose from many causes and was the work of many individuals." We are now living through and are on the verge of a great historical transformation, as evidenced by the release of the so-called gang of eight's long-awaited immigration proposal. This transformation, some 20 years in the making, has definitely been a process.

By Esha Bhandari, Equal Justice Works Fellow, ACLU & Carmen Iguina, Equal Justice Works Fellow, ACLU of Southern California In a landmark ruling yesterday, Federal District Judge Dolly M. Gee ordered the federal government to provide legal representation for immigrant detainees in California, Arizona and Washington who have serious mental disabilities and are unable to represent themselves in immigration court.

By Michael Tan, Staff Attorney, Immigrants' Rights Project, ACLU National Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a landmark ruling that curtails one of the most wasteful and draconian features of our immigration lock-up system: the government's practice of putting immigration detainees behind bars for months or even years, without ever holding a bond hearing to determine if they should be locked up in the first place. In Rodriguez v. Robbins, a class-action lawsuit brought by the ACLU, the Court upheld an order requiring bond hearings for detainees locked up six months or longer while they fight their deportation cases. The ruling stands to benefit thousands of immigration detainees across the Ninth Circuit, where an estimated 25% of immigrant detainees are held every year.