ACLU News

The California Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that students who attend at least three years of high school in California and who graduate from a California high school are eligible for in-state tuition rates at California public colleges and universities, regardless of their immigration status. The Court found that federal law did not bar California from offering tuition equality to students. California is one of ten states to grant tuition equality to its students.

The ACLU has reached a settlement on behalf of a San Francisco condo resident who challenged an attempt by a homeowner's association to force him to remove political signs from his windows.

The ACLU and its three California affiliates sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Gil Kerlikowske, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, on Oct. 25, arguing that there would be no legal basis for the Department of Justice to sue to overturn Proposition 19 should it be approved next month by California voters, and urging the Justice Department not to change its current law enforcement focus on major criminal activity in favor of new enforcement activities against California marijuana users.

The California Department of Health Care Services has failed to provide a meaningful explanation for its illegal release of the names of some 5,000 HIV-positive Medi-Cal recipients to a third-party service provider, said attorneys at Lambda Legal, the ACLU-NC, and HIV & AIDS Legal Services Alliance. A letter delivered to the agency from the groups today warns that DHCS must immediately act to protect the confidentiality of HIV patients, or face further steps that could include legal action.

Following developments in federal and state court, the Attorney General conceded that the execution scheduled to occur at 9:00 pm on September 30 cannot go forward. This came just 30 hours before the scheduled execution. Yet legal experts had predicted for weeks that the execution would not occur due to the many remaining legal challenges and uncertainties regarding the state's method of execution, lethal injection.

For almost five years, California has engaged in a protracted legal battle over its method of execution: lethal injection. Despite ongoing legal challenges and widespread public concern, the state is rushing to carry out an execution scheduled for this week on Wednesday, September 29 just after the stroke of midnight. In response, death penalty opponents are gathering across California to protest the planned execution at San Quentin.

For almost five years, the State of California has engaged in a protracted legal battle over its method of execution: lethal injection. During this time period, executions in California have been on hold. Now, the state is rushing to carry out an execution next week, even though none of the legal questions have been answered.

In a letter to government agencies, the ACLU of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are calling for answers to critical privacy and safety questions regarding a controversial federal program to track preschoolers with radio frequency identification chips at a preschool in Richmond, California.

The ACLU-NC is demanding a full explanation of a state agency's unauthorized and illegal disclosures of confidential information of approximately 5,000 HIV-positive Medi-Cal recipients, and seeking assurance that there will be no more illegal disclosures. "The state stepped out of bounds when it disclosed the confidential records of HIV-positive Medi-Cal patients, even including their contact information," said ACLU-NC Attorney Elizabeth Gill.

The California affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit against the State of California and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today for allowing school districts throughout the state to charge fees for books and other essential educational supplies. This practice violates the California Constitution which, since 1879, has guaranteed children a free education.

On September 8, an en banc panel of all 11 judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit dismissed the ACLU's case on behalf of five men who were kidnapped by the CIA, forcibly disappeared to U.S.-run prisons overseas and tortured. According to the ACLU, the ruling all but shuts the door on accountability for the illegal "extraordinary rendition" program. The ACLU intends to seek Supreme Court review of the decision.

A new report explores racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in access to education, employment, and housing. It found that these factors relate to how likely it is someone will be incarcerated, and that lack of data collection hinders the ability to address this problem. As a result lawmakers are creating policies without fully understanding the racial, ethnic, and gender impact of their decisions.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian filed a lawsuit Aug. 24 against the FBI to speed the release of FBI records on the investigation and surveillance of Muslim communities in the Bay Area.

Through an interim policy released on August 11, 2010, the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE") has weighed in on a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Northern California against the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department and the federal immigration agency concerning the County's participation in immigration enforcement. Since at least 2005 Sonoma County Sheriff and local ICE agents used something called an immigration "detainer" or "hold" to place arrestees in the County jail for four days without notice of the charges against them, and without procedural rights normally afforded to immigration detainees.

in a landmark decision on August 4, a federal judge ruled that Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that excluded same-sex couples from marriage in the state, violates the United States Constitution. The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and Lambda Legal filed two friend-of-the-court briefs in the case supporting the argument that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

Thirty ACLU affiliates are seeking details about the FBI's program that collects and maps sensitive information in communities with concentrated ethnic populations.