In September 2020, the City of San Francisco filed a series of lawsuits against 28 Bay Area residents. The City is seeking to use California’s public nuisance and Unfair Competition Law (“UCL”) to ban individuals from the Tenderloin District for allegedly engaging in street-level drug sales. The City, therefore, wants to create a second, civil track, that runs parallel to the existing criminal one.

On Sept. 8, 2022, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati filed a class-action lawsuit against the city and county of San Francisco and Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, urging the court to prevent the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office from requiring that individuals agree to unconstitutional “four-way” searches and GPS location data-sharing as conditions of pretrial release on electronic monitoring. 

On September 27, 2022, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area and the ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed suit on behalf of the Coalition on Homelessness and several unhoused individuals against the City and County of San Francisco and Mayor London Breed for their efforts to criminalize homelessness through an array of practices that violated the constitutional rights of unhoused San Franciscans.