News & Commentary

Ramona Ripston is Executive Director of the ACLU of Southern California.

For many immigrants in this country, the chance to take the oath of allegiance to the United States and become sworn in as a U.S. citizen is a moment they dream about and work years to achieve. But for Tarek Hamdi and many other Muslim immigrants around the country, the dream is tarnished by racial and religious discrimination in the naturalization process.

The ACLU of Southern California’s Chief Counsel, Mark Rosenbaum, will testify before the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on the unconstitutionality of Arizona’s AB 1070. The board is set to vote today on whether to support a boycott of Arizona in response to the new law requiring that police demand "papers" from people they stop and suspect are not authorized to be in the U.S.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – James Gilliam, an award-winning attorney who has extensive experience working pro bono on a wide variety of civil rights, immigration, homelessness and LGBT issues, has been named deputy executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, ACLU/SC Executive Director Ramona Ripston announced today.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – Five days after a team of civil rights lawyers filed lawsuits on behalf of two immigrants with mental disabilities who were locked up for years after being judged mentally incompetent to understand the proceedings against them, federal officials announced the two men would be released from custody.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – For five years, two men with mental disabilities have languished in immigration detention, effectively lost in a system that has no established procedures to determine whether they should be released or whether their cases should be resolved in another way.

Ahilan T. Arulanantham is director of immigrant rights and national security for the ACLU/SC. He wrote this piece for the American Constitution Society.