Legal Docket

In September 2020, the City of San Francisco filed a series of shockingly unprecedented lawsuits against 28 Bay Area residents. The City is seeking to use California’s public nuisance and Unfair Competition Law (“UCL”) statutes to banish individuals from the San Francisco's Tenderloin District for allegedly engaging in a few instances of street-level drug dealing. Read More

The ACLU of Northern California, the Immigrant Defense Project, Just Futures Law, and Mijente sued the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection under the Freedom of Information Act seeking records of their use of Clearview AI’s face surveillance system. Read More

Five residents of Pacifica are suing the city for attempting to banish RV dwellers from its jurisdiction. Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California and Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus filed a class-action lawsuit demanding that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stop its illegal practice of using third-party contractor G4S Secure Solutions to arrest people at jails and prisons to transfer them to ICE for deportation. Read More

Advocates filed damages claims against Governor Newsom and California prison officials on behalf of four people who were transferred to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), instead of being released back to their loved ones and allowed to reenter society after serving their time. Read More

In late May and early June 2020 during mass demonstrations of the George Floyd protests, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), in defiance of a 2019 city ordinance backed by the ACLU and other civil rights organizations, illegally tapped into a sprawling private camera network to conduct live mass surveillance of protesters. SFPD did so without first going through a legally re... Read More

Foothills Park is a 1,400-acre public green space located in the city of Palo Alto. For decades, the city has kept the park exclusive to Palo Alto residents under an ordinance that threatens non-residents who enter the park with jail time and a hefty fine unless they enter as guests of a city resident. This ordinance is a vestige of Palo Alto's history of racial discrimination. The ACLU Foundation... Read More

Renting an electric scooter should not give the government the right to trace your every move — where you start, where you end, and all stops, twists, and turns in between. But that's the situation in the City of Los Angeles where electric scooter rental companies are required to provide real-time and historic GPS tracking data to city officials. Beginning in late 2017, communities across Calif... Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a class action lawsuit to compel Tulare County to take immediate precautions to prevent a severe spread of COVID-19 that would expose approximately 1,900 incarcerated people to serious illness or death. Read More

In July 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the ACLU Foundations of Southern California, Northern California, and San Diego and Imperial Counties, along with the law firm of Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP and the National Center for Youth Law, sued the County of Riverside on behalf of students and the non-profit mentoring organization Sigma Beta Xi. The lawsuit argu... Read More

The Unitarian Universalist Church in Fresno has displayed Black Lives Matter Banners on its property since the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017—part of Unitarian Universalism’s national Side With Love campaign. The banners were on display when Unitarian Universalist Church served as a polling place during the June 2018 elections. But prior to the November 2018 elections, Fres... Read More

The ACLU Foundations of California and legal partners filed a federal class action lawsuit seeking the immediate release of detainees at Yuba County Jail and Mesa Verde Detention Facility. The overcrowded and unsanitary conditions at the ICE jails endanger our plaintiffs' lives in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic. Read More