Court Cases

The ACLU of Northern California filed a lawsuit to compel the city of Vallejo to release public records that contain information about officers in the Vallejo Police Department who allegedly bent their badges after on-duty shootings as a badge of honor. Following litigation, the City of Vallejo was forced to release a long-suppressed third-party investigation into the allegations.

The Coalition on Homelessness and several individual plaintiffs sued San Francisco over its punitive practice of seizing and destroying unhoused residents’ belongings during encampment sweeps in violation of the Fourth Amendment and the city’s own policies.

We filed a motion in federal court to prevent Meta from complying with the Department of Homeland Security’s demand that the tech giant turn over the name, email address, and phone number associated with an Instagram account that reposted a video naming a Border Patrol agent. We argue that the government’s administrative subpoena violated First Amendment protections for anonymous political speech.

In June of 2024, we filed a motion to unseal court records and preserve public access to hearings in the class action lawsuit that survivors of sexual assault at Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin brought against the federal Bureau of Prisons.

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California and our legal partner sued Santa Clara County Superior Court over its unfair policy requiring people who want to voluntarily address an outstanding arrest warrant to first go to jail if they are too poor to post bail.

Nine people detained at the Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center in Bakersfield, Calif., and the Golden State Annex in McFarland, Calif., filed a class action lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and GEO Group, the for-profit prison company that owns and operates the detention centers. They alleged that they and other detained people faced retaliation, including threats of solitary confinement and bans on family visitation, for engaging in a collective hunger strike to demand their release from immigration custody and the shutdown of both facilities.

On March 16, 2022, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California (“ACLU”) filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Fresno, urging the court to strike down a city ordinance that targets unhoused people, and puts unconstitutional restrictions on advocates, organizers, and reporters who try to draw attention to how the unhoused are treated during encampment sweeps. In February 2022, city officials amended an existing ordinance to create a buffer zone around abatement activity, like encampment sweeps, taking place on public property. Anyone who enters the off-limits area “without express authorization” from the city can now be charged with a misdemeanor or fined up to $250. This outrageously broad ordinance is a direct assault not just on our plaintiffs’ constitutional rights, but on everyone’s rights. The ACLU and the California Homeless Union, represented by the Law Offices of Anthony D. Prince, filed the complaint in the United States District Court, Eastern District of California on behalf of Dez Martinez, a longtime advocate who was once unhoused, Robert McCloskey, a reporter and activist, the Fresno Homeless Union, and Faith in the Valley. The lawsuit seeks to stop the ordinance from going into effect on March 31 and ultimately to get it voided altogether. On March 30, 2022, the ACLU and the California Homeless Union filed a motion for preliminary injunction to ask the Court to prohibit the City of Fresno from enforcing the ordinance and conducting nuisance abatements under the ordinance. In response, the City of Fresno moved to dismiss the lawsuit. The Court has scheduled a hearing on the preliminary injunction for Wednesday, May 11.

On July 14, 2021, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, Disability Rights Advocates, King & Spalding LLP, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise filed a class action complaint against the City of Mountain View for enacting two ordinances that, together, severely restricted when and where “oversized vehicles” (OSVs) could park in the City.