TalkLeft Talks Habeas...

NEW YORK – Ahead of the one-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s bombing campaign of private boats in international waters, the American Civil Liberties Union is demanding immediate action from both Congress and the White House. On Sept. 2, 2025, the United States struck a small boat in the Caribbean Sea that had 11 people on board. Nine were killed in the first strike. Two survived, clinging to the wreckage for around 45 minutes before a second “double tap” strike killed them. In the year since the Trump administration launched its campaign, the United States has conducted at least 68 strikes and killed at least 227 civilians, including the family members of two ACLU clients. This tragic milestone comes right after U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced plans to expand lethal military operations throughout Latin America. “For a year now, the Trump administration has engaged in a terrifying, lawless killing campaign at sea and has yet to provide the public with anything beyond the most threadbare justifications,” said Jeff Stein, staff attorney with ACLU’s National Security Project. “These strikes have devastated countless families, terrified communities, and, by the administration’s own admission, failed to achieve their purported goal of stopping drugs from entering into the United States. We urge leaders in both Congress and the executive branch to put an immediate end to these strikes before anyone else is killed.” The Trump administration has claimed, without proof, that these military strikes are targeting unnamed drug cartels. But neither domestic nor international law authorizes the use of military force against such criminal organizations. The strikes are thus premediated killings of civilians outside of armed conflict, constituting murders under domestic law and extrajudicial killings under international human rights law. Nonetheless, a secret Trump administration legal memorandum reportedly blesses the strikes as lawful and purports to immunize personnel who authorized and carried out the strikes from future criminal prosecution. Along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (“CCR”) and the New York Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU is suing for the immediate release of this memorandum. While many of the strikes’ victims remain unknown, according to investigative journalists and Senator Tim Kaine (who has reviewed classified information about the strikes), the strikes have killed ordinary people with no connection to drug trafficking. That includes Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, two Trinidadian men who worked as fishermen and farmhands in Venezuela and were killed in an October 14, 2025, strike while returning home to see their loved ones. The ACLU, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and CCR represent Chad and Rishi’s family members in a lawsuit against the United States government seeking compensation for their wrongful deaths. The ACLU has also called on international human rights bodies, such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, to investigate the strikes and hold the perpetrators accountable. “The international community must do everything in its power to hold the Trump administration responsible for these extrajudicial killings that are blatant violations of international law,” said Jamil Dakwar, director of ACLU’s Human Rights Program. “No other country should provide any assistance that could contribute to these unlawful U.S. government killings. We call for independent international investigation into this lawless campaign.”

NEW YORK – Amid nationwide outcry against its automatic license plate readers, Flock Safety announced today that it will reduce its standard data retention policy and allegedly provide more control over local data searches, among other changes. However, according to American Civil Liberties Union’s new analysis, many of the proposed changes seem to be a thinly veiled PR attempt to counter communities’ genuine privacy concerns with its mass surveillance system with largely hollow security promises, rather than an earnest effort to address them. While the ACLU acknowledges one potentially positive development, most of the proposed changes stand little chance of making a positive difference for civil liberties. “Transforming an exceptionally dangerous mass surveillance system into one that is fully protective of civil rights and civil liberties is a difficult, if not impossible task. That is even more the case with a company like Flock, whose nearly $1 billion in venture capitalist funding has locked it into an operational model that seeks to trade our privacy for massive profits,” said Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at ACLU. “Given that Flock’s latest announcement still appears more focused on addressing a PR problem than the significant privacy and other harms its products create, we will continue to analyze the company’s proposals fairly and honestly. We just won’t be holding our breath.” Flock operates more than 120,000 automatic license plate readers in at least 6,000 cities across the country, raising serious concerns around mass surveillance, data privacy, and how police and the government can use this data to go after immigrants, protestors, and others. Just this week, the Institute for Justice published a database with more than 100 incidents of ALPR abuse, including romantic stalking, wrongful stops and detentions, non-law enforcement use, and other types of misconduct. One of the changes announced is that Flock will decrease its standard data retention option to one week from 30 days. This seems positive at first blush, but as the ACLU’s breakdown explains, the devil will be in the details. For example, an exception to the data retention policy is something called “Evidence Mode, which is “when a search is tied to a case number, that data is preserved instead of aging out after 7 days.” As the ACLU notes, “If ‘Evidence Mode’ only retains hit result data that police determine may be evidence in an active investigation of a specific case, then the change may be a positive one. But if Evidence Mode triggers the retention of any ALPR data that is searched, then the new mode could indefinitely retain all the ALPR data Flock collects and shares nationally.” Another “change” the company is implementing is that local police will be able to decide what types of offenses other Flock customers can search their data for. The ACLU contends that this is not new. Flock has attempted this before, and the security measure failed because police were easily able to circumvent the system’s requirement that they input the purpose of their search. Finally, Flock announced that in response to the reports of police abuse, they will now require reasons for a search, and that they plan to universally roll out its audit assistance tool to detect police misuse. Flock’s announcement fails to note how easily users have circumvented “search reason” security measures in the past or how its new policy improves the quality of the feature. And while providing “Audit Assistance” to all departments makes sense, the ACLU notes that there is no evidence that the tool works consistently to address what the Washington Post observed is a growing pattern of police officers turning Flock into a personal stalking tool. To determine the efficacy of this tool, Flock needs to have it analyzed by an independent evaluator. Until then, the ACLU says, “we don’t know if the tool is a real security measure or just window dressing.” Dozens of communities across the country have successfully convinced their leaders to cancel Flock contracts, suspend their ALPR programs, or deactivate the cameras, with many more cities considering new legislation to rein in this mass warrantless surveillance tech. In June, the ACLU launched its “Get the Flock Out” campaign to bring together the litigation, advocacy, and legislative efforts of ACLU affiliates in each state, show how communities across the country are fighting back against the spread of Flock and other license plate readers, and lay out how lawmakers at the local, state, and federal level can best protect our rights.

Hundreds of thousands of Washington residents oppose the Trump administration’s continued deployment of the National Guard. The only way to make sure this never happens again is to make D.C. a state