The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) certainly has been busy filing two separate lawsuits that seek to end discrimination and racial profiling of immigrants and Latinos.

First in Arizona: On Monday the ACLU, Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the National Immigration Law Center, National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center filed a lawsuit to stop SB1070 on the grounds that it violates the Constitution’s 1st and 4th amendments, among other reasons.

From the L.A. Times:

The individual plaintiffs include a 70-year-old U.S. citizen of Spanish and Chinese descent who says he’s been stopped twice by Arizona police asking for “papers”; a Latino citizen studying at Arizona State University whose New Mexico driver’s license would not be accepted as proof of citizenship under the law; and a Jamaican immigrant who fears police will not believe the photocopy of a judge’s order that he be allowed to stay in the country, the only paperwork he has that gives him legal status here.

Closer to my home here in NY, yesterday the ACLU along with the The New York Civil Liberties Union and LatinoJustice PRLDEF filed suit against an Oyster Bay town ordinance that targets primarily Latino day laborers. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York against the town of Oyster Bay and Town Supervisor John Venditto, in the name of Centro de la Comunidad Hispana de Locust Valley and the Workplace Project maintains that the ordinance violates the First and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

From a press release from the NYCLU:

Oyster Bay’s ordinance is hurting families and it’s hurting children,” said Luz Torres of the Centro de la Comunidad Hispana de Locust Valley. “These people have to work so that they can feed, clothe and house their children, and they have the right to talk to anyone they want.

We have to remember that in the case of the Oyster Bay law, this is the same Long Island (and really nation-wide) context of hate that took the life of Marcelo Lucero and sees brown people not as contributors to the economy or even as human beings struggling like everyone else to survive in the current economy but as “alien” outsiders that need to be feared and threatened, detained or worse.