Legal Docket

Seeking to address years-long delays in the processing of citizenship applications, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and other civil rights organizations filed a class-action lawsuit against the federal government for its violation of the Constitution and federal law. Ahmadi v. Chertoff sought to enforce federal laws that require the government to decide a citizenship application within ... Read More

On Dec. 16, 2008, the San Francisco Superior Court struck down a state law requiring that low-income working women must have resided in California for at least six months before becoming eligible to receive prenatal and other medical care services through California's Access for Infants and Mothers (AIM) insurance program. Read More

On September 14, 2009 ACLU Foundation of Northern California and civil rights allies filed a motion to intervene in Associated General Contractors of America v. California Department of Transportation.  The lawsuit, currently pending in U.S. District Court in Sacramento, was brought by the Pacific Legal Foundation and seeks to dismantle Caltrans' Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) p... Read More

A settlement was finalized September 16 between the ACLU Foundation of Northern California and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) in its case involving Kebin Reyes, a U.S. citizen who was six years old when he was illegally detained for ten hours by immigration officials. We argued that Kebin's constitutional rights were violated when he was taken from his home in San Rafael... Read More

The California corrections department is using underground, non-public guidelines, rather than lawful regulations, to decide whether to transfer California prisoners to other states as far away as Mississippi and Tennessee. This means that inmates and their families do not know how the prisons decide whom to transfer. It also leaves open the possibility that prison officials are using arbitrary an... Read More

Federal class action lawsuit filed in 2008 charging that the city of Antioch and its police department are engaged in a concerted campaign of intimidation, harassment, and discrimination against African-Americans who receive federal housing assistance. Read More

Does a school district have the authority to expel students based on an incident involving a school resource officer that occurred off campus and after school? A Contra Costa County Superior Court ruled in May 2008 that the Antioch Unified School District violated the rights of two students when it expelled them from school following an off-campus incident in which police officers pepper-sprayed ... Read More

Two Southern California fair housing organizations sued Roomate.com, an Internet-based roommate matching service, arguing that the website must be held responsible for postings on the site that violate federal fair housing laws. Roommate.com argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from liability for content posted by third parties, gives it complete immu... Read More

The ACLU Foundations of California has sued telecommunications giants AT&T and Verizon to stop them from continuing to provide the National Security Agency (NSA) with the personal phone records of millions of California customers.Since September 11, 2001, the telephone companies have been providing the NSA with customers' records, including phone numbers for incoming and outgoing calls, and ti... Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) successfully defended the First Amendment when they persuaded a federal district court judge in San Francisco to dissolve an order requiring a domain registrar to shut down the domain name Wikileaks.org in a dispute over documents allegedly posted on the site by a former employee of Swiss Bank Julius Baer. Read More

In March 2007, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a lawsuit in Napa Superior Court on behalf of five families, seeking judicial relief from an unconstitutionally vague, overbroad, and restrictive dress code enforced by Redwood Middle School and the Napa Valley USD. Read More

The District Attorney of Yolo County in late December 2004 sought a permanent injunction against the Broderick Boys “gang,” attempting to place on permanent probation, without any trial or due process, hundreds of residents of a predominantly Latino neighborhood in West Sacramento. In July 2005, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a motion to set aside the permanent injunction for lac... Read More