Archive

Encounters with the law can be stressful or scary. People have various experiences with law enforcement, some of which are not always fair or legal. This guide provides you practical information that could help you avoid more trouble or potentially harmful situations. The underlined words below are “magic words” that you can repeat over and over to show you know the law. Memorize them. Know your r... Read More

A federal court today blocked the federal government’s attempt to strip Venezuelans of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) while the case moves forward. Read More

California's Native American students learn and grow amid a fundamental contradiction: while their families, cultures, and Tribes embrace education as central to their ways of life, California's school systems too often fail to provide them with an equitable and inclusive education. Read More

"Stopping the Flood Waters: A Call to Transform California's Schools in Support of Native American Students" documents how California schools consistently fail to provide Native American students with an equitable and inclusive education. Here, two students share their educational experiences in their own words. Read More

In the first hearing in NTPSA v. Noem, a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's decision to terminate humanitarian protections for more than one million Haitian and Venezuelan TPS holders, plaintiffs asked the court to put on hold DHS Secretary Noem's plan to revoke work authorization and legal status in early April for 350,000 Venezuelans while the case proceeds. Read More

When police seek access to information about people exercising their First Amendment rights, they must meet a much higher legal standard to justify that intrusion. That’s what a court ruled in a case where the UC Santa Barbara Police Department attempted to force Instagram to surrender detailed records associated with two activist Instagram accounts. Read More

Do NOT open your door. ICE can’t come into your home unless they have a signed search warrant or you let them in. If officers are at your door, ask them to pass the warrant under the door before you open it. An arrest warrant (or an administrative warrant of removal) is not enough to come inside you home. If ICE officers want to enter your home, they must have a valid judicial search warrant that ... Read More

Long before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state must provide a lawyer to poor people charged with crimes, many counties in California already did so. Yet today, after years of neglect by the state, California is in the midst of a decades-long public defense crisis. Read More

Read More

A San Francisco judge has ruled that the California Department of Justice can no longer indefinitely store the DNA of people who were never convicted of a crime. Read More