News & Commentary

Fresno City Council Member Steve Brandau wants Fresno to turn its back on immigrants, inclusion, and human dignity.

While California already has many great laws in place, there's much work to do for civil rights and civil liberties – especially now as the Trump Administration begins its attack on the most vulnerable among us.

Trump didn’t appear to know that Douglass died 132 years ago.

It was 75 years ago that President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which began the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Tens of thousands of American citizens were declared dangerous to domestic security and forced to go to internment camps in isolated areas across the Western United States.

January 30 is Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution, established by the California legislature in 2010 to commemorate the ACLU of Northern California’s client who was interned during World War II.

My mother was seven years old when she and her family were evacuated from the West Coast and forced to live in an Army barrack behind barbed wire in an internment camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Born in Los Angeles, she had been taught in school to be a proud and loyal American citizen, so the wholesale exclusion and relocation of her community was both terrifying and confusing. On the journey to Wyoming, the prisoners were ordered to keep their shades down when the train passed through towns; my mother thought this must be because people hated her and her community so much that they didn’t want to see their faces. She was incarcerated at Heart Mountain for three years before she and her family were permitted to return to their home in Los Angeles.

California now has some of the strongest protections against policing for profit in the country. Although we had several legislative successes this year, two important, ACLU-sponsored bills died in the Legislature.

Communities are being torn apart by mandatory immigration detention. Every day, more than 30,000 immigrants are held in prison-like without due process.