When police seek access to information about people exercising their First Amendment rights, they must meet a much higher legal standard to justify that intrusion. That’s what a court ruled in a case where the UC Santa Barbara Police Department attempted to force Instagram to surrender detailed records associated with two activist Instagram accounts.
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Do NOT open your door. ICE can’t come into your home unless they have a signed search warrant or you let them in. If officers are at your door, ask them to pass the warrant under the door before you open it. An arrest warrant (or an administrative warrant of removal) is not enough to come inside you home. If ICE officers want to enter your home, they must have a valid judicial search warrant that ...
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Long before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state must provide a lawyer to poor people charged with crimes, many counties in California already did so. Yet today, after years of neglect by the state, California is in the midst of a decades-long public defense crisis.
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A San Francisco judge has ruled that the California Department of Justice can no longer indefinitely store the DNA of people who were never convicted of a crime.
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The feeling of violation continues to feel overwhelming—strangers now have access to everything, from my random casual conversations to incredibly intimate family exchanges. I thought I could get back to my studies after the challenges of last spring when I was excluded from campus after the protests. But having my phone seized right at the start of the year has really set me back.
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The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a motion today to challenge an unconstitutionally broad search warrant that authorized UCSC police to seize and search a student’s cellphone, in violation of the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA), the First and Fourth Amendments, and the California Constitution.
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On February 19, 2025, the National TPS Alliance and seven Venezuelan TPS holders sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to challenge the vacatur of the previously ordered extension of TPS for Venezuela, and the subsequent termination. On March 20, 2025, the plaintiffs amended the complaint to also challenge the vacatur of the full TPS extension for 500,000 Haitians, with four Haitian TPS h...
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