Blog of Rights
Jennie
Pasquarella
03/22/2013
Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Mother Faces Deportation for Having Barking Dogs

By Jennie Pasquarella, ACLU of Southern California & Axel Caballero, Cuéntame at 2:20pm

Where would you expect to find half-a-dozen patrol cars on New Year's Eve? In Bakersfield, California, ranked in the highest ten percent of the most violent cities in America, you'd hope they'd be responding to incidents of violence and preventing murder, rape, and other violent crime. At the very least, you'd expect them to be patrolling for drunk drivers.

Not so. At least not when it comes to prioritizing such matters as "barking dogs." On December 31, 2012, the Kern County Sheriff's Department deployed six police cars and numerous officers at the behest of a resident who called for help from, well, the sounds of two small barking dogs. Her neighbor, Ruth Montaño, a Latina farm-worker, and her three American children owned the dogs.

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12/06/2012
Immigration Detention

California Attorney General: Immigration Detainers are Voluntary

By Jennie Pasquarella, ACLU of Southern California & Julia Harumi Mass, ACLU of Northern California at 2:14pm

 

For the first time, California Attorney General Kamala Harris publicly weighed in on the hotly-contested federal immigration program, Secure Communities (S-Comm).

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11/29/2011
Swept Up By S-Comm

Detain First, Investigate Later: How U.S. Citizens Are Unlawfully Detained Under S-Comm

By Jennie Pasquarella, ACLU of Southern California at 3:32pm

Detain first, investigate later — that is Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s mantra when it comes to its Secure Communities program.

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09/01/2010

ACLU Sues Federal Contractor for Exploiting Immigrant Workforce

By Jennie Pasquarella, ACLU of Southern California at 1:41pm

Terra Universal, Inc., is a multimillion dollar U.S. government contractor built on the backs of an immigrant workforce. It contracts with the U.S. Army, Navy and NASA, but for years, its owner, George Sadaghiani, has exploited and discriminated against its workers.

Terra Universal regularly makes employees at its plant in Fullerton, California, work as many as 14 hours a day, but refuses to pay overtime. The company pays workers whom its executives believe to be undocumented far less than everyone else, and denies them benefits. Mr. Sadaghiani verbally abuses workers and flaunts basic health and safety codes, all the while browbeating the employees into believing that if they don't have papers, they don't have basic workplace rights.

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08/18/2010

ACLU of Southern California Demands Truth About Proxy Detention of Naji Hamdan

By Jennie Pasquarella, ACLU of Southern California at 1:38pm

Since shortly after Naji Hamdan, an American citizen, was arrested and held incommunicado in the United Arab Emirates in 2008, the ACLU of Southern California has been working to obtain the truth about why the U.A.E. held, tortured, and charged Mr. Hamdan as part of the U.S.'s controversial "proxy detention" program.

Today, the ACLU of Southern California filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Los Angeles seeking to require U.S. national security agencies to release this information.

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06/22/2010

Unequal Access to Citizenship for Muslims

By Jennie Pasquarella, ACLU of Southern California at 2:09pm

For many immigrants in this country, the chance to take the oath of allegiance to the United States and become sworn in as a U.S. citizen is a moment they dream about and work years to achieve. But for Tarek Hamdi and many other Muslim immigrants around the country, the dream is tarnished by racial and religious discrimination in the naturalization process.

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10/31/2008

Keeping Americans Out of America

By Jennie Pasquarella, ACLU of Southern California at 12:50pm

Imagine you are a native-born U.S. citizen and, like many spring break-ers before you, you take a short trip to Mexico. Upon returning home, you cross the border by land and present your birth certificate showing that you were born in the United States. You don't have any photo identification, and you don't know that they've changed the rules to require it. Now, imagine that at the border, the examining agents ask you some questions unrelated to your citizenship, and without corroborating your birth certificate or your identity, conclude that you are not a U.S. citizen. They return you to Mexico, denying you any opportunity to contest their unfounded conclusion or prove your citizenship.

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