Court Cases

A settlement was finalized September 16 between the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) in its case involving Kebin Reyes, a U.S. citizen who was six years old when he was illegally detained for ten hours by immigration officials. We argued that Kebin's constitutional rights were violated when he was taken from his home in San Rafael during a raid in which ICE officials arrested his father, who is from Guatemala.

Federal class action lawsuit filed in 2008 charging that the city of Antioch and its police department are engaged in a concerted campaign of intimidation, harassment, and discrimination against African-Americans who receive federal housing assistance.

Does a school district have the authority to expel students based on an incident involving a school resource officer that occurred off campus and after school? A Contra Costa County Superior Court ruled in May 2008 that the Antioch Unified School District violated the rights of two students when it expelled them from school following an off-campus incident in which police officers pepper-sprayed the students and forcefully arrested them. The judge overturned the expulsions. The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Northern California and Berkeley attorney Jivaka Candappa sued the district on behalf of the students, arguing that it lacked the authority to expel the students based on the incident, and that the students' due process rights were violated during the expulsion hearings.

Two Southern California fair housing organizations sued Roomate.com, an Internet-based roommate matching service, arguing that the website must be held responsible for postings on the site that violate federal fair housing laws. Roommate.com argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from liability for content posted by third parties, gives it complete immunity from suit. After agreeing to have the case re-heard en banc, the Ninth Circuit issued an opinion that holds housing websites accountable for their own actions that violate the fair housing laws but sustains the important free speech protections of section 230 by holding that housing websites may not be held liable for the discriminatory comments of users of the site. The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a friend of the court brief urging the court to carefully separate content and conduct by Roommate.com from that of the individuals who use its service.