Blog of Rights
Sandhya
Bathija
Sandhya Bathija joined the ACLU communications department in September 2011 and serves the Washington Legislative Office. Previously, she worked in the communications department of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and as a reporter for The National Law Journal. She also practiced law for a small civil rights firm in Detroit, Michigan. She holds a law degree from The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and is proud alum of Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
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04/12/2012
End Racial Profiling Act

ACLU Lens: Laura W. Murphy Speaks Out As a Mother on the Impact of Trayvon Martin's Death 

By Sandhya Bathija, Washington Legislative Office at 12:05pm

The ACLU's Laura W. Murphy shares a personal story about how she has often feared her 22-year-old African-American son will be targeted like Trayvon Martin.

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11/21/2011
H.B. 56

Help From Washington: Members of Congress See Firsthand the Damage of Alabama’s H.B. 56 And Speak Out

By Sandhya Bathija, Washington Legislative Office at 4:21pm

Today, a congressional delegation traveled to Alabama to see first-hand the devastating effects of H.B. 56.

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11/17/2011
Immigration Deportation

ACLU Lens: NY Times Highlights DHS Latest Plan to Deport Criminals

By Sandhya Bathija, Washington Legislative Office at 1:36pm

The New York Times reports today that the Department of Homeland Security will begin a new system to review deportation cases in a way that officials claim will speed up the deportations of convicted criminals while stopping many deportations of immigrants with no criminal record.

DHS has claimed its priority is to deport dangerous, violent criminals who have come into the country illegally. Five months after its original announcement on this, the department will at last begin a nationwide training program for enforcement agents and prosecuting lawyers to achieve these goals and to close deportation cases that fall outside DHS priorities. Currently, about half of immigration detainees have no criminal convictions.

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09/16/2011
Secure Communities

ACLU Lens: Leaked Secure Communities Task Force Report Shows Program's Many Flaws

By Sandhya Bathija, Washington Legislative Office at 2:07pm

A task force report released today on the Department of Homeland Security's Secure Communities reveals the program's many problems — namely that it has led to the deportation of thousands of immigrants with no criminal records and undermines community policing efforts.

Secure Communities (S-Comm) is a federal program created by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Under S-Comm, anytime an individual is arrested and booked into a local jail for any reason, his or her fingerprints are electronically run through ICE's immigration database, allowing ICE to identify noncitizens in local custody and to initiate deportation proceedings against them.

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02/03/2012
Fair Sentencing Act

Threat to Current Sentencing Law Looms: Are We Headed Back to Mandatory Guidelines?

By Sandhya Bathija, Washington Legislative Office at 5:43pm

The debate over sentencing guidelines is about to heat up in Congress, according to a recent report by NPR. In a story that ran on Tuesday’s Morning Edition, Carrie Johnson reports that some GOP members of Congress aren’t happy with the current state of federal sentencing guidelines.

For decades, mandatory sentencing guidelines forced judges to hand down harsh and unfair sentences that did not always fit the offender and unnecessarily flooded our prisons. This included the mandatory sentencing scheme that unequally punished comparable offenses involving crack and powder cocaine at a ratio of 100:1 and resulted in racially biased sentencing.

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