News & Commentary

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.

Like thousands of other people in 2006, Jose Franco was detained by immigration authorities. Most detainees are either deported to their country of origin or released after winning their right to remain in the United States.

Amidst all the talk of immigration reform and the need to secure our borders, it's easy to forget that our government already imprisons thousands of immigrants for months, often years, in several hundred immigration detention centers scattered across the United States.

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WHEN GULET MOHAMED FINALLY returned home on a chilly Virginia morning in January, the 19-year-old from Fairfax was wearing the same outfit he had on when he disappeared a month earlier in Kuwait. Clad in a fleece hat and a gray Real Madrid sweatshirt, the straggly-bearded, wide-eyed teenager stepped out of arrivals at Dulles Airport and into a phalanx of television cameras. He wore a bewildered smile—as if he was still unsure of what had happened to him but was just grateful it was over.

The ACLU of Southern California recently released its 2011 Annual Report. Below is a welcome letter from ACLU/SC Executive Director Hector Villagra.

We warned you that the federal government had gotten into the snake-oil business with Secure Communities (S-Comm). Turns out that the actual purpose of S-Comm was just part of the story. The federal government also misled state and local governments, as well as the public, about whether or not the program was voluntary.