July 22nd, 20200WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass the NO BAN Act, a bill that will effectively repeal the Trump Administration's discriminatory ban against Muslims, Africans, refugees and asylees.
The final vote tally was 233-183. U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Dearborn) presided over the debate of...
May 8th, 20190Oklahoma – President Trump pardoned former U.S. Army Lieutenant Michael Behenna on Monday after he served five years in prison for killing an Iraqi soldier in 2008.
Behenna was convicted of unpremeditated murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison for the killing of Ali Mansour Mohamed. Mansour had been suspected for his involvement...
April 19th, 20190I awakened early Wednesday to listen to a voicemail message from Omar Barghouti, a leading member of the Palestinian movement to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) Israel. In the message, Omar told me that he was at Ben Gurion Airport and despite holding a valid U.S. visa and a boarding pass for his flight to Washington, D.C., the...
December 11th, 20180KEY WEST, FLA — The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, Southern Poverty Law Center and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP filed a federal lawsuit Monday Dec. 3 on behalf of a natural-born U.S. citizen who was detained as a result of a Florida sheriff’s collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The ACLU...
November 22nd, 20180DETROIT — A federal judge ordered the release Tuesday of roughly 100 Iraqi detainees held for more than 16 months, saying the federal government cannot indefinitely detain foreign nationals.
U.S. District Court Judge Mark Goldsmith granted two motions filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan in 2017: Release of the...
September 30th, 20180PHOENIX — On Thursday, Sept. 27, a federal court blocked an Arizona law that requires state contractors to certify that they won't boycott Israel, finding that the law likely violates state contractors’ free speech rights under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“A restriction of one’s ability to participate in...
July 30th, 20180U.S. BORDER — Around 1,400 children of some 2,500 separated families at the U.S.-Mexican border have been reunited with them, the U.S. government said in a court filing on Thursday, July 26.
Government lawyers said 711 other children were not yet eligible for reunification with their parents in time for Thursday’s deadline, which...
July 6th, 20180WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal court has blocked the arbitrary detention of asylum seekers fleeing persecution, torture or death in their countries of origin. It also ordered a case-by-case review of whether each asylum seeker in a class-action lawsuit should be released on humanitarian parole. The ruling began from a challenge brought...
June 26th, 20181WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday handed Donald Trump one of the biggest victories of his presidency, upholding his travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries and rejecting the argument that it represented unconstitutional religious discrimination.
The 5-4 ruling, with the court’s five conservatives in...
June 24th, 20180DETROIT – On Monday, a federal judge ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to stop coercing Iraqi detainees into signing a document giving up their right to be in the U.S. and agreeing to be deported.
The government is trying to send back the mostly Christian detainees, but the ACLU said their return to Iraqi...
June 23rd, 20181DEARBORN – As grisly images from “Right of Return” protests along the Gaza-Israeli border become increasingly harder for the American public to ignore, lawmakers across the U.S. are reacting with anti-BDS bills that seek to hamper efforts to boycott the nation’s most significant ally in the Mediterranean – shifting the...
June 20th, 20181NEW YORK —Civil rights lawyers sued the U.S. Commerce Department last week to try to stop plans to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, calling it an unconstitutional attempt to discriminate against immigrants.
The Manhattan federal court lawsuit on behalf of immigrants' rights groups blames racial animus for the recent...
April 10th, 20180LANSING ― School children in Flint will receive screening and in-depth health assessments to measure the effects of lead-tainted drinking water on their ability to learn, under a more than $4 million legal agreement reached on Monday.
The agreement partially settled a federal lawsuit related to a water crisis in Flint that drew...
February 27th, 20180WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday curbed the ability of immigrants held in long-term detention during deportation proceedings to argue for their release in a ruling in sync with President Donald Trump’s get-tough approach toward immigration.
The court’s conservative justices carried the day in the 5-3 decision that...
February 15th, 20180WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump’s travel ban targeting people from six Muslim-majority countries violates the U.S. Constitution by discriminating on the basis of religion, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday in another legal setback for the policy.
The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, on a 9-4...
December 22nd, 20172DETROIT — Six months ago, about 30 heavily-armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers stormed into the home of Briana Moore and her husband, Ahmed Mohammed, a 52-year-old Iraqi American truck driver who'd served time in prison for allegedly stealing a rental car about a decade ago.
"Are you going to kill my dad?" Moore...
September 14th, 20170DEARBORN—The Arab American National Museum (AANM) hosted a town hall on September 8 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Japanese American detainment in internment camps and the 16th anniversary of the September 11 World Trade Center attacks in New York City.
In 1942, President Roosevelt signed executive order 9066, which entailed...
August 29th, 20170The ALCU reported on Monday, Aug. 28 that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently asked the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA), which instructs federal agencies on how to maintain records, to approve its timetable for retaining or destroying records related to its detention operations.
This may seem like a...
