The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), has responded to a complaint filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Legal Aid of North Carolina/Advocates for Children’s Services (ACS) by announcing it will investigate North Carolina’s Wake County Public School System for discrimination against Latino students with Spanish-speaking parents.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and its allies are demanding that Alabama’s attorney general ensure the state adheres to last week’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down most of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law.
It took an opinion from the United States Supreme Court, but this week our nation officially recognized the obvious – children are fundamentally different from adults and our criminal justice system should not lock them up and throw away the key.
For the better part of seven years now, Kansas attorney Kris Kobach has been urging municipalities and states to pass the draconian laws he writes that are aimed at so badly punishing undocumented immigrants that they will “self-deport.” Even as governments went into debt to pay his fees and the cost of defending his dubious statutes, Kobach insisted that if they hung tough, they would win in the end.
Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court is a blow to Arizona’s anti-immigrant law and similar copycat laws that have sprung up in other states. The court’s decision affirms that much about these laws is unconstitutional because many of their provisions are preempted by federal law. The decision also shows the court has significant concerns about the one provision they allowed to stand.
With chronic budget shortfalls, dangerously overcrowded prisons and the nation’s biggest municipal bankruptcy filing, folks here in Alabama have a lot on our minds. But at least we can cross one worry off the list: Thanks to a new and little-noticed state law, our property cannot be confiscated by the United Nations – not, at least, without due process.
Activists and academics from Latin America are gathered at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., for an intensive, week-long conference to share strategies for fighting racism and discrimination.
The Southern Poverty Law Center asked a federal court late yesterday to block efforts by House Republicans to further delay a decorated 12-year U.S. Army veteran in a legal same-sex marriage from seeking the same benefits provided to other married veterans and their spouses.
The Southern Poverty Law Center announced today that Alabama’s Jefferson County Board of Education abolished its unlawful policy banning male students from wearing earrings – a policy that discriminated on the basis of sex and violated students’ free-speech rights.
Mary Bauer, legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the Obama administration’s announcement Friday to delay deporting young immigrants is a positive step, but against a backdrop of anti-immigrant sentiment and harsh laws in many states, much more remains to be done.
