The Whole World Is Watching: Your Right to Videotape Police

Sanctions would endanger the investigation of war crimes across the globe and prove a grave blow to human rights.

WASHINGTON – Four years after a district court ruled that a Trump-era policy blocking military service members’ expedited path to citizenship was unlawful, the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of the District of Columbia are in court urging the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to uphold this ruling. “The promise of expedited citizenship Congress has made to non-citizen service members is a moral imperative embedded in our history, values, and laws," said Scarlet Kim, senior staff attorney at ACLU. “If you are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for America, you are – and should be – entitled to become American citizens.” For over a century, Congress has granted non-citizens serving during armed conflict eligibility to naturalize at the start of their service, so that they can deploy overseas as United States citizens. A 2017 Trump administration policy introduced new time-in-service requirements that effectively deprived service members of the opportunity to naturalize before potential assignment overseas. In April 2020, the ACLU filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of eight non-citizens serving in the U.S. military who represent a class of thousands in uniform. A federal district court struck down this policy in August 2020 and the first Trump administration appealed. The Biden administration rescinded the policy but maintained the Trump-era appeal while it allegedly developed a new policy. However, the Biden policy never materialized, and, now, the Department of Defense under President Trump is once again back in court seeking to overturn the victory the ACLU’s clients won four years ago. The ACLU will argue that the case is moot and should be dismissed because the Trump policy was rescinded and there is no current policy. It will also argue that if the court determines the case is not moot, it should affirm its clients’ victory in the district court. “Since World War I, the United States has naturalized non-citizen soldiers before they deploy, so that they serve — and perhaps die — as citizens of the nation they serve,” said Arthur Spitzer, senior counsel at the ACLU of the District of Columbia. “Congress has recognized for a century that this is proper, and the Pentagon has no right to change it.”

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — In a long-awaited ruling in United States v. Hasbajrami, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York last night held that warrantless queries — or searches — conducted under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act violated the Fourth Amendment. The ruling is the first of its kind, and it follows years of public revelations about how Section 702 has been used by the government to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans, including protesters, members of Congress, and journalists. The court's opinion addresses numerous queries the FBI conducted of the defendant, Mr. Agron Hasbajrami, during an investigation years ago. The government initially hid its use of Section 702 in Mr. Hasbajrami's case and others, reversing course only after the Department of Justice's policy of wrongly concealing Section 702 surveillance in criminal cases came to light. “This is a major constitutional ruling on one of the most abused provisions of FISA,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project. “As the court recognized, the FBI's rampant digital searches of Americans are an immense invasion of privacy, and trigger the bedrock protections of the Fourth Amendment. Section 702 is long overdue for reform by Congress, and this opinion shows why.” The decision follows a groundbreaking 2019 ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which recognized that Section 702 queries of people in the United States are searches that trigger separate Fourth Amendment scrutiny. The court of appeals sent the case back to the lower court for further constitutional analysis, culminating in yesterday’s ruling. While the new opinion holds that the FBI’s Section 702 queries violated the Fourth Amendment, the court ultimately denied the defendant's motion to suppress the resulting evidence on separate grounds. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief in support of Mr. Hasbajrami in the Second Circuit.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington ruled today that the federal government’s Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP) is “arbitrary and capricious,” and violates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). CARRP is a discriminatory policy that instructs immigration officers to label some people applying for immigration benefits – like green cards or citizenship – as “national security concerns.” According to CARRP, someone can be branded as a “national security concern” based on innocuous characteristics, like speaking another language or having an advanced technical degree. Once USCIS decides a person is a “national security concern,” it bends over backwards to find a way to reject their application for benefits. People in CARRP have to endure extended processing delays and much higher denial rates, which can tear apart their personal and professional lives. “This decision makes clear that CARRP was a horribly flawed idea from the beginning,” said Charlie Hogle, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “It needlessly harms aspiring Americans, many of whom have homes, families, and careers here.” In its decision, the court recognized that, despite years of litigation, the federal government has never pointed to any evidence explaining its decision to create CARRP. The court also found that, in designing CARRP, the federal government failed to consider whether it would be able to decide applications in CARRP within a reasonable amount of time, as the law requires. These failures make CARRP unlawful. “Today’s order is a huge step forward in vindicating the rights of thousands of people with lawful status who are subjected to arbitrary and unlawful delays that wreak havoc on their lives,” said Matt Adams, legal director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. “These delays —often for years—cause people to lose jobs and homes.” The plaintiffs challenging CARRP also argued that the policy violates their constitutional rights to due process and equal protection. The court did not agree with those arguments, even as it concluded that CARRP violates the APA. The plaintiffs in Wagafe v. USCIS are represented by the ACLU, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, Perkins Coie LLP, the Law Offices of Stacy Tolchin, and the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program.