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For Immediate Release
March, 27 2012, 03:03pm EDT
Contact:
Sandhya Bathija, (202) 675-2312; media@dcaclu.org
Vesna Jaksic, ACLU national, (212) 284-7347 or 549-2666; media@aclu.org
ACLU To Testify at Congressional Forum on Trayvon Martin Case
Dennis Parker, director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, is scheduled to testify today before a Congressional Democratic forum, "The Role of the Federal Government and Hate Crimes."
WASHINGTON
Dennis Parker, director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, is scheduled to testify today before a Congressional Democratic forum, "The Role of the Federal Government and Hate Crimes."
"The tragic death of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent response of the Sanford, Florida, Police Department raise, yet again, disturbing issues of the biased perception of young men of color and the continuing failure of the criminal justice system to protect people of all races," Parker said. "Trayvon's family and the nation deserve a full and fair investigation of the killing, as well as a thorough examination of the fatal effects that racial discrimination has in our country. The failure to take decisive steps now will only ensure that this tragedy will be repeated."
In his testimony, Parker asks for: the Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) to investigate the response of the Sanford Police Department following Trayvon's shooting; a thorough examination into whether the shooting was a federal hate crime; full funding for the DOJ Civil Rights Division to conduct investigations into civil rights violations by law enforcement across the nation; and for Congress to pass the End Racial Profiling Act and urge the administration to strengthen DOJ guidance on the use of race by federal law enforcement agencies.
To read the testimony, go here: www.aclu.org/racial-justice/aclu-testimony-trayvon-martin-forum-us-house-representatives
To read Parker's blog post on the hearing, go here: www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/house-holds-forum-racial-profiling-and-hate-crimes-wake-trayvon-martins-killing
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
'Epically Corrupt': Raskin Demands Answers for $1.25 Million Taxpayer Payout to Trump Crony
"The American people are watching this department squander their tax dollars, handing over giant sums to the president’s friends for claims that multiple federal judges have rejected as having no legal merit."
Apr 06, 2026
Rep. Jamie Raskin is demanding answers in the US Department of Justice's decision to fork over more than $1 million to Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump's disgraced former national security adviser.
As CNN reported last month, the DOJ agreed to pay Flynn $1.25 million to settle a malicious prosecution lawsuit related to his 2017 guilty plea for lying to the FBI during its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
A DOJ spokesperson told CNN that the Flynn settlement was "an important step in redressing that historic injustice," which began when Trump-appointed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein selected Robert Mueller, a longtime Republican who was chosen as FBI director by former President George W. Bush, to serve as special counsel in the Russia probe.
In a letter sent to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Monday, Raskin (D-Md.) demanded documents and information related to the DOJ's decision to give Flynn a payout.
"The American people are watching this department squander their tax dollars, handing over giant sums to the president's friends for claims that multiple federal judges have rejected as having no legal merit," Raskin wrote. "The American people deserve a full accounting of why our tax dollars are being used that way."
Raskin noted that Flynn had affirmed his guilty plea multiple times under oath, and that Flynn's effort to sue the DOJ for $50 million was shot down by a federal judge, who dismissed the case completely. The judge found Flynn had "completely failed to establish the elements of such a claim and stopp[ed] just short of sanctioning him for bringing frivolous arguments before the court."
Raskin said that Flynn rushed to refile his complaint against the DOJ after Trump's victory in the 2024 election, at which point the DOJ "entirely reversed its position" by agreeing to pay the former national security adviser $1.25 million in a case that had already been dismissed.
The Maryland Democrat then warned that Flynn's case could be just the first in a long number of efforts by Trump allies to bilk US taxpayers.
"The Flynn settlement is an ominous test case," he wrote, "as the president and his political allies are all lining up for their free-government-money payouts. The president himself has demanded $230 million from this department... and has sued the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for a staggering $10 billion—a figure around two-thirds the size of the IRS’s total annual budget."
Raskin also pointed to lawsuits filed by multiple Trump supporters who violently stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, including five leaders of the Proud Boys who were convicted on seditious conspiracy charges and are now demanding $100 million.
"The Flynn settlement," Raskin contended, "offers a road map for this epically corrupt President to keep paying out his political underlings and private militiamen with taxpayer money."
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'She Got Ripped Away From Me': ICE Raids Military Base, Cages Wife of Newlywed Soldier Preparing to Deploy
"In every previous administration, including Trump's first, this woman would not have been a priority for enforcement," said one immigration expert.
Apr 06, 2026
A US Army staff sergeant saw his young wife taken away by immigration agents at his military base in Louisiana last week.
Matthew Blank, 23, who is set to begin training for deployment next month, was preparing to move into his home at the Fort Polk Army base with his 22-year-old wife, Annie Ramos, whom he married just weeks ago.
According to a report out Monday from The New York Times, Ramos is an undocumented Honduran immigrant who was brought to the United States as a toddler. She works as a Sunday school teacher and is months away from finishing a biochemistry degree. She has no criminal record.
Undocumented immigrants who marry US citizens become eligible for green cards and can apply for full citizenship three years after receiving them. Prior to their marriage, Blank and Ramos had already hired a lawyer to begin the process.
Ramos had also applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2020, but her application was never processed after the Trump administration halted it for new applicants.
Blank said he and his wife were following the procedures to get her legal status: "We were doing everything the right way.”
In the meantime, they were planning to begin their lives as newlyweds. On April 2, the couple headed to the base's visitor center to get Ramos registered for military spouse benefits.
They showed Ramos' birth certificate, Honduran passport, their marriage license, and Blank’s military ID. When asked whether Ramos had a visa or green card, they explained that she did not, but that they had completed the application and planned to file it within days. That's when the trouble began.
After the attendant made a "flurry of calls," they were told Ramos would be detained.
Soon enough, she was led away in shackles and taken more than an hour away to the privately owned South Louisiana Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Processing Center in Basile, where she waits with hundreds of other women who have been rounded up as part of President Donald Trump's mass deportation effort.
"She was going to move in after the Easter weekend," Blank said. "Instead, she got ripped away from me.”
The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement following initial reports of Ramos' arrest.
“She has no legal status to be in this country and was issued a final order of removal by a judge,” the statement read. “This administration is not going to ignore the rule of law.”
The statement also said that Ramos was arrested "after she attempted to enter a military base," seeming to imply she was in the process of illicit activity rather than there as a military spouse.
Ramos had been issued a deportation order in absentia in 2005, when she was 22 months old, after her family failed to show up for an immigration court hearing.
However, experts told the Times that it is very rare for people who have been issued prior deportation orders to be detained and that it's typically easy for them to adjust their paperwork.
"In every previous administration, including Trump's first, this woman would not have been a priority for enforcement," concurred Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, who wrote about the incident on social media.
While prior deportation orders can affect an undocumented person's ability to receive legal status, he said, "discretion is part of the enforcement of every law."
"She got a deportation order when she was a small child. It's quite possible that, like many people, she didn't even know about it. That's a common situation," he explained. "Immigration law has always involved choices about whether deportation makes sense or not."
Citing a YouGov/Economist poll from February, he noted that just 21% of Americans support deporting undocumented people brought to the US as kids, while just 16% support deporting those married to US citizens.
Contrary to previous administrations, which tended to target immigrants with criminal records and recent arrivals for deportation, around three-quarters of those currently in ICE detention have no criminal convictions, according to data published in February.
While there is no complete data on how long the average ICE detainee has lived in the US, the Deportation Data Project found that during the first nine months of the second Trump administration, the number of arrests away from the border increased by a factor of 4.6, suggesting that it was going after undocumented immigrants who have been in the US for longer periods of time.
According to Blank's parents, who were there as their son's young spouse was taken away, even the ICE agents who enforced the order to arrest Ramos did not appear proud of what they were doing.
“They told us that they didn’t have a choice, they said they had to take Annie,” recalled Blank's mother, who said the agents apologized.
“I begged them not to take her,” she said. “They said the higher-ups made them do it.”
Ramos told the Times that she knows no other home besides the United States.
"I grew up here like any American,” she said over the phone. “My husband and family are here.”
The facility where she is being held, run by GEO Group, a multibillion-dollar private prison company, has been the subject of dozens of complaints from current and former female detainees who have claimed they were denied basic medical treatment, hygiene supplies, and edible food.
Others have said they've faced sexual abuse and harassment and were subject to forced labor. In December, a former guard pleaded guilty in federal court to sexually abusing a Nicaraguan detainee in mid-2025.
Ramos' detention comes as thousands of US service members deploy to fight Trump's war in Iran. ICE has also been deployed to military bases to screen the family members of Marine recruits at their graduation as recently as last week.
Blank, who has previously been deployed to the Middle East and Europe, said he was "going to fight with everything I have" to secure his wife's freedom.
"She is going to move in with me. We will start a family," Blank said. "I am going to be with her and serve my country."
Their lawyer has petitioned the court to reopen her removal order, which could freeze her deportation. Until it is reopened, however, she could be deported at any moment.
They have also continued to push forward with the effort to get Ramos a green card. But the guards at Basile have refused to let them bring the completed forms inside to get Ramos' signature.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus said on social media that Blank "should be focused on training today," but "instead, he was forced into a fight against his own government to free his wife."
A GoFundMe campaign created by Blank's sister to pay for the legal fight has raised more than $20,000 since Saturday.
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Trump Threatens to Jail Journalists Who Received Leak About US Pilot Downed in Iran
“We think we’ll be able to find it out because we’re going to go to the media company that released it and we’re going to say: ‘National security—give it up or go to jail,'" the president said.
Apr 06, 2026
President Donald Trump vowed Monday to find the "leaker" who disclosed that US forces could not locate the second pilot stranded in Iran after their F-15 fighter jet was shot down, threatening to jail unnamed journalists who received the information if they do not reveal its source.
Trump claimed that Iranian authorities did not know that a second pilot of the downed two-seat warplane was missing until after the news report, which made the US rescue mission "much more difficult."
“We’re looking very hard to find that leaker,” Trump said. “We think we’ll be able to find it out because we’re going to go to the media company that released it and we’re going to say: ‘National security—give it up or go to jail.'”
Trump: "They didn't know there was somebody missing until this leaker gave the information. Whoever it was, we think we'll be able to find out, because we're gonna go to the media company that released it and we're gonna say, 'National security. Give it up or go to jail.'"
[image or embed]
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 6, 2026 at 10:27 AM
“The country, Iran, put out a major notice... offering a very big award for anybody that captures the pilot," Trump continued. "We have to find that leaker, because that’s a sick person. Probably didn’t realize the extent of how bad it was."
"We’re going to find out," he added. "It’s national security, and the person that did the story will go to jail if he doesn’t say.”
While the president did not say which "media company" he was talking about, the first widely cited reporting about the missing second pilot was broadcast Friday by CNN, CBS News, and The New York Times.
Israel journalist Amit Segal—who has close high-level links to the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—claimed Monday on his Telegram channel that he was the first to publish information on the second pilot.
"We are about to see Trump’s promise to find and imprison whoever leaked the info about the second pilot vanish into the ether," US investigative journalist Ryan Grim said on social media Monday in response to Segal's post.
Both pilots were successfully rescued. Some critics mocked Trump for presuming that Iranians would not know that the two-seat F-15 is crewed by multiple pilots.
Since early in his first administration, Trump has discussed jailing journalists and political foes who leak or refuse to say who disclosed information. The president has also long denigrated journalists as the "fake news media" and the "enemy of the people," sowing distrust of an entire profession that culminated in physical attacks on reporters during the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection.
Trump's threat comes as the president said he is "considering blowing everything up” in Iran if the country's leaders don't reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday night. This, after Trump said during a nationally televised address last week that he would bomb Iran "back to the Stone Ages" if the vital waterway is not reopened.
Responding to the president's remarks, Freedom of the Press Foundation advocacy chief Seth Stern said that “Donald Trump has long harbored bizarre fantasies about having journalists arrested and even sexually assaulted in prison for refusing to burn their sources."
"But journalists don’t work for the government and their right to publish government leaks is protected by the First Amendment which, despite Trump’s efforts, remains the law of the land," he continued. "It does not disappear whenever the words 'national security' are uttered. To the extent that the government is allowed to withhold information, it’s up to the government to keep its secrets, not journalists."
“Confidential sources are the lifeblood of investigative journalism," Stern contended. "Sources who come forward at great personal risk won’t do so if they don’t trust that their identities won’t be revealed, as Trump knows well from his days impersonating publicists to brag about himself to reporters."
"Some of the most important news stories in American history have come from confidential sources, including stories that have brought down corrupt presidents," he added. "That’s why Trump is so obsessed with leaks. It has nothing to do with national security."
Update: This article has been updated with reaction from Freedom of the Press Foundation advocacy chief Seth Stern.
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