Immigrants' Rights

Regardless of your immigration status, you have guaranteed rights.

No one should be above the law, including federal law enforcement. Yet when federal agents violate people’s constitutional rights, holding them accountable can be extraordinarily difficult. In this episode of A More Perfect District, ACLU-DC Paralegal & Intake Coordinator Ameerah Adetoro talks with Legal Director Scott Michelman about the barriers that can make it difficult to hold federal officers accountable, why accountability matters for protecting all of our rights, and what we can do to push for change.

Mais vos droits ne changent PAS lorsque vous franchissez ces frontières.

ነገር ግን እነዚህን ድንበሮች ሲያቋርጡ መብቶችዎ አይለወጡም።

Soon after the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump’s Executive Order seeking to do away with birthright citizenship was unconstitutional, he tried again, with a new Executive Order, issued on August 6, 2026, that directs executive agencies not to recognize the citizenship of an individual “when neither parent of that person is a citizen” and: a) “either parent of that person is an alien enemy, defined to include” a member of certain designated terrorist organizations; b) “either parent of that person is a foreign government employee,” including not only foreign ministers with full diplomatic immunity but also various other employees of foreign governments or international organizations; c) “either parent of that person engaged in a commercial transaction to purchase or access birthright citizenship for the person, or engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship”; or d) “the person is born in a territory or territorial waters of the United States where citizenship is not conferred by Federal statute.” On September 28, 2026, we and the National ACLU filed a new lawsuit challenging the new Executive Order. We allege that it is unconstitutional for the same reasons the first one was, and that it also violates the federal immigration statute, as Justice Kavanaugh opined was true of the first order. The plaintiffs are: “Clara,” a citizen of France; she and her husband work for international organizations in Washington, DC, and their son “Nathan,” who was born after the issuance of the new Executive Order. “Patricia” and her husband, European citizens who also work for international organizations in the United States, and who are expecting a child in spring 2027. “Edward,” a citizen of Australia; he and his Australian wife are expecting a child through surrogacy to be born in the United States in October 2026. We will soon file a motion for a preliminary injunction asking the court to prevent executive agencies from refusing to recognize the citizenship of our clients’ children and others similarly situated.

This case challenges the Trump administration’s secretive elimination of bedrock safeguards from the expedited removal process, a fast-track deportation procedure. Since 1997, when the expedited removal system was first put into practice, immigration officials were required to advise all noncitizens of their right to seek protection from persecution and torture and to ask all noncitizens if they fear being removed. These requirements reflected the United States’ non-refoulment treaty obligations not to remove noncitizens to countries where they could fear persecution or torture, and were reflected in specific forms immigration officials use during expedited removal, Forms I-867A and I-867B (collectively, “Form I-867”). Given the importance of these safeguards, courts have invalidated prior attempts by the government to summarily deport noncitizens without providing them notice and an opportunity to seek protection. Yet in February 2025, the Trump administration adopted a Revised Form I-867 that eliminated the fear advisal and questions. It adopted this revised form without any public notice or announcement at the time. It was not until January 29, 2026 that the government first announced in a court filing that it had quietly adopted this revised version of the Form nearly a year earlier. Together with the National ACLU, we filed this case in the federal district court in D.C. on behalf of non-profit organizations that have noncitizens as members and individual noncitizens seeking relief from Revised Form I-867. We allege that the Revised Form is unlawful because it violates the Due Process Clause under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution and various provisions of the Administrative Procedure Act. We are asking the court to, among other things, vacate the Revised Form I-867, enjoin the government from employing the Revised Form, and order the government to return the individual noncitizen plaintiffs who were summarily removed pursuant to the unlawful Revised Form to the United States, parole them into the country, and allow them the opportunity to seek immigration relief.  

Among other things, ACLU-D.C. urges the Council to put pressure on MPD to implement all recommendations from the Office of the D.C. Auditor (Auditor) and Office of Police Complaints (OPC); pass legislation prohibiting all District government entities, including all entities designated as law enforcement, from collaborating with any federal agency for the purpose of carrying out immigration enforcement; and taking a more compassionate approach to concerns about youth misbehavior, by investing in proven crime prevention strategies, rather than punitive ones, like the youth curfew.

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an illegal and unprecedented quest to stockpile millions of Americans’ confidential voter data. DOJ has demanded that nearly every state and the District of Columbia turn over their unredacted statewide voter registration lists, which can include sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, signatures, dates of birth, home addresses, places of birth, political party affiliation, and voter participation history. Never before has a federal agency centralized this volume of Americans’ voting data in a single record system. And in doing so, DOJ has flouted legal safeguards designed to ensure transparency and public participation in the federal government’s collection of Americans’ personal information. DOJ’s apparent purpose in collecting this data is to conduct its own state-by-state voter list maintenance operation and compel states to purge eligible voters from their voter rolls as part of the Trump Administration’s attempts to take over elections from states and subvert the 2026 midterm elections. DOJ is using this highly sensitive data to build—without Congressional authorization—a sprawling new voter surveillance and purging system that endangers millions of Americans’ fundamental voting and privacy rights. Heeding President Trump’s repeated calls to “take over” and “nationalize” elections, DOJ is now compiling these state voter files in order to create a national voter registration record system. DOJ is moving rapidly to interfere with the States’ lawful authority over elections and impose its own secretive “verification procedures” for identifying “ineligible voters” and then requiring states to remove those individuals from their voter rolls. DOJ has told federal courts and state officials that it will run states’ entire voter registration lists through the Department of Homeland Security’s flawed Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (“SAVE”) system. In 2025, DHS haphazardly expanded SAVE—which was previously a limited tool to determine eligibility for certain benefits—to conduct mass “voter verification” citizenship checks using unreliable data. The faulty new system has already falsely identified significant numbers of U.S. citizens as non-citizens, endangering their fundamental right to vote. And the system has proven especially unreliable for citizens born outside of the United States (e.g., naturalized citizens), who are at great risk of being falsely identified as non-citizens. Centralizing hundreds of millions of Americans’ state-level voter data in a single federal system also presents major cybersecurity risks, creating a new target for hackers and foreign actors who seek to undermine our elections and Americans’ data security. In addition to making bulk disclosures to DHS, DOJ plans to disclose voter registration lists data to unidentified private “contractors” to assist with its “list maintenance verification procedures.” Most states have resisted DOJ’s unprecedented data demands. But at least 12 and, according to DOJ, as many as 19 states have acquiesced to DOJ’s demands for their Confidential Voter Lists, including Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming. These states have disregarded the privacy and voting rights of millions of Americans who never consented to disclosing their sensitive personal data to the federal government for undefined purposes and without statutory authorization. On April 21, together with the National ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Protect Democracy Project, and the Democracy and Rule of Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, we filed this lawsuit on behalf of Common Cause, an organization dedicated to upholding the core values of American democracy, and four of its individual members, to block the Trump Administration’s unlawful efforts to invade voters’ privacy and subvert our democratic elections. On April 19, we filed a motion for partial summary judgment, asking the court to rule that the government’s plan violated several federal statutes and to order DOJ to cease collecting and using this voter information and to delete what it has already obtained.