News & Commentary

Tech companies provide access to the sensitive personal information used to destroy communities and undermine the rights that we work every day to protect. Join the #NoTechforICE campaign.

The American Civil Liberties Union along with Brooklyn Defender Services (BDS), created “We Have Rights,” a national immigrant empowerment campaign to inform immigrant communities of what to do when interacting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The campaign centers around four animated videos available in seven languages: English, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, Haitian Creole and Urdu. Created as a direct response to expressed community needs, the videos are based on true stories and provide practical tips for how to safely defend the legal and human rights of immigrants during four common encounters with ICE: when ICE is at the door, when ICE is inside homes, when ICE stops people in the street, and when ICE arrests immigrants.

UPDATE: The Union City Police Department informed the ACLU that it does not operate license plate cameras and has no license plate detection data to share with ICE. Union City provided a recent sharing report and screenshots showing that ICE is not listed as a sharing partner and that Union City has not contributed “detections” data to the LEARN database.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using mass location surveillance to target immigrants. And local governments like Merced and Union City, California, are helping — feeding their residents’ personal information to ICE, even when it violates local privacy laws or sanctuary policies. Today, the ACLU is urging an immediate end to this information sharing.

After more than a month of threats, a government shutdown, and bipartisan action by Congress, President Trump has finally declared a national emergency to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on his border wall obsession. In response, the ACLU will file a lawsuit early next week challenging this blatantly illegal executive action.

Let’s get something straight upfront: There is no emergency. Members of Congress from both parties, security experts, and Americans who live at the border have all said so. What the president is doing is yet another illegal and dangerous power grab in service of his anti-immigrant agenda.

UPDATE, Nov. 20, 2018: Late Monday night, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking President Trump’s asylum ban while the suit moves forward. The order will be in effect until Dec. 19 at least, when there will be another hearing on the ban. In his order, Judge Jon S. Tigar of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco wrote, “The rule barring asylum for immigrants who enter the country outside a port of entry irreconcilably conflicts with the INA [Immigration and Naturalization Act] and the expressed intent of Congress. Whatever the scope of the President’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden.”

Update: Read our 2024 report "Resistance, Retaliation, Repression: Two Years in California Immigration Detention."

It was recently discovered that Amazon is marketing its face surveillance product "Rekgonition" to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.