Courage comes in many different forms. For Esmeralda a transgender asylum seeker from Mexico who faced horrific circumstances in immigration detention, it came in the form of seeking justice. Kept in a segregated cell with other transgender detainees, Esmeralda never realized that her experience in detention would match the trauma of discrimination she had faced back home. But her story is also one of hope for change.

November 7th 2009 marked one year from the day that Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorian immigrant, was killed in the Long Island suburb of Patchogue. But rather than act as a stand-alone instance, the act of violence put a national spotlight on race relations and has emerged as one among dozens of cases of violence against Latinos in Suffolk County over the past ten years.

In August 2008, the ACLU of Southern California released an analysis, prepared by economist and Yale University Professor Ian Ayres, of the data collected through the federal consent decree over the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Prof.

On September 5, 2008, the ACLU of Northern California filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of three individual plaintiffs and the Committee for Immigrant Rights of Sonoma County, a grassroots community organization.

In May 2007, two African American students at Deer Valley High School were expelled from school for running away from police officers who tried to cite them for blocking traffic while they walked through the parking lot of a shopping center.The students’ expulsions were upheld by the Contra Costa County Board of Education, notwithstanding that (1) neither student