News & Commentary

This summer Californians celebrated a historic victory when Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law AB 1266 – the School Success and Opportunity Act.

Sergio Villatoro was waiting to pay a traffic ticket at the Kern County courthouse in Lamont, California, when the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid began. ICE agents blocked all of the exits. Although ICE agents made no attempt to establish Mr. Villatoro’s identity – much less his immigration status – they placed him under arrest, along with five others waiting to pay tickets, all Latino. Agents told them they were being arrested for “being in the country illegally.”

Today, I feel grateful to be a woman in California.

In 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, an act that authorized the indefinite detention of "Americans of Japanese ancestry." As a result, over 110,000 Japanese Americans residing on the West Coast were forced from their homes and imprisoned without trial in overcrowded and unsanitary internment camps. Because of their race, these Americans lost their freedom to the specter of a national security threat.

For years, we at the ACLU have been warning that the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative – a vast information sharing program that encourages the collection and sharing of “suspicious activity” among private parties and local, state and federal law enforcement – would lead to violations of our privacy, racial and religious profiling, and interference with constitutionally-protected activities.

Should the government be allowed to lie to the courts in the name of national security? This is the question that judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will have to consider in the next few weeks.