US government travel blacklists (euphemistically described by the government as merely “watchlists”) are being used to restrict airline travel and target searches of electronic devices of organizers of protests against US support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza, according to a complaint filed this week in Federal court by attorneys for two blacklisted Palestinian-American US […]
In a decision issued last week, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has offered the first appellate opinion on whether there is any basis in law for the U.S. government’s creation and use of a system of “watchlists” (blacklists) to determine who is allowed to travel by air and how they are treated when they […]
In a nationally-significant lawsuit, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has filed the most comprehensive challenge to date to the US government’s system of arbitrary and extrajudicial blacklists (“watchlists”) used to stigmatize and impose sanctions on innocent people — almost all of them Muslim — without notice, trial, conviction, or any opportunity, even after the […]
A lawsuit filed last week in Federal court in Oklahoma City by the Council on American-Islamic Relations on behalf of Oklahoma native Saadiq Long challenges unconstitutional searches and seizures (sometimes at gunpoint) and interference with freedom of movement on city streets and highways on the unlawful basis of a combination of warrantless dragnet surveillance and […]
The Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) “fails to provide constitutionally sufficient procedural due process,” according to a motion for summary judgment filed this week in a lawsuit brought by people who have been placed on the TSDB blacklist. We’ve been following this case, Elhady v. Kable, since it was filed in 2016. Discovery and depositions taken […]
1. The federal government has imposed a kind of second-class citizenship on the Plaintiffs. Without charges, without arrests, without even an investigation sometimes — the agency defendants act in concert to deprive thousands of innocent Americans, mostly Muslim, of their right to be free from a government that extrajudicially designates them as worthy of permanent […]
A Federal judge has ruled that yes, he can review the Constitutionality of Federal blacklists (euphemistically but misleadingly labeled “watchlists”). That should be an unsurprising finding. But “pre-crime” and predictive policing programs, including decisions to put people on blacklists that are used to control what they are and aren’t allowed to do, have largely operated in […]
[D]ue process requires… notice and a hearing prior to restricting an individual’s ability to travel. (9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Order on Motion for Stay, February 9, 2017, State of Washington and State of Minnesota v. Trump) President Trump’s Executive Orders prohibiting entry to the US by citizens of specified blacklisted countries and cutting off […]
The broadest and most fundamental legal challenge to the waging of the US “War on Terror” through standardless, secret, extra-judicial government blacklists was filed today in the Federal court for the district in Virginia where the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are headquartered. (Video backgrounder and interviews […]
Faced with a series of Federal court rulings upholding challenges to “no-fly” orders, or allowing them to proceed toward trial, the US government agencies responsible for “no-fly” orders have responded by pretending that they don’t understand what the courts have ordered them to do. Instead of complying with court orders, the responsible agencies are asking […]