News & Commentary

LOS ANGELES — UCLA Immigration Law professor Hiroshi Motomura led what he described as "a 42-hour immigration course compressed into two hours" at the ACLU of Southern California headquarters last Tuesday.

LOS ANGELES - Transgender students in California are one step closer to just treatment. Today, the California Senate Education Committee voted 5-2 to pass AB 1266 (the School Success and Opportunity Act), which would ensure that transgender students have equal access to facilities and activities like sports teams that match their gender identity. The bill passed the California Assembly in May, and now moves to the full Senate.

WEST HOLLYWOOD—Risqué costumes, boisterous after-parties and general debauchery usually dominate reportage on LA PRIDE festivities. To newcomers, the celebration’s essential mission is overshadowed by the pomp and circumstance.

President Obama's response to the troubling news of indiscriminate government collection of communication information is meant to be reassuring: the NSA is operating under supervision by all three branches of government. Even if this were true, and it is not, this purported defense should make us more nervous, not less, because it suggests that, in Washington, it has become business as usual to withhold basic information from the American public about what powers of surveillance the government claims it can lawfully use.

By Hector Villagra, Executive Director, ACLU/SC On Wednesday, June 5th, the ACLU of Southern California’s Ahilan Arulanantham took part in a public discussion concerning the Obama Administration’s targeted killing program. Speaking alongside Mr. Arulanantham was John Yoo, formerly with the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush Administration.

By Hector Villagra, Executive Director, ACLU of Southern California The consent decree secured by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and the Justice Department accomplished its purpose by and large. This is no longer your father’s Los Angeles Police Department.

On May 15, 1923, angered by the LAPD's brutal treatment of striking longshoremen, journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair appeared at a rally in San Pedro. Because the police banned all public meetings by the unionized strikers, the rally was held, with the owner's written permission, on private property prophetically named "Liberty Hill." Sinclair began reading the First Amendment.

Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using sophisticated cameras, called “automated license plate readers” or ALPR, to scan and record the license plates of millions of cars across the country.