News & Commentary

Administration’s acknowledgement of severe S-Comm flaws highlights need for Moratorium and TRUST Act

ACLU/SC client Osfel Andrade wasn’t looking for attention when he blew the whistle on years of exploitation and discrimination of largely immigrant workers by his employer. In fact, attention is something Andrade was hoping to avoid. 

Los Angeles — The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California announced that a federal court in Los Angeles ordered the Department of Homeland Security to find legal representation – whether paid or pro bono – for a man suffering from a serious mental illness held in immigration detention.  The court’s order, which was unsealed today, defined the procedures that the government must follow to protect the rights of immigrants with severe mental disabilities held in detention. 

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The ACLU of Southern California and the national ACLU filed an emergency request to prevent a woman, who is a lawful permanent resident, and her U.S. citizen child from being denied entry into the United States.

LOS ANGELES — A coalition of civil rights groups has agreed to dismiss its Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against federal immigration officials, after securing the release of more than 2500 pages of documents relating to the federal government’s unlawful treatment of workers detained during a huge workplace raid in Los Angeles in 2008.

Republican legislators in several different states revealed a new plan to deal with our broken immigration system. Their proposal requires the states to pass laws creating two classes of birth certificates -- based on the immigration status of the parents of the child -- and then to deny citizenship to those children whose parents do not have the right to live here permanently. The idea appears to be to first deny these American-born children state citizenship, and then use this as a springboard to deny them United States citizenship.