News & Commentary

Danny Pham, a 27-year-old Westminster native, was serving a six-month sentence in an Orange County jail for a non-violent offense. He was close to completing his sentence. Instead, he ended up dead.

Law enforcement agencies are deploying secret and invasive surveillance technologies to collect sensitive location and biometric data, target local activists, and feed ICE's deportation machine. Technologies like drones, social media surveillance, and license plate readers have invaded people's private lives and are being exploited by the federal government to tear California families apart.

Police in California have a problem with deadly force. Last year, police shot and killed 162 people in the state, half of whom did not have guns. California departments have some of the highest rates of killings in the nation. In a 2015 report, for example, the Guardian identified central California's Kern County as the place where a member of the public is most likely to die at the hands of police.

Last week, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra provided all California public school leaders with the policies they must adopt by July to protect students from immigration enforcement while at school. 

It's a scene out of a dystopian police state: Your bus pulls into the station after a long ride, but before you can get off, law enforcement agents board and make their way down the aisle, peering at passengers. They see brown skin, or hear a foreign accent, and stop to demand identification, then proof of citizenship. Those who don’t satisfy their questions are escorted off the bus.

Students deserve to attend supportive and well-resourced schools, where they feel safe. And, as students across the country are calling for common sense gun control, the Trump administration has instead proposed to “harden” schools by increasing the numbers of armed police in schools and by arming teachers and school staff. These proposals, while cloaked in the language of “school safety,” are most likely to hasten the process of transforming schools into something more akin to penal institutions while increasing the risk to students.

Peter Arellano's life changed when a Los Angeles Police Department officer handed him a piece of paper informing him that he was now subject to a "gang injunction." He could no longer visit his neighbors in their homes, drive to church with his family, ride his bike through the local park, or even stand in his own front yard with his father or brother. If he violated these terms, he could be arrested and jailed. Arellano, who has never been convicted of any crime, had effectively been placed on house arrest.

Last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the latest move in this administration’s increasingly desperate attempts to bully states and localities into colluding with its draconian detention and deportation agenda. Following a brief aside to blame all immigrants for violent crime, homicides, and opioid overdose deaths, he told a meeting of the California Peace Officers' Association that the Justice Department had just filed a major lawsuit against the state of California.

To resist the Trump administration's cruel immigration enforcement policies, Culver City, California declared itself a sanctuary city. The City Council passed a resolution in March 2017 declaring the city's commitment "to protecting the safety, well-being and constitutional rights of its residents