News & Commentary

By Michael Kaufman, Staff Attorney A Democratic consultant ignited a firestorm several months ago when she questioned whether Ann Romney – who had tweeted that raising five children had been “hard work” – had “actually worked a day in her life.” Commentators from both sides of the aisle roundly criticized the consultant. The message was clear: taking care of a family is real work, and our society should value domestic work as much as paycheck-earning employment.

Revelations of brutality by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and cover-ups inside the jails have exposed significant shortcomings in the department’s civilian watchdog system, which was created to prevent such misconduct.

The Obama administration has been ordered to give immigrants bail hearings if they’ve been detained in the L.A. area for more than six months. That’s fair. U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. last week ordered the Obama administration to provide bail hearings for certain immigrants who have been detained in Southern California for more than six months to determine whether their continued detention is warranted. Hatter’s decision is a welcome development that could help restore some much-needed fairness to the troubled detention system. We hope the administration accepts the court’s ruling.

By Jason Howe, Director of Communications Did you hear on the news about the mass exodus of a half-million troops from the U.S. military?

By Hector Villagra, Executive Director John Morton, the director of U.S. Immigrations and Enforcement (ICE), has suggested that policies that restrict compliance with immigration detainers “may” violate federal law. If he thinks this is true of the TRUST Act, a bill that now sits on Governor Brown’s desk, all I can say is this: Yes, and pigs “may” fly.

When is the Veterans Affairs Department going to meet its responsibility to house chronically homeless veterans in Los Angeles on the large tract of government-owned land that should have been put to this use long ago?

The United States is increasingly a multiracial society, with white students accounting for just over half of all students in public schools, down from four-fifths in 1970. Yet whites are still largely concentrated in schools with other whites, leaving the largest minority groups — black and Latino students — isolated in classrooms, according to a new analysis of Department of Education data.

SAN FRANCISCO—Today the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will rehear the ACLU of Northern California’s challenge to a California law that mandates that DNA is collected from anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony, whether or not they are ever charged or convicted. Oral argument is scheduled for 10am in Courtroom 1 at the James R. Browning US Courthouse in San Francisco.

Facing severe criticism of his leadership, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca finds himself confronting his toughest political test since he took the helm of the nation’s largest sheriff’s department nearly 14 years ago.