Archive

The ACLU of Northern California releases the third episode of Gold Chains, our podcast about California’s hidden history of slavery. It connects the dots between an early California law that allowed white settlers to enslave Indigenous children and a current U.S. Supreme Court case Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California, Disability Rights Advocates, Legal Aid of Sonoma County, and California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc. filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Sebastopol for enacting an ordinance that prohibits vehicles “designed or altered for human habitation” from parking anywhere within city limits during the day. Read More

An ACLU lawsuit challenges a Sebastopol ordinance designed to drive unhoused people out of town by banning vehicles "used for human habitation" from parking anywhere within city limits during the day. Read More

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 Foundation of Northern California and the law firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati filed a class-action lawsuit to prevent the San Francisco Sheriff's Office from requiring that individuals agree to unconstitutional “four-way” searches and GPS location data-sharing as conditions of pretrial release on electronic monitoring. Read More

For years, San Francisco has claimed that it is taking steps to address the City’s homelessness crisis. But in fact, the City is forcing unhoused people out of sight—destroying their survival belongings and citing and arresting them for sleeping in public when they have no shelter. Read More

On September 27, 2022, the Coalition on Homelessness and seven individual plaintiffs filed suit against the City and County of San Francisco and Mayor London Breed for their efforts to criminalize homelessness through an array of brutal policing practices that violate the constitutional rights of unhoused San Franciscans. Plaintiffs are also seeking a preliminary injunction to stop these practices... Read More

By a margin of 4-7, the San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted to give the SFPD access to privately owned cameras. With the cameras, comes the power to put essentially the entire city under live surveillance indefinitely. Read More

An ACLU lawsuit urges the court to prevent the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office from requiring that individuals agree to unconstitutional “four-way” searches and GPS location data-sharing as conditions of pretrial release on electronic monitoring. Read More

Over the course of four years, the ACLU uncovered documents showing that sheriffs throughout the Central Valley have worked behind the scenes to evade pro-immigrant laws. They have devised underhanded schemes to transfer people from jails to ICE and avoid the public reporting required under state law. Read More