American Civil Liberties Union

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has made the world safe for corporate political speech, it's worth asking why plainclothes police officers are allowed to arrest an environmental activist for expressing his political views.

This outrageous tale comes to Dateline Earth from Jim Dwyer's About New York column in The New York Times, although it's apparently been raising hackles in the Big Apple for some time now.

Dwyer relates how Edward Kerry Sullivan was outside his Staten Island apartment building one night last summer when two undercover cops approached, arrested and cuffed him and whisked him off to the pokey.

Sullivan's "crime"? In letters about three inches high, he wrote "The Jerk" on an election poster for local pol James P. Molinaro. (A poster that would turn out to be itself illegally posted.) 

Now, let's admit that this isn't strictly an environmental story. But juxstaposed with the Citizens United campaign-finance ruling from the Supreme Court last week, it certainly seems worth noting. Folks, this is stunning.

And it's about an environmental advocate.

Are civil liberties at risk if we implement laws that might bring relief to communities terrorized by out-of-control gangs?

A delegation of Yakima Valley residents appear willing to put those civil liberties on the line, telling lawmakers that they simply can’t take it anymore.

One high school senior told members of the House Judiciary Committee that she and her siblings have been forced to crawl around on the floor of their home to avoid gunshots aimed at a neighboring house, Beth Leah Ward reports in the Yakima Herald online.

"I don't think it's fair that I have to be afraid for my little brother and sister," Anna Aburto, a senior at Davis High School, told the House Judiciary Committee. "I'm afraid to go out in my neighborhood."

I recently wrote about this problem in Outlook, a small town in rural Yakima County, where one six-block area is home to as many as 150 gang members, where one in every five residents is said to be in a gang. The unincorporated town is only sporadically patrolled by Yakima County Sheriffs’ deputies, and has been plagued by shootings and assaults. There are few community resources for dealing with kids lured by gangs.

At least eight of two dozen homicides in Yakima County last year have been linked to gangs.

Every day, about 32,000 illegal immigrant detainees -- including women and children -- are kept in conditions criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union as overcrowded, inhumane and unsafe.

Now, the Department of Homeland Security is reforming its illegal immigrant detention policies for nonviolent detainees awaiting their day in court -- such as those who just arrived, seeking asylum from their home countries' conflicts and persecution. 

In addition to centralizing its scattered, fractured oversight, the U.S.