News & Commentary

By Duncan Roy, ACLU client Duncan Roy was arrested in November 2011 on a charge of extortion for threatening to blog about the legality of a real estate deal. He was held at a sheriff’s station in Lost Hills before being transferred to Men’s Central Jail.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca on behalf of people who say they were denied bail for minor offenses after being flagged by immigration authorities.

By Esha Bhandari, ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project Mark Lyttle, an American citizen with mental disabilities who was wrongfully detained and deported to Mexico and forced to live on the streets and in prisons for months, settled his case against the federal government this week.

By Michael Kaufman, Staff Attorney A Democratic consultant ignited a firestorm several months ago when she questioned whether Ann Romney – who had tweeted that raising five children had been “hard work” – had “actually worked a day in her life.” Commentators from both sides of the aisle roundly criticized the consultant. The message was clear: taking care of a family is real work, and our society should value domestic work as much as paycheck-earning employment.

The Obama administration has been ordered to give immigrants bail hearings if they've been detained in the L.A. area for more than six months. That's fair. U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. last week ordered the Obama administration to provide bail hearings for certain immigrants who have been detained in Southern California for more than six months to determine whether their continued detention is warranted. Hatter's decision is a welcome development that could help restore some much-needed fairness to the troubled detention system. We hope the administration accepts the court's ruling.

By Hector Villagra, Executive Director John Morton, the director of U.S. Immigrations and Enforcement (ICE), has suggested that policies that restrict compliance with immigration detainers "may" violate federal law. If he thinks this is true of the TRUST Act, a bill that now sits on Governor Brown's desk, all I can say is this: Yes, and pigs "may" fly.

By Ahilan Arulanantham, ACLU/SC Deputy Legal Director; Michael Kaufman, ACLU/SC Staff Attorney; Michael Tan, ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project Alejandro Rodriguez’s parents brought him from Mexico when he was a baby. Prior to his detention, Alejandro earned his green card and lived near his extended family in Los Angeles, working as a dental assistant to support his two U.S. citizen children. The two convictions that gave rise to his detention and deportation case were minor and non-violent— joyriding when he was 19, and a misdemeanor drug possession when he was 24. Alejandro posed no flight risk or danger to the community and yet, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) locked Alejandro up for more than three years without a bond hearing. Bond hearings are a basic and guaranteed principle of due process in the American judicial system, but thousands of immigrants like Alejandro are denied this fundamental right on a daily basis.

By Michael Kaufman, Staff Attorney This past week, I traveled to Guantánamo Bay to observe military commission hearings, continuing the ACLU’s long-standing commitment to be present at each and every hearing of these deeply flawed tribunals. Six days of pre-trial hearings were scheduled in the capital cases of the five defendants alleged to have participated in the 9/11 attacks. Unfortunately, Mother Nature had other plans and the hearings were postponed due to Tropical Storm Isaac’s then-imminent arrival. But during my brief time in GTMO, I had a window into the military commission proceedings that left me deeply concerned about their fairness and legitimacy.

LA WEEKLY: Director Duncan Roy casts a courtly image of a baronial figure as he sits in his home atop Las Flores Canyon, a modernist, Bohemian hideaway with a jaw-dropping view of the Pacific. His surroundings project an image of California's creative lifestyle at its most alluring. But in February, Roy found himself standing alone outside Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail, released after three months of harrowing and wrongful incarceration.