News & Commentary

LOS ANGELES — On the eve of Labor Day, the ACLU of Southern California and the law firm of Hadsell, Stormer, Keeny, Richardson & Renick, LLP today filed a class action lawsuit in federal district court against Terra Universal, Inc., charging the multi-million dollar federal government contractor with violations of federal wage and hour laws for requiring employees to work long hours without overtime pay and systematically discriminating against Latino workers based on their race and immigration status.

Jennie Pasquarella is a staff attorney with the ACLU of Southern California.

Los Angeles County Jail has just installed an Assault Intervention Device ''' an invisible microwave-beam weapon originally developed by the military ''' as a way to subdue inmates by focusing a microwave beam on them to make them feel "intolerable heat."

LOS ANGELES – The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Southern California today sent a letter to Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca demanding that he not employ against prisoners at the Los Angeles County jails a high-technology device employing heat rays, built for military use.

LOS ANGELES – Seeking to uncover information about the U.S. government’s 2008 overseas “proxy detention” of American citizen Naji Hamdan, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California filed a lawsuit in federal district court here today. The suit asks the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies to turn over records about their surveillance of Mr. Hamdan in the United States, and their involvement in his detention and torture in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates.

Since shortly after Naji Hamdan, an American citizen, was arrested and held incommunicado in the United Arab Emirates in 2008, the ACLU of Southern California has been working to obtain the truth about why the U.A.E. held, tortured, and charged Mr. Hamdan as part of the U.S.'s controversial "proxy detention" program.