Litigation Highlights

Our teams provide hundreds of new clients each year with free direct legal representation in cases ranging from fighting wage theft and evictions to protecting immigrant community members from detention and deportation. Through impact litigation, we’re also driving systemic change at the local, state, and national levels, from expanding voting rights and workers’ rights to protecting affordable housing and challenging illegal and unjust policies that surveil, detain, and criminalize communities. Learn more on our Litigation and Direct Services page.

In the waning days of the Trump administration, the Department of Justice pushed through a new rule that eliminated essential protections for immigrants in deportation proceedings. The rule made it nearly impossible for people to reopen old deportation orders, even if their rights were violated during their initial proceedings. It also created often insurmountable barriers to legal representation such as unreasonable briefing deadlines. In January 2021, we sued on behalf of our clients Centro Legal de la Raza, Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Tahirih Justice Center, and RAICES to block the rule, which the Biden administration defended.

In March 2021, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted a preliminary injunction against this draconian rule, allowing us and our client organizations to continue providing critical support to immigrants. The litigation is stayed while the Biden administration considers whether to rescind the rule.

Our co-counsel are Sidley Austin LLP and Lakin & Wille LLP.

In 2017, we began learning from our formerly incarcerated clients that contractors from the notorious private prison corporation G4S were arresting people as they were released from California prisons and delivering them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)--in blatant violation of immigration laws. Gabriela Solano, a domestic violence survivor granted a commutation and parole due to her demonstrated rehabilitation, is one such impacted client who faced an imminent threat of being unlawfully arrested by a G4S contractor.

After Governor Newsom vetoed legislation AB 1282 that would have stopped the practice, we filed a class action lawsuit against ICE in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, defeated a motion to dismiss, and reached a settlement with ICE in 2022.

Our co-counsel are the ACLU of Northern California and Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP.

California passed the TRUTH Act and the CA Values Act (SB 54) to limit state and local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration enforcement and transferring Californians to federal immigration custody. Nevertheless, in March 2019, Daly City police pulled over Jose Armando Escobar-Lopez for a purported traffic violation as he and his now spouse were driving home from a baptism. Police interrogated him about his immigration status, performed a database search, and concluded he had an administrative immigration warrant that was not signed by a judge. They arrested him, detained him at a police station, and transferred him to ICE custody. Transferred hundreds of miles from his community, he was detained at an ICE facility, where he remained for almost three months.

We sued Daly City in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California for violating Mr. Escobar-Lopez's rights under the U.S. Constitution and California statutes, including the TRUTH and Values Acts. We settled the case, obtaining significant monetary relief for him and changes to Daly City's policies that ended their collaboration with ICE. Mr. Escobar-Lopez's case is an example of why California must pass the VISION Act (AB 937, Carrillo), a bill in the CA legislature that would establish a bright line separating state and local law enforcement from federal immigration enforcement.

Our co-counsel was Latham & Watkins.

At the end of March 2021, Georgia passed Senate Bill 202 (“SB 202”), making a raft of election law changes that drastically reduce access to voting for all Georgians. SB 202 intentionally discriminates against and disproportionately impacts AAPI voters and other voters of color by restricting the use of absentee ballot and early voting, drop boxes, and weekend voting, among a range of other unfair and discriminatory restrictions. The law is among the most egregious of state voter suppression bills that have been proposed and passed across the nation since 2020. In April 2021, we filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on behalf of our Atlanta affiliate and several individual voter plaintiffs seeking remedy for violations of the First, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and 42 U.S.C. §1983. The case, filed originally as Asian Americans Advancing Justice et al. v. Raffenserger et al., was consolidated in January 2022 with five other similar cases, including one filed by the U.S. Department of Justice. It will proceed as In Re Georgia Senate Bill 202.

Our co-counsel are Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta; Asian Americans Advancing Justice-AAJC; and Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP.

In a freedom of association case, we represented anonymous presenters at a 2018 conference held at UCLA on Palestinian human rights who intervened in a public records case that sought to uncover their identities. The person who demanded the records argued that even though it was a private conference that did not receive public funds, he was entitled to know their identities because the conference was held on the UCLA campus. At its core, the case threatened to violate the First Amendment rights of student activists for Palestinians’ rights by chilling their speech, subjecting them to harassment, and interfering with their professional lives. The demand for the records was based on the bigoted premise that the activists may have ties to terrorism simply because of their advocacy for Palestinian human rights, and that it was in the public interest for their names to be disclosed. In the first decision of its kind, the California Superior Court held that releasing our clients’ names “would violate their rights to freedom of association, anonymous speech, and privacy.”

Our co-counsel were Palestine Legal and the Law Office of Matthew Strugar.