News & Commentary

By Carmen Iguina and Michael Kaufman This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s declaration in Gideon v. Wainwright that the Constitution guarantees indigent criminal defendants the right to appointed counsel. The Supreme Court described a “noble ideal” of “fair trials before impartial tribunals in which every defendant stands equal before the law.” As we reflect on the many unfulfilled promises of Gideon, we should also pause to consider that this “noble ideal” is not recognized in many court proceedings regarded as “non-criminal,” but where the most serious and significant interests are at stake. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the immigration system.

By Jennie Pasquarella, ACLU of Southern California and Axel Caballero, Cuéntame Where would you expect to find half-a-dozen patrol cars on New Year’s Eve? In Bakersfield, California, ranked in the highest ten percent of the most violent cities in America, you’d hope they’d be responding to incidents of violence and preventing murder, rape, and other violent crime. At the very least, you’d expect them to be patrolling for drunk drivers.

Tarek Hamdi is a civil engineer who’s helped build freeways, tunnels and bridges throughout New England and Southern California. His wife (his college sweetheart) and his four daughters are all American-born U.S. citizens. So it made sense to Tarek, who was born in Egypt but has lived in the U.S. since he was a teenager, to try to become a citizen.

Apparently as a result of sequester-induced budget cuts, Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently released hundreds of immigration detainees that it found were not risks either to flee or endanger public safety. The fact that these detainees were locked up in the first place confirms a startling truth about our immigration detention system: the government routinely detains people for no good reason. Even Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano promised to examine why these detainees were in jail, saying: "That's a good question. I've asked the same question myself... so we're looking into it."

By Julia Harumi Mass, ACLU of Northern CaliforniaBertha Mejia is a 53-year-old grandmother who fled political violence and sexual abuse in her native El Salvador as a girl. She has four U.S. citizen children and is the primary caretaker for her 9-year-old grandson, Pablo. The victim of rape at the hands of her employer, Ms. Mejia has a strong case for a "U-visa," a type of visa for victims of crime who cooperate with law enforcement. The police have already certified that Ms. Mejia is a victim who has assisted the police in apprehending the perpetrator.

By Michael Tan, ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, & Joanne Lin, Washington Legislative Office

By Michael Kaufman and Carmen Iguina In 2009, the Obama administration announced plans to transform the immigration detention system to make it “truly civil” – a recognition that detainees are being held for civil immigration violations, not as punishment for a crime.

By Jason Howe You have to hand it to Sheriff Lee Baca. He sometimes arrives at the correct conclusion. It’s just not very often that he does it quickly, easily or without a lot of coercion – i.e. being sued.

By Jennie Pasquarella, ACLU of Southern California and Julia Mass, ACLU of Northern California For the first time yesterday, California Attorney General Kamala Harris publicly weighed in on the hotly-contested federal immigration program, Secure Communities (S-Comm). In an information bulletin to local law enforcement agencies, she provides much needed clarification to these agencies about the parameters of their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Her statement should finally put to bed any lingering doubt that immigration detainers are voluntary requests and that each local agency may make its own decisions about whether or not to enforce the requests, at its own expense.