News & Commentary

ICE obtained a warrant to track and locate the cell phone of an immigrant from El Salvador who the government believed to be removable from the country. This is the first evidence we’ve seen of ICE using a Stingray in a specific immigration enforcement operation, but we’ve known for some time that the agency possesses the technology.

Every year on May 22, California celebrates Harvey Milk Day to mark the indelible impact Milk left on the world. Did you know that in the last year of his life, Milk tirelessly fought a virulently homophobic statewide initiative that looked very likely to pass and would have put California in the vanguard of a growing anti-gay movement?

Jails have become America's top place to warehouse people living with mental health challenges. Far too many of those incarcerated are locked up for low-level offenses related to their health condition.

Every year, money bail boosts bail insurance corporations’ profits at the expense of millions of low-income people of color.

“On behalf of myself and my 17-year-old daughter that I’m raising and my mother, who recently passed away – we’ve been drinking contaminated water for some time now. I live on a fixed budget. I don’t make more than $600 a month, and I pay out about $80 a month to have to buy water. And that’s for cooking purposes also other than just drinking. In talking with my daughter, she says, “Dad – how can I be safe, how can I be healthy if I can’t even drink the water?”

It's the 135th anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act, an immigration law that legitimized racism as policy.

In late February, Aaron Gach was returning to the United States from Brussels. An artist and activist, he had been abroad exhibiting works about mass incarceration, government control, and political dissent. In his pocket was a smartphone.    

On Nov. 9, 2016 we awoke to a new reality. America had elected Donald J. Trump as its 45th President. “We’ll see you in court” became the ACLU's mantra.

For months, the Trump administration has tried to bully local communities into signing up to become extensions of the federal deportation system. That campaign of threats and public shaming based on flawed data — which has been mostly unsuccessful — suffered another major blow yesterday. A federal court in San Francisco ruled in two cases that the president’s threats were unconstitutional, and stopped the government from carrying them out anywhere in the country. The ruling vindicates the constitutional rights of cities, counties, and states to refuse to participate in deportations. And like the court orders halting the president’s Muslim ban, the ruling shows the crucial role that courts play in preventing presidential overreach.