Veterans and their advocates in southern California, the epicenter of veterans’ homelessness, are angry that President Obama and the Veterans Affairs Department have not built a single bed for homeless disabled veterans on the 400 acres the government owns in West Los Angeles, property that was deeded to the federal government for that very purpose in 1888.

They are right that Mr. Obama and the Veterans Affairs secretary, Eric Shinseki, have nothing to show for their promises to tackle the problem. But then neither did presidents named Reagan, Bush and Clinton, nor the long string of Veterans Affairs secretaries who served under them.
The campus has a hospital and outpatient services, but no long-term supportive housing for the desperately ill men and women who live and die on the streets, abandoned by the government they served. The circle of blame is wider than the executive branch.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California has filed a federal lawsuit accusing the veterans department of dereliction of duty. Some of the department’s defenders, however, see things differently. Jim Nicholson, the department’s secretary under George W. Bush, is pointing a finger at Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat of California, in whose district the campus lies. Mr. Nicholson said last week, “Waxman’s been a congressman there for nearly 40 years” but has done nothing about the problem.
Mr. Waxman says he helped win $20 million to renovate a building on the site as homeless housing. He says he pushed to improve health services there and fought to prevent parts of it from being sold to private developers. Commercial interests still use it anyway, through lease deals for uses like rental-car lots and hotel laundries.
Unlike Mr. Nicholson, Mr. Waxman is in a position in Washington to prod the Veterans Affairs Department to swifter action. While there are plans for a renovated building, no construction contract has been awarded yet. Some advocates, citing the desperate need, want the department to open a tent city there; it’s not an ideal solution but a quick one, and better than tents under a highway overpass. The latest government estimate says the building will be dedicated in August 2014. At this rate, the country will be well on its way out of Afghanistan before it will have built a single housing unit for homeless veterans in Los Angeles. The building, by the way, will have 65 beds. Tonight, an estimated 8,000 veterans will be sleeping on the streets of the city. NEW YORK TIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/09/opinion/homeless-veterans-whose-responsibility.html

By Mitra Ebadolahi, Legal Fellow, ACLU National Security Project
The ACLU is appearing today before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to argue on behalf of our client, Nick George.
In August 2009, Nick went to the Philadelphia International Airport to catch a flight to California and begin his senior year at Pomona College. At the airport, he was detained, abusively interrogated, handcuffed, and jailed for several hours in a holding cell – solely because he was carrying a set of Arabic-English flashcards for his language studies, and a book critical of U.S. foreign policy.
That’s right: no liquids, no matches, no weapons, no explosives. Just First Amendment-protected materials.
Nick, who was double majoring in physics and Middle Eastern studies and had been learning Arabic since his freshman year, arrived at the security checkpoint with a single piece of carry-on luggage, in which he had stereo speakers. As he approached the X-ray machine, a TSA officer asked him what he had in his bag, and Nick truthfully replied. The officer asked him to step aside for secondary screening, and Nick complied. His speakers were X-rayed separately, and his cell phone swabbed twice to test for explosives – all with negative results. At this point, he should have been free to board his plane. He wasn’t.
We’re all familiar with searches at the airport. Courts have held that they are permissible under a narrow exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement that a government officer have at least a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity before she may detain an individual or search his belongings. That exception allows airport security officials to conduct suspicionless safety checks for the sole purposeof ensuring that a passenger is not carrying weapons or explosives.
These are well-established legal principles, and the TSA officers were constitutionally required to let Nick board his flight as soon as they had had determined that he carried neither weapons nor explosives. Instead, the TSA officers stalled because during the secondary screening, when Nick was asked to empty his pockets, he had produced his flashcards, which he was using to learn the vocabulary of contemporary Arabic-language media.
While one TSA agent asked Nick about a recent Phillies game, the other stepped away to call a supervisor and tell her about Nick’s flashcards. Thirty minutes later, the TSA supervisor arrived and began interrogating Nick in a hostile and aggressive manner.
Noticing Nick’s book, the TSA supervisor said: “You clearly read. Do you know who did 9/11?”
Taken aback, Nick answered, “Osama bin Laden.”
The TSA supervisor asked “Do you know what language he spoke?”
Nick answered, “Arabic.”
The TSA supervisor then held up the flashcards and said, “Do you see why these cards are suspicious?”
Then, a Philadelphia police officer – whom the TSA had summoned – handcuffed Nick and marched him through the terminal, in full view of other passengers, to the airport police station. Nick was told he was being taken for “extra screening” but was instead locked inside a jail cell. The police held him there for hours at the request of federal law enforcement officials. Eventually, two FBI agents arrived and interrogated Nick for an additional thirty minutes.
At the end of the interview, one of them said to Nick, “The police call us to evaluate whether there is a real threat. You are not a real threat.”
Throughout the experience, Nick remained cooperative and calm. He was never advised of any rights or given an explanation for his mistreatment. His ordeal lasted for almost five hours, with four of those spent in the jail cell.
The only thing more outrageous than these facts is the position the government has taken in our lawsuit. From the beginning, the defendants have maintained that their egregious actions were somehow consistent with the Constitution. Last year, the federal district court disagreed; on appeal, the TSA officers and the FBI agents continue to insist that they did nothing wrong.
As one federal appeals court explained in 2005, “[E]ven with the grave threat posed by airborne terrorist attacks, the vital and hallowed strictures of the Fourth Amendment still apply: searches must be reasonable to comport with the Constitution.”
Every single federal court to have considered this issue has come to the same exact conclusion. The implication of the defendants’ position in our lawsuit is that Americans lose one of their most treasured and basic constitutional rights when they decide to fly. This is not, and has never been, the law.

By Esha Bhandari, ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project
Mark Lyttle, an American citizen with mental disabilities who was wrongfully detained and deported to Mexico and forced to live on the streets and in prisons for months, settled his case against the federal government this week.
Lyttle will receive $175,000 for the suffering he endured after being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who deported him despite ample evidence that he was a U.S. citizen.  The settlement comes after a federal district court in Georgia ruled in Lyttle’s favor in March, holding that the bulk of his claims against the federal defendants should not be dismissed.
“What happened to Mark Lyttle is outrageous and unconstitutional,” said Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, which has been representing Lyttle along with ACLU affiliates and a partner firm. “People with mental disabilities are entitled to due process in immigration court, and it is fundamentally unfair, as well as inhumane, to force them to endure such proceedings alone, without the assistance of a lawyer.”
Lyttle’s case is unfortunately not unique, but demonstrates the systemic failures of ICE and the federal government to protect the rights of individuals with mental disabilities.  The current lack of procedural safeguards—including no right to appointed counsel—means that even U.S. citizens can end up in immigration detention and be deported.  It is a growing problem as more people are being swept up under the nation’s unreasonable detention and deportation practices.
Lyttle, who was born in North Carolina and suffers from bipolar disorder and cognitive disabilities, was inexplicably referred to ICE in 2008 as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico even though he had never been to Mexico, shared no Mexican heritage, and spoke no Spanish.  ICE detained him for 51 days, despite substantial evidence that he is a U.S. citizen.  Nevertheless, ICE officials coerced Lyttle into signing a statement that he was from Mexico, and then put him in removal proceedings, where he was forced to defend himself without ever having the assistance of a lawyer.
Lyttle was ordered to be removed from the country in December 2008, transported to the Mexican border, and forced to disembark there and travel through Mexico on foot, with only $3 in his pocket.  He spent the next 125 days wandering through Mexico, Honduras, and Nicaragua, sleeping in streets and shelters and enduring abuse and imprisonment because he had no identity documents or proof of citizenship.
It was only after Lyttle came across a sympathetic U.S. embassy official in Guatemala that he was able to secure a passport and return to the United States in April 2009.  Even then, ICE officials at the Atlanta airport detained him for six days and attempted to remove him again.  Only after the assistance of his family and a lawyer was Lyttle released and the case against him terminated.
Lyttle’s ordeal should never have happened.  State and federal officials knew of his history of repeated hospitalizations for mental disabilities, and yet no one took any steps to provide him with a lawyer or other safeguards to protect his rights.
Yet he is not the only example of such unconstitutional treatment at the hands of ICE officials. In addition to representing Lyttle, the ACLU has been involved in a class action lawsuit in California, which aims to secure due process protections for all individuals with mental disabilities caught in the sweep of immigration detention and enforcement, so that what happened to Mark Lyttle never happens again.