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For Immediate Release
June, 16 2011, 12:01pm EDT
Contact:
Josh Bell, ACLU, (212) 549-2508 or 2666; media@aclu.org
Report from U.N. Human Rights Expert Expresses Grave Concern over Deportations to Haiti
GENEVA
The American Civil Liberties Union, along with more than 50 other groups, at a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council today called on the U.S. to stop deportations to Haiti. The joint statement condemning the deportations came as the U.N. Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Haiti, Michel Forst, repeated his serious concerns about deporting individuals to Haiti because of the unsafe environment there.
Since January 2011, the U.S. has sent four deportation flights carrying dozens of people to Haiti. The most recent flight was Tuesday, and more are expected soon. At least one of the deportees, Wildrick Guerrier, died of cholera after being deported to Haiti. In a policy statement issued April 1, the government said that it was deporting only individuals with criminal records who pose a danger to the public, and that it would take into account additional factors such as family ties and medical conditions that place individuals at particular risk. However, the government has established no procedure for making these determinations, and recent deportees include people with only nonviolent and minor crimes as well as people with extensive family ties to the United States and serious medical conditions.
The following can be attributed to Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU Human Rights Program:
"Continuing deportations to Haiti while conditions remain so dangerous is an affront to human rights. With Haiti battling a cholera epidemic and an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, it is irresponsible to force anyone to return before conditions have improved enough to allow a safe and humane return. The United States should strive to be a leader on human rights, but this policy ignores the recommendations of the international human rights community."
The following can be attributed to Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project.
"The government is violating its own stated policy. At a minimum the government must ensure that no one is deported to Haiti without the case-by-case assessments they are entitled to."
The joint statement from the ACLU and other organizations is available here:
www.aclu.org/human-rights/joint-statement-un-human-rights-council-condemning-deportations-haiti
The report of the U.N. Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Haiti is available here: www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.42_en.pdf
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
(212) 549-2666LATEST NEWS
Just After Settling With Trump DOJ, RealPage Sues New York Over Ban on Algorithmic Rent-Setting
"As if we need any more evidence the settlement is BS," wrote one antitrust advocate.
Nov 26, 2025
After securing a corporate-friendly settlement with the Trump Justice Department earlier this week, the real estate software company RealPage on Wednesday turned its attention to the state of New York, suing to block a recently enacted law aimed at preventing algorithmic rent-setting that has helped drive up housing costs nationwide.
The law in question prohibits software companies like RealPage, which is owned by a private equity firm, from enabling landlords to collude and push up rents. Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the measure into law last month, making the state one of the first in the nation to combat algorithmic price-fixing.
In a legal challenge filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, RealPage argues the state law is "a sweeping and unconstitutional ban on lawful speech specifically intended" to outlaw RealPage's software.
On the third page of the lawsuit, RealPage cites its pending settlement with the US Justice Department in an effort to bolster its case against New York's law, which advocates hailed as a major victory for renters.
"Especially because RealPage offers [revenue management software (RMS)] that does not reference any competitor’s non-public information when a customer is using the software, there is no plausible basis to conclude that RealPage’s RMS can be used to facilitate any form of collusion among RealPage customers," the lawsuit states. "In fact, this version of the software is specifically permitted by the U.S. Department of Justice under its proposed antitrust consent decree with RealPage."
"As if we need any more evidence the settlement is BS," replied Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project.
With sky-high housing costs a central focus in New York—particularly the successful New York City mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani—and across the country, RealPage and management companies that use its software have drawn heightened scrutiny. Last week, nine states reached a $7 million settlement with Greystar, the largest landlord in the US, in a lawsuit over the company's use of RealPage software to raise rents.
As part of the state settlement, Greystar agreed to no longer use rent-setting software that relies on private data from other landlords.
Late last year, during the presidency of Joe Biden, the Justice Department sued RealPage over the company's alleged "unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing."
“RealPage contracts with competing landlords who agree to share with RealPage nonpublic, competitively sensitive information about their apartment rental rates and other lease terms to train and run RealPage’s algorithmic pricing software,” said the Biden DOJ. “This software then generates recommendations, including on apartment rental pricing and other terms, for participating landlords based on their and their rivals’ competitively sensitive information.”
On Monday, the Trump Justice Department announced a proposed settlement with RealPage that the company openly welcomed, characterizing the deal as an effective endorsement of the legality of its product. The settlement, in which RealPage does not admit to any wrongdoing, still must be reviewed and approved by a court.
According to a report published last year by the Biden White House, algorithmic price-setting cost renters across the US nearly $4 billion in 2023 alone.
The American Prospect's David Dayen noted Wednesday that RealPage previously "promised landlord clients that it would generate 'revenue lift between 3% to 7%' by feeding rental data in a metro area into an algorithm that recommended price increases."
"Then, RealPage agents would tell landlords that they risked losing access to the platform if they didn’t comply with hiking rents," Dayen wrote. "This was a case of classic price-fixing."
"Not having to pay a nickel or admit wrongdoing is lenient enough," Dayen added, referring to the DOJ settlement. "But there are several loopholes even in the restrictions. RealPage can continue using past data to train AI models, which will inform future price recommendations. Public data can be aggregated and used for this purpose. And RealPage can continue using an 'auto-accept' feature for price recommendations, as long as clients can reconfigure it to opt out. We know from most of digital age history that opt-outs don’t work well."
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'Unspeakably Cruel': Trump Freezes Green Cards to 235,000 Refugees Admitted Under Biden
"These are refugees who fled persecution... refugees who had been more thoroughly vetted than any other population before entering our country," said the head of the Refugee Council USA.
Nov 26, 2025
The Trump administration has halted the distribution of green cards to around 235,000 refugees admitted during the Biden administration, requiring all their claims to be reassessed, according to a memo obtained by the Associated Press.
The AP reported on Tuesday that the abrupt change will not only apply to refugees awaiting green cards, but that some who have already received them could have their permanent residency status revoked.
The memo, signed by the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Joseph Edlow, claims that during the previous administration, “expediency” and “quantity” were prioritized over the “detailed screening and vetting" of those who applied for refugee status.
Refugee status can be claimed by those outside the United States who fear persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a social group. Most refugees who have entered the US in recent years come from nations in the midst of severe upheaval from civil war or other forms of political instability.
Between October 2021 and September 2024, the Biden administration admitted 185,640 refugees. Last year, more than 100,000 were admitted, with the largest numbers coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Syria.
The memo states that these refugees will be subject to new investigations into their claims of past persecution or fear of persecution in their home countries. It also says USCIS will review the possible grounds for inadmissibility, which could place them at risk of losing their status. Those the agency determines did not meet the criteria for admission will have "no right to appeal."
In addition to reassessing the validity of their claims of persecution, the review process will also reportedly involve an assessment of a refugee's potential for "assimilation" into the United States.
The Refugee Council USA (RCUSA) said the directive violates the Refugee Act of 1980, which states that refugees shall be considered for a green card after one year of residence in the US.
"By ordering reinterviews and halting permanent residence processing for those admitted during the previous administration, the Trump administration is placing the entire resettlement system into legal limbo," the group said.
The AP reports that the lives of many refugees in the US have been thrown into chaos by the rule change. One Syrian refugee who fled the nation's deadly civil war roughly a decade ago said he now feared that he and his family would be sent back.
“It was, and it still is a dream to be in America,” said the man, who remained anonymous for fear of being targeted by US authorities. “If they start sending back people to their home countries, you don’t have the rights that you have here and the opportunities.”
Despite the administration's claims, refugees already undergo an extraordinarily long and thorough vetting process to enter the US, which can take up to 36 months. The process involves screening of biographic and biometric information, extensive interviews, and security screenings by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense.
“This administration’s disdain for refugees and newcomers is well-documented, yet it continues to find new ways to outdo itself," said Rick Santos, president and CEO of Church World Service (CWS), which provides support for refugees around the globe. "The decision to review and reinterview resettled refugees—who have already passed through the most stringent of vetting processes—is not merely a relitigation, but a retraumatizing of individuals who were assured of their safety and a chance to live free of persecution."
“Just the threat of this is unspeakably cruel," said Mark Hetfield, the president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, in a comment to CNN. "To threaten refugees with taking away their status would be retraumatizing and a vicious misuse of taxpayer money."
CWS argued that "the resources it will take to relitigate refugees’ cases could be much better spent addressing USCIS’s backlog of approximately 4 million cases."
As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, noted, "The same administration that redefined refugee status to cover white South Africans is now going to drown in red tape tens of thousands of refugees approved years ago, potentially even seeking to strip some of their status and deport them."
In October, the Trump administration announced that it would limit the number of refugees accepted during this fiscal year to a historic low of 7,500, down from over 100,000 under former President Joe Biden, with most spots going to the white descendants of the Europeans who subjected South Africa's majority Black population to apartheid for decades. The first of those refugees was admitted to the US earlier this week, just before the green card freeze was announced.
“The latest refugee policy announcement from the Trump administration is astounding, unprecedented, heartbreaking, and cruel,” said John Slocum, executive director of RCUSA. "These are refugees who fled persecution on account of their religion, race, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Refugees who had been more thoroughly vetted than any other population before entering our country. Refugees who had been promised, not a temporary sojourn, but a permanent grant of freedom, safety, and opportunity."
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Washington Homeowners Sue Big Oil Over Soaring Insurance Costs
"Big Oil took its playbook directly from the minds of Big Tobacco and think they can get away with the same deliberate disinformation campaign, coercing the public to pay for the very harms they suffer."
Nov 26, 2025
Efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the climate emergency continued in Washington state this week as homeowners sued oil giants and a trade association over their decades of lies and rising insurance premium rates.
"As natural disasters become more costly, homeowners foot the bill," explains the complaint, filed on Tuesday in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington against the American Petroleum Institute, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell and its subsidiary Equilon Enterprises.
"In 2023, a significant number of natural catastrophes... impacted the United States, at an estimated cost of $114 billion, of which approximately $80 billion was insured," the filing notes. "In the state of Washington alone, homeowners' rates have increased by a total of 51% over the past six years. But climate change has driven insurance premium increases throughout the country because insurance generally operates by pooling risks."
There are two named plaintiffs in the proposed class action suit. Margaret Hazard lives in Carson, an "area that is very dry and prone to forest fires." Since she began paying for home insurance in 2017, her premiums have doubled, and she recently had to switch to a policy with less coverage. Richard Kennedy of Normandy Park has also paid for homeowner's insurance since then; his premiums have gone from $1,012.10 to $2,149.18, an increase of nearly 113%.
"This case is about holding the fossil fuel defendants accountable for the increased homeowners' insurance premiums that their coordinated and deliberate scheme to hide the truth about climate change and the effects of burning fossil fuels has brought about and for their conduct contributing to climate change; a cost the highly profitable trillion-dollar industry can easily afford, and one that it should not be permitted to simply pass along to the everyday people who are presently bearing the burden of these increased premiums," the complaint states.
The document highlights that "defendants have known since at least the 1960s, based on their own internal scientific research, that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas pollution caused by the unchecked sales of its highly profitable petroleum products would inevitably lead to 'catastrophic' weather-related consequences with 'considerable significance to civilization' and that only a narrow window of time existed in which to act before severe consequences would result."
Big Oil "took this internal calculus seriously," the filing details, but "rather than inform the public, or... undertake meaningful remedial steps, defendants chose instead to protect their profits by engaging in a massive, deliberate, decadeslong misinformation campaign intended to sow doubt in the minds of the media [and] business leaders, and deceive the public and consumers about the conclusions they themselves had reached about the substantial consequences that the sale of their products would have."
As journalists and academic researchers have revealed what fossil fuel companies knew, and when, over the past decade—while extreme weather, from rapidly intensifying hurricanes to historic wildfires, ravaged US communities—various climate liability lawsuits have been filed across the country by states, municipalities, tribes, and individuals.
According to the Center for Climate Integrity's national tracker, in Washington state alone, there are at least three other cases: two brought by tribes in December 2023 and a wrongful death suit filed in May by the daughter of Juliana Leon, who died during the extreme heatwave that plagued the Pacific Northwest in 2021.
The cases have often drawn comparisons to the tobacco industry's deception, and the one filed this week is no exception. In fact, the plaintiffs for the new federal suit in Washington are represented by the law firm Hagens Berman, whose managing partner and cofounder, Steve Berman, served as special assistant attorney general for 13 states against Big Tobacco.
"Big Oil took its playbook directly from the minds of Big Tobacco and think they can get away with the same deliberate disinformation campaign, coercing the public to pay for the very harms they suffer," Berman said in a statement. "We see a direct correlation between Big Oil's lies and the alarming increase of homeowners insurance due to the rising threat of natural disasters."
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