All posts tagged "Aclu"

A former FBI informant who once spied inside Southern California mosques threw a long-running surveillance case into fresh chaos.

According to reporting by Politico, Craig Monteilh balked after U.S. District Judge David Carter demanded he affirm a series of allegations against the FBI and attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union, who once relied on him for information.

Monteilh's disclosures about "Operation Flex," an undercover effort that ran in 2006 and 2007, sparked a 2011 ACLU lawsuit accusing the bureau of illegally recording inside houses of worship and infringing on Muslims' religious practice. According to Politico, Monteilh has walked back much of what he told the ACLU, and a Justice Department lawyer said the government believes he "admitted that he committed perjury" in his original declarations....

The Department of Homeland Security refuted an article in Monday's Los Angeles Times that accused the agency of making sweeping arrests based on "racial profiling."

The article's headline read, "Fears of racing profiling rise as Border Patrol conducts 'roving patrols,' detains U.S. citizens."

It quoted an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California as saying, "We are seeing ICE come into our communities to do indiscriminate mass arrests of immigrants or people who appear to them to be immigrant, largely based on racial profiling."...

Two new court cases will test the limits of the First Amendment as the Supreme Court decides just how far religion can permeate public schools.

At issue are two cases the court recently agreed to hear: in the first, the six Republican appointees and three Democratic appointees will consider whether to permit the country’s first publicly funded religious charter school in Oklahoma; and in the second, the court will hear an appeal from parents in Maryland who want the right to keep their children from reading books having to do with LGBTQ subjects.

The American Civil Liberties Union condemned the court's decision to take the Oklahoma case, saying in a statement: “The law is clear: Charter schools are public schools and must be secular and open to all students." The statement continued, "Oklahoma taxpayers...should not be forced to fund a religious public school that plans to discriminate against students and staff and indoctrinate students into one religion. Converting public schools into Sunday schools would be a dangerous sea change for our democracy.”...

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden is in hot water with the progressive wing of his party over his new, tough-on-migrant border policy.

"I think it's a profound disappointment," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told Raw Story after voting on the House floor Wednesday.

Biden’s new executive order will force asylum seekers to be turned back at the border whenever the seven-day average for migrant encounters — an unscientific measurement that sometimes double or triple counts asylum seekers — tops 2,500 between entry points. ...

A cop's decision to sport a body camera and search a Massachusetts middle school for a book has raised serious concerns among civil liberties experts, a new report shows.

The Berkshire Eagle reported Wednesday on mounting fears after the Great Barrington plainclothes police officer who entered an eighth grade classroom at W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School.

“Police going into schools and searching for books is the sort of thing you hear about in communist China and Russia," Ruth A. Bourquin, senior and managing attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts, told the local news outlet. "What are we doing?”...

A Jewish family that challenged Christian prayer in their local school fled their home town after then-evangelical attorney Mike Johnson warned of an “enemy” that was “silencing the gospel,” according to a new report.

Johnson’s words, spoken when he was a senior attorney with the evangelical legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, appeared in a local Louisiana newspaper published in 2004 and uncovered Friday by the Huffington Post.

“The ultimate goal of the enemy is silencing the gospel,” the Shreveport Times report quotes Johnson as saying. “This is spiritual warfare.”...