Tag: aclu

‘Louisiana Lockup’ Detention Center Is Punishing Immigrants for the Same Crime Twice, New Lawsuit Says

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed suit on Monday, accusing Louisiana’s new immigration detention center, “Louisiana Lockup,” and the Trump administration of indefinitely locking up immigrant detainees in the facility and punishing immigrants for the same crime twice, in violation of the Double Jeopardy Clause.

The Louisiana facility opened on September 3, using the blueprint forged by Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz. After Republican Gov. Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency in July to expedite repairs to a section of the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana—a maximum-security prison notorious for violent and inhumane conditions—the state partnered with the Department of Homeland Security to add 416 immigrant detainee beds. 

“This facility is designed to hold the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens,” and is meant “to consolidate the most violent offenders into a single deportation and holding facility,” Landry said during a press conference on opening day. “Angola is the largest maximum-security prison in the country,” he continued, “with 18,000 acres bordered by the Mississippi River, swamps filled with alligators, and forests filled with bears.”

“If you don’t think that they belong somewhere like this,” Landry said, referring to the incoming immigrant detainees, “you got a problem.” 

But in the case of Oscar Amaya, a 34-year-old man who is currently detained at “Louisiana Lockup,” there may very well be a problem. The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, argues that Amaya’s continued detention violates the Double Jeopardy Clause and is designed to punish him—again—for a prior conviction. 

Although immigration detention is a civil penalty, double jeopardy applies if the civil sanctions are applied punitively. As the complaint, reviewed by Reason, points out, the punitive nature of imprisonment in a place like Angola is no secret. Rather, both Landry and Trump administration officials seem to relish in the facility’s violent past. “This is not just a typical [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] ICE detention facility that you will see elsewhere in the country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem proclaimed during the facility’s opening. “This is a facility that’s notorious.…Angola Prison is legendary.”

Amaya fled Honduran gang life in 2005 and worked in the United States “without incident” until 2016, according to the complaint. That year, he was arrested and later “convicted of attempted aggravated assault, possession of a weapon (knife) for unlawful purpose, and unlawful possession of a weapon (knife).” Amaya was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, but was released after two years with good time credits. 

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ACLU Sues ICE to Release Records of Detainment Facilities

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), seeking to compel the agency to disclose records related to specific operations, according to the complaint filed on Oct. 1.

The lawsuit, filed jointly by the ACLU and its Virginia and North Carolina affiliates in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, concerns the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

According to the lawsuit, ICE issued a request for information (RFI) on May 28, seeking information on available detention facilities capable of housing single adult populations to support the agency’s Washington field office.

An RFI is issued to gather information regarding services or products from suppliers. In this case, ICE wanted information on detection facilities. While ICE owns five detention facilities, it relies on private prison companies and other facilities to detain a majority of people in its custody, the lawsuit states.

On Aug. 8, plaintiffs submitted a FOIA request to ICE, asking for records of responses to the agency’s RFI.

“[The FOIA] was enacted to facilitate public access to government documents,” the lawsuit reads.

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Army surveillance balloons spotted over Tucson raise privacy concerns from advocates

The U.S. Army and a private company are flying high-altitude surveillance balloons over the Tucson area, raising concerns among privacy advocates. 

Multiple high-altitude balloons have been spotted over the Tucson and Sierra Vista area for more than a week, with one balloon in particular staying over the area longer than any of the others. That balloon, with the registration number N257TH, has made headlines in the past. 

The balloon is owned by South Dakota aerospace company Aerostar, and in 2023 was mistaken for a Chinese spy balloon. The balloon is actually part of Aerostar’s “Thunderhead” balloon system, which has been doing multiple tests with the military and other contractors across the nation and around the globe. 

“It is a technology that should not and constitutionally cannot be applied to the American people,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Arizona Mirror. “Even testing for eventual overseas use in legitimate combat theaters raises a lot of questions about what kind of data is being collected.”

Aerostar would not answer specific questions about what type of testing was being done. The company referred additional questions to the U.S. Department of Defense and the Army, neither of which responded to multiple requests for comment. 

Aerostar confirmed that the flights were not connected to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol or Department of Homeland Security programs, “however high-altitude balloons would be ideal for that type of mission,” Aerostar Culture and Communications Director Anastasia Quanbeck said in an email to the Mirror. 

“By leveraging directional wind patterns at high altitudes, Aerostar’s Thunderhead Balloon Systems offer groundbreaking capabilities for navigation and persistence over areas of interest,” she said. “Aerostar Thunderhead Balloon Systems are capable of supporting intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, as well as extending communications across wide distances, environmental monitoring, earth observation, and scientific research.” 

Quanbeck said she was not able to discuss the work the company does with the DOD or the Army. 

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Trump Administration Must Give Some Venezuelans 21 Days Notice Before Deportations: Judge

The Trump administration must provide Venezuelans whom officials arrest for alleged links to the Tren de Aragua gang three weeks’ notice before removing them from the country, a federal judge ruled on April 22.

A temporary restraining order from U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney applies to all noncitizens in Colorado who were, are, or will be subject to President Donald Trump’s March proclamation declaring an invasion of the United States by the gang and directing the deportation of its members.

Government officials must under the order provide 21 days’ notice to the noncitizens advising them that the government intends to deport them, that they can hire an attorney, and that they have a right to seek judicial review.

The notice “must be written in a language the individual understands,” Sweeney wrote.

The judge also required the government not to remove any of the affected noncitizens from Colorado, until at least May 6. The restraining order may be extended by then, or turned into a preliminary injunction—a longer-term form of relief.

Sweeney sided with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is representing two Venezuelan nationals who were apprehended under Trump’s proclamation and said they feared being deported.

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The Courts Are The Scofflaws Behind Our Current Constitutional Crisis

“Both the Executive and the Judiciary have an obligation to follow the law.” 

Those thirteen words, penned by Justice Samuel Alito on Holy Saturday, represent the first admission by the judiciary that courts too can wrongly flout the law. 

Justice Alito’s stark acknowledgement concluded his bullet-point evisceration of the Supreme Court’s “unprecedented” command that President Trump not remove a “putative class of detainees” under the Alien Enemies Act. The Supreme Court had entered that order shortly after midnight after the American Civil Liberties Union (“ACLU”) filed an emergency application asking alternatively for an emergency injunction, an immediate administrative injunction, a writ of mandamus, or a stay of removal, to prevent the Trump Administration from removing Venezuelans to El Salvador pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act.

The ACLU’s scattershot request for relief from the Supreme Court came a mere two days after they sued the Trump Administration in a federal court in Texas — and before that court or the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had an opportunity to rule on the request for an injunction barring the removal of any more aliens to El Salvador. 

The ACLU filed the habeas corpus complaint on Wednesday in the Northern District of Texas, on behalf of two plaintiffs, identified merely as A.A.R.P. and W.M.M., but the ACLU also sought certification of a class defined as “[a]ll noncitizens in custody in the Northern District of Texas who were, are, or will be subject to the March 2025 Presidential Proclamation entitled ‘Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren De Aragua’ and/or its implementation.”

Simultaneously, the ACLU filed a motion for a Temporary Restraining Order to prevent the Trump Administration from removing any aliens under the presidential proclamation Trump signed on March 14, 2024. That proclamation provided that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA [Tren de Aragua], are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”

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No Other Land Won an Oscar. Miami Beach’s Mayor Is Trying To Evict a Movie Theater for Screening It

The mayor of Miami Beach, Florida, is trying to terminate the lease of a movie theater for screening No Other Land, an Oscar-winning documentary about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The Miami Herald reported that Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner introduced a resolution to terminate the lease of O Cinema, an independent film theater that rents space from the city, and discontinue more than $60,000 in promised grant funding. The legislation comes after Meiner tried to pressure the theater to cancel the screening.

Florida civil rights groups and First Amendment experts say such government retaliation against the theater for the content of the films it chooses to screen would be unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

“Simply put, the First Amendment does not allow the government to discriminate based on viewpoint or to retaliate against anyone for their speech,” says Daniel Tilley, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida. “Pulling funding from an independent, community-based cinema under these circumstances is patently unconstitutional. The government does not get to pick and choose which viewpoints the public is allowed to hear, however controversial some might find them.”

The Miami Beach mayor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

However, in a newsletter to Miami Beach residents earlier this week, Meiner wrote: “I am a staunch believer in free speech. But normalizing hate and then disseminating antisemitism in a facility owned by the taxpayers of Miami Beach, after O Cinema conceded the ‘concerns of antisemitic rhetoric,’ is unjust to the values of our city and residents and should not be tolerated.”

On March 5, Meiner sent O Cinema a letter on official city letterhead expressing outrage at the cinema’s decision to screen the film, which documents the destruction of Palestinian homes in the West Bank.

“Here in Miami Beach, our City has adopted a strong policy of support for the State of Israel in its struggle to defend itself and its residents against attacks by the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah,” the letter read. “Airing performances of the one-sided, inaccurate film ‘No Other Land’ at a movie theater facility owned by the City and operated by O Cinema is disappointing.”

This is flagrant government jawboning—an attempt to use the mayor’s bully pulpit and the implicit threat of government action to cow the theater into self-censorship.

O Cinema initially complied.

“Due to the concerns of antisemitic rhetoric, we have decided to withdraw the film from our programming,” Vivian Marthell, CEO of O Cinema, wrote to Meiner the following day. “This film has exposed a rift which makes us unable to do the thing we’ve always sought out to do which is to foster thoughtful conversations about cinematic works.”

However, the theater then reversed course and told the Miami Herald it would continue the screenings after all.

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Status Panic on the Campus

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is “fighting back against efforts to intimidate professors into silence,” which—for many of us whose memories of college lecture halls are not uniformly pleasant—is yet another ACLU cause we might not support. The issues here, however, are of more momentous social and political consequence than our initial reaction might suggest.

The ACLU’s efforts—they’re raising funds to support them—are a response to lawsuits brought against students and faculty at Columbia University and elsewhere for their opposition to the war in Gaza. 

The issues are complicated, but the ACLU says it is fighting against attempts to “weaponize our legal system to punish and silence constitutionally protected speech.” Such lawsuits “have become a common tool for intimidating and silencing criticism—including from whistleblowers, journalists and political protestors… not necessarily to win in court, but to entangle people in expensive litigation, using the prospect of mounting legal fees and a potentially ruinous financial penalty to chill speech. In other words, to bully people into silence.” 

The plaintiffs in the Columbia case say statements by faculty supporting student protestors “somehow injured them by causing Columbia University to move classes online, restrict campus access, and cancel commencement.” Three defendants in the case are Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman—members of the notorious Capitol Hill “Squad”—which might be about all most conservatives will want to know before making up their minds.

Personally, I have no dog in this fight. Both sides—all sides—seem intent on dragging their opponents into court, a strategy that seems unlikely to improve matters. This conclusion that the atmosphere on campuses will only get more poisonous, tentative as it is, was reinforced the other day in a casual conversation with a college professor friend at a public university more than 300 miles from Columbia. 

This professor and I have a mutual friend who was hoping to land a job at the university, and I asked what he might do to help make that happen. 

“I have no influence here,” the professor said. “I’m just a content provider.”

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Judge Forces Indiana to Pay for Sex Change Operation for Convicted Trans-Identifying Baby Killer

In a landmark ruling, a federal judge has ordered the state of Indiana to provide gender transition surgery for a trans-identifying inmate convicted of murdering an infant. 

The decision, handed down by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Young, deems the denial of such surgery as “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The Post Millennial (TPM) reported that Autumn Cordellioné, born Jonathan C. Richardson, is currently serving a 55-year sentence for the 2001 murder of an 11-month-old girl. 

The inmate, who began identifying as transgender while incarcerated, will now receive state-funded gender reassignment surgery following a successful lawsuit backed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

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PLANNING THE STEAL: ACLU Sues Pennyslvania to Force Counties to Count Fraudulent Mail-In Ballots

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sued the state of Pennsylvania in an effort to try and force counties to count votes with errors that would otherwise be invalidated.

PHL17 reports that the lawsuit is seeking to challenge a provision in the law that states that voters must write the correct date on the envelope of their mail-in ballot.

According to ACLU attorney Steve Loney, ensuring the correct date is written on the ballot “means nothing” and should be discounted.

“When something buts up against the Constitution, the Constitution wins,” said ACLU attorney Steve Loney. “So here we have a requirement that people have to sign and date. And include a handwritten date that means nothing.”

“Right, everybody agrees that we’re talking about tens of thousands of ballots that were received on time. They complied with every other step in the process. And this one step means nothing.”

Around 8,000 mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania from the 2022 midterm elections were rejected for errors with dates and signatures.

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Trans-Identified Male Rapist Housed In Women’s Prison Files Lawsuit Demanding To Be Released Into Women’s General Population

A trans-identified male inmate serving three life sentences for crimes against women has filed a discrimination lawsuit in an attempt to be transferred into the general population among female prisoners. Thomas Preston Lamb, also known as Michelle Renee Lamb, is currently detained in a women’s facility in Topeka, Kansas, but has been kept separate from the female inmates — an arrangement Lamb deems unacceptable.

Lamb, 82, alleges he is being discriminated against by the staff of Topeka Correctional Facility and the Kansas Department of Corrections on the grounds that he is being held in restricted housing instead of being allowed to frequently interact with incarcerated women.

Lamb first filed his legal claim against Governor Laura Kelly, Topeka Correctional Facility, and the Kansas Department of Corrections last November, and a ruling is expected to be reached by early May.

Authorities at Topeka Correctional Facility (TCF) made the decision to separate Lamb from the female prison population due to both his history as a sex offender and his conduct while in prison. Lamb, who was quietly transferred into the female prison estate in January of 2023, has repeatedly ignored no-contact orders and has been sexually harassing female correctional officers. On at least one occasion, he was charged with lewd conduct with a female inmate.

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