Blog of Rights
Sarah
Mehta

Sarah Mehta joined the ACLU of Michigan staff in September 2011. Previously, she was the Aryeh Neier fellow at Human Rights Watch and the national American Civil Liberties Union, working on the rights of people with disabilities in immigration court and detention. 

 

She is a graduate of Yale Law School and has a dual bachelor’s degree in International Development and South Asian Studies, honors, from Brown University. From 2005-2006 she was a Fulbright Scholar in India, investigating discrimination against Muslims and previously spent a year in Hyderabad, India, studying access to courts. 

 

While a student at Yale, Sarah was a student director of the Prison Litigation clinic and participated in the International Human Rights Clinic, Capital Punishment Clinic and the Criminal Defense project. Sarah was an articles editor of the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal and was director of the Civil Rights Project. Sarah has worked on prisoner rights in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska and Connecticut and specifically on juvenile justice in Mississippi (with the Southern Poverty Law Center) and police brutality in New Orleans. Sarah speaks intermediate French and Hindi/Urdu.

08/30/2012
Contraception

Religion Doesn’t Justify Discrimination: ACLU Files Brief in Third Contraception Rule Challenge

By Brigitte Amiri, ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project & Sarah Lipton-Lubet, ACLU Washington Legislative Office & Michael J. Steinberg, Legal Director, ACLU of Michigan & Sarah Mehta, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Michigan at 12:33pm

Another private company – this one sells lawn and snow removal equipment in Michigan – is challenging the federal rule that requires employers to provide insurance coverage for contraception without a co-pay. As we’ve written before, these cases are meritless and harken back to a time that we should not repeat. For example, in 1966, the Piggie Park restaurant in South Carolina refused to serve African-Americans because integration was against the owners’ religious beliefs. The same argument was used to try to get around equal pay and labor protections. The courts did not allow religion to justify discrimination then, and they should not do so now.  

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10/21/2011
End ICE Abuse

"I Was Scared for My Life": Trapped in Detention With a Mental Disability

By Sarah Mehta, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Michigan at 4:23pm

Thousands of immigrant detainees with mental disabilities are housed in remote detention facilities around the country, far from professional medical services and the contact and care of their families.

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03/29/2011
Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Local Enforcement Tactics Lead to Racial Profiling, Human Rights Abuses

By Sarah Mehta, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Michigan at 9:57am

Yesterday, military veteran and U.S. citizen Robert Cote spoke to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) about his wife, Rita, who was illegally arrested and detained by Florida police and now faces deportation.

In February 2009, Rita Cote helped her sister, who does not speak English, report a domestic violence incident. She stayed with her sister until the police arrived in order to translate. But rather than attending to Cote's sister, who was visibly injured and anxious to report her assault, the police instead asked Cote to show her passport, based on nothing more than her race and Spanish accent. After targeting her on those bases, police found an administrative removal order issued when she was a minor and of which she had no notice.

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02/19/2011
Guantánamo

Still Prosecuting the Little Fish at Gitmo

By Sarah Mehta, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Michigan at 9:01pm

At 5 p.m. on Friday, a jury of military officers sentenced Sudanese detainee Noor Uthman Muhammed to 14 years in prison. Shortly afterward, a military judge announced that under Muhammed's plea bargain agreement, he will serve almost three more years at Guantánamo, on top of his nearly nine years of detention (8 1/2 at Guantánamo). The jury's 14-year sentence is entirely symbolic, as Muhammed will serve the three-year sentence worked out in his plea deal, just like Gitmo detainees Ibrahim al-Qosi and Omar Khadr, who cut plea deals in July and October. (In al-Qosi's case, though the jury sentenced him to 14 years, he is serving only two additional years at Gitmo, and though the jury sentenced Khadr to 40 years, he will return to Canada within a year, where he will serve up to seven more years if he's not paroled earlier.) Under military commission rules, Gitmo detainees cannot get credit for their pretrial detention.

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02/17/2011
Guantánamo

Sentencing an Al-Qaeda Lackey

By Sarah Mehta, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Michigan at 1:19pm

Yesterday opened with the selection of jurors (the process called "voir dire") who will sentence Noor Uthman Muhammed, the Sudanese detainee who accepted a guilty plea Tuesday morning. Noor pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorist networks, on account of his involvement at a training camp in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2000. Reports have suggested that under a sealed plea deal, Muhammed will serve three more years at Guantánamo, in addition to the over eight years he has already spent in U.S. detention.

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02/16/2011

At Guantánamo: Enough Already

By Sarah Mehta, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Michigan at 10:58am

Yesterday morning, I watched Sudanese detainee Noor Uthman Muhammed plead guilty before a military commission in Guantánamo as part of a sealed plea deal capping his sentence at an undisclosed number of years. Noor Uthman Muhammed’s case is the only war crimes prosecution currently before the Gitmo military commissions. He is accused of training recruits at the Khalden terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and providing additional logistical support to the camp’s operations between 1996 and 2002.

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