Immigration

A U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., has denied the American Civil Liberties Union access to documents held by the Department of Homeland Security regarding deaths of immigration detainees.

The court found for the ACLU regarding Homeland Security's attempt to withhold e-mail and records as exempt internal agency memoranda under exemption 5. The court also held, however, that the government had properly withheld or redacted other records under privacy and law enforcement exemptions.

Two government defendants in a civil rights lawsuit yesterday dropped a subpoena for unedited video footage of a reporter’s interview with the plaintiff in the case.

From the The San Diego Union-Tribune:

Three news organizations have appealed a judge's decision barring Vista officials from making public the identities of employers registered under the city's day-laborer law.

The ACLU is suing a city in California to prevent the public release of names of employers registered to hire day laborers.  The longtime civil rights defender wants to keep the names primarily from a local offshoot organization of the anti-illegal-immigration group the Minuteman Project (see below). 

It's no secret that the ACLU and the Minuteman folks don't like each other.  But now their PDA (public display of acrimony) is wounding bystanders... namely, the public and the public's records.