News & Commentary

Spring 2011

Since 1933, the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties has fought for the basic human rights and dignity of immigrants and all people living in this region of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Early Years

Our founder, Helen Marston, first launched our immigrants’ rights work in 1933 by fighting for the rights of farm workers who were mostly Mexican immigrants to assemble and organize in Imperial County.

At the height of the Depression, farm workers faced severe repression simply for seeking to meet to discuss working conditions and how to organize for improvements. The use of tear gas by police and vigilantes in a raid on an organizing meeting in a crowded meeting hall allegedly resulted in the death of a child, further enflaming tensions. In 1934, the ACLU sued to protect the workers’ rights to meet without harassment. Marston and the ACLU’s attorney A.L. Wirin encountered physical harassment and intimidation by vigilantes opposed to the ACLU’s protection of basic rights. Wirin was abducted, taken to the desert, beaten, and left for dead, but survived to report the ordeal and continue the fight.

In a case that benefited all immigrants and people of color in the United States, Wirin won a landmark Supreme Court victory on behalf of a mixed status San Diego farming family, the Oyamas. The decision in Oyama v. California overturned discriminatory land seizures by the government and applied new legal standards that became the basis for protecting the equal rights of all people of color in the United States.

Border Crossing Deaths

In 1999, the San Diego ACLU staked its leadership role in fighting the tragedy of needless deaths of border crossers that results from the border enforcement policies of the United States, in particular Operation Gatekeeper. That year, the San Diego ACLU submitted a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights alleging that U.S. border enforcement-deterrence strategies violated the right to life under Article I of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man.

Sadly, fifteen years later, the deaths continue, and the rate of deaths has increased. With the Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos, the San Diego ACLU issued a seminal report on the issue, Humanitarian Crisis: Migrant Deaths at the U.S.-Mexico Border (October 2009) and sent another plea for intervention to the Inter-American Commission. The report documented the more than 5,000 crossing deaths that have resulted since the start of Operation Gatekeeper in 1995. It recommended concrete, achievable means by which the U.S. government could easily reduce the number of deaths.

Responding to the Resurgence of Anti-Immigrant Policies and Actions

Particularly in the past five years, our work on human rights issues with partner organizations along and on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border and on immigrants’ rights have increased dramatically.

In 2006, the ACLU led a coalition of civil rights groups to overturn an ordinance in Escondido, California, that prohibited land owners from renting to undocumented immigrants. The ordinance violated the Equal Protection Clause because it denied public education to children of the undocumented, and also forced citizens to take on federal law enforcement duties. The city settled the suit, permanently enjoining the ordinance and paying plaintiff’s legal fees. On the heels of the legal victory, we helped pass a law to prevent such ordinances, making California the first state in the country to expressly preclude these anti-immigrant ordinances at the local level. The San Diego ACLU is currently involved in advocacy and organizing in Escondido, to prevent further ordinances like this and laws like SB 1070 being passed here in our county.

A synopsis of our work in the past five years that affects the rights and lives of individuals and communities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border appears below: