Berkeley Brainwaves – Minju Cho, Senior Staff Attorney for the Immigrants’ Rights Program at the ACLU of Northern California, Minju Cho 7-29-25
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Lisa Katovich: You’re listening to Berkeley Brainwaves on KALX, Berkeley, university of California, and Listener Supported Radio, I’m your host, Lisa Katovich. My guest today is Minju Cho, senior staff attorney for the Immigrants Rights’ Program at the ACLU of Northern California. Welcome to the program men.
Minju Cho: Thank you so much for having me.
Lisa Katovich: What is the relationship between regional ACLU offices and the ACLU headquarters? How do you interact with each other?
Minju Cho: So there is a national ACLU, and they’re headquartered in New York with offices in San Francisco as well, and they have a variety of issue area projects such as the Immigrants Rights Project or the Disability Rights Project. They work nationwide to protect civil rights and civil liberties or to provide support to geographic areas where there are fewer civil rights attorneys or you know, resources for people [00:01:00] seeking to vindicate their civil liberties. The affiliates are separate nonprofit organizations, and there is one in every state as well as Puerto Rico. In California, we have the distinction of having three ACLU affiliates, Northern California, Southern California, and San Diego and Imperial Counties. We’re the only state that has more than one affiliate.
Lisa Katovich: California has the most undocumented immigrants in the nation. What are the current battles that ACLU of Northern California are fighting in the area of immigration?
Minju Cho: The cases that we’ve brought since the Administration came into office, include a case against Border Patrol, which traveled up to Bakersfield, to Kern County in January.
Lisa Katovich: Is that the operation, “Return to Sender”?
Minju Cho: That’s right, yes.
Lisa Katovich: Ah, okay.
Minju Cho: They traveled from the southern border. Uh, led by Chief Gregory Bovino, who has a very active Twitter presence and, um, has been in the [00:02:00] news a lot lately because he’s also now leading the DHS response in Los Angeles.
But in January he led a group of agents up too Bakersfield, which is hundreds of miles from the border. They went to Home Depot to round up day laborers. They went to farms and highways where farm workers commute. They indiscriminately stopped people that they thought looked like they didn’t belong. No warrant for any of the arrests that they conducted.
At least 78 people, because that comes from their own press release. But of course. they stopped many more than that. They arrested not just people who are not citizens, but also citizens. They made judgements based on a person’s appearance. And of course we know that citizens look like all sorts of races and ethnicities in this country.
Uh, and it is absolutely unconstitutional to stop people on the basis of their appearance or their perceived occupation. They bussed them hundreds of miles away to the southern [00:03:00] border where they held them incommunicado for three days in these border patrol facilities that are temporary and not meant to hold people for a long time.
Lisa Katovich: Are these private facilities or are they federal government facilities?
Minju Cho: These were run by border patrol, federally run. But you are getting at an important point, which is that the longer term ice detention facilities in California are all privately run by for-profit prison companies, and that is an incredibly important issue in this state.
But these facilities are in temporary holding facilities run by border patrol, and they pressured people who were detained there for three days without adequate food or medical care, without even a bed to lie down on and pressured them to take voluntary deportation, which is a form of summary expulsion to outside the United States.
They took people who have been living here for decades, people who have children and grandchildren, who have been valued members of the community for longer than I’ve been alive and [00:04:00] pressured them to, to be expelled to Mexico without ever a chance to come back, you know.
Lisa Katovich: And are they currently still out of the country?
Minju Cho: Yes. Uh, we know about 40 people were pressured into taking this form of summary expulsion. Despite requests to speak to a lawyer and their family members, they were all denied and they are still in Mexico. We filed a lawsuit in the wake of these raids to say that there are clearly established laws around how border patrol, how any immigration agent can conduct detentive stops and warrantless arrests, and in this case, border patrol flouted those completely.
We also demanded that the people who had been unlawfully expelled in violation of their due process rights be brought back to the United States. We were successful in winning a preliminary injunction order, which binds border patrol in the Eastern District of California, which is most of California, covers the whole Central Valley.
When border patrol conducts immigration enforcement in this Eastern [00:05:00] district of California, they must obey the law. That injunction is in place. And we are entitled to reporting from the government if there are arrests or stops by border patrol. We are continuing to litigate the case to its merits because this is just a preliminary order that the judge has put into place while the case is litigated to the end because that can take a very long time. It keeps the status quo in that it says, before these raids, border patrol was required to follow the law. They broke the law. They must return to the status quo. They have to follow the law. That’s what the, the judge’s order very clearly says.
We have two lawsuits about temporary protected status which challenges decisions by Secretary Noem, she’s the Secretary of Homeland Security, to terminate temporary protected status for several countries. So temporary protected status is a form of lawful status that allows people to live here, have a work permit, uh, have jobs. go to school, contribute to the community.
[00:06:00] The Trump administration has sought to terminate this status, which would then make over a million people instantly undocumented. So we have brought lawsuits to challenge determinations for TPS as to Venezuela, Haiti. Nepal, Nicaragua and Honduras, and those cases are pending in the courts. Um, we did win an order from the district court in the Venezuela case, which was the very first one, but unfortunately the Trump administration appealed it all the way to the Supreme Court, and so the order that we won is on hold, and so this is definitely not the last word, and we are going to do everything in our power to protect the TPS community.
Lisa Katovich: Looking at the history of immigration all the way back to 1924, the Johnson Reed Act, it seems like over the years it has seesawed back and forth because of labor shortage, but now it feels different, more of a criminalization stance. Do you think it’s different now or is it still about economic policy?
Minju Cho: [00:07:00] Economics is definitely core to immigration policy. The intersection with what this administration would call criminality is not as straightforward as they would have you think so, until, you know, the last 25 years or so, there was a lot more flexibility, for example, on the southern border, which allowed people who lived on either side of the border to cross the border for school, for work, precisely because of how intertwined the economies of the southern border are with the towns and cities on the other side in Mexico.
With more draconian border related laws, you know, with, with kind of a desire, uh, in Congress and in the, in the White House to make much stricter immigration laws, including under democratic administrations, especially I would say Bill Clinton.
Lisa Katovich: Mm-hmm.
Minju Cho: In 1996
Lisa Katovich: Even Obama.
Minju Cho: Absolutely. As our immigration laws became more stringent, it began to [00:08:00] make unlawful, actions, which for many, many decades had just been routine, especially for people living on the southern border. What we could think of as a black and white “is this criminal or not”, I think it’s much more complicated than that. I’ll also say for temporary protected status, in particular, the statute that Congress passed created this status because of humanitarian and natural disasters that were making it impossible for people to safely return to their countries. And so they said, well, if you are a national of a country where a terrible, natural disaster has occurred, like Hurricane Mitch 35 years ago in Central America. Or the earthquake in Nepal in 2010, or the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
Then for those nationals who happen to be in the United States for one reason or another when this event occurred, making it too dangerous for you to safely return home, we will allow you to stay here temporarily as your home country gets back on its feet. [00:09:00] In that time, people have built lives here. They’ve gotten mortgages, they’ve gotten married, they’ve had children. And what this administration is trying to do is they’re telling those people, you have 60 days to get out before you’re undocumented, you know, before you lack lawful status. And we could pick you up anytime and throw you in a detention center.
Lisa Katovich: And many of them, as you said, have, have children now.
Minju Cho: Yes
Lisa Katovich: and were born here. So the birthright citizenship issue arises and that, that is an ACLU case as well.
Minju Cho: Yep. So there is an ACLU case on birthright citizenship, and that was filed in New Hampshire. Um, so our affiliate is not involved, but of course it’s an issue that is core to our interests, especially because the foundational Supreme Court case that recognized birthright citizenship for ALL was Wong Kim Ark and he was born in San Francisco in Chinatown. And so we at the ACLU, Northern California and all Californians have a very special connection to this concept [00:10:00] that birthright citizenship is for everyone.
There is a case in the ninth circuit out of uh, Washington State and in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the various birthright, citizenship injunctions. A lot of the cases have moved for nationwide class certification. I mean, it is such a blatantly unconstitutional attempt by this administration.
If anything is going to withstand judicial review, it’s going to be these orders that say the Constitution says that everyone born in the borders of the United States is a US citizen. For me, you know, this is personal as well, because my parents were not citizens when I was born in the United States. I was born in Oakland and my father was a student.
I was born here because he was pursuing his graduate studies here, and because of birthright citizenship, I am the first US citizen in my family. And because I was born here, I have had so many opportunities to pursue education, to go to law school [00:11:00] and take out federal loans, which I’m paying back as I speak.
But if I had been considered not a citizen, I would not have even had the opportunities to take out those loans to pursue an education and to do the civil rights work that I have dreamed of doing since I was a little girl. The Birthright Citizenship Executive Order would say the only children who can be born citizens in this country are the children of citizens or lawful permanent residents.
There are SO many people here who are neither citizens nor lawful permanent residents, and the executive order would be devastating to those families and the children that they have had and will have.
Lisa Katovich: Do you think that this is the case that will go to the Supreme Court on the 14th Amendment?
Minju Cho: I think it is entirely up to the Trump administration because they will lose. They will lose in every court.
Lisa Katovich: So you’re talking about all the lower courts?
Minju Cho: Yep.
Lisa Katovich: That is an interesting point because the lower courts are more and more important than ever.
Minju Cho: You know, they always have been because they are [00:12:00] the first line of defense. Not all cases filter up to the appellate courts and the Supreme Court takes such a small number of cases, so the district courts are tremendously important. The judges who are hearing these cases are doing extraordinarily important.
The executive order is so blatantly unconstitutional that they’re going to lose at the district courts and they’re going to lose at the courts of appeal. And the only question is whether the Solicitor General who makes these decisions for the federal government, will choose to petition for certiorari, which is, you know, apply to the Supreme Court and ask them to hear the case.
So that’s up to them. And whatever political considerations they decide are at stake for them and for the White House. Uh, so we’ll just have to see. But the Supreme Court made clear during its oral argument in these cases earlier this year, they expressed extreme discomfort and skepticism, even the more right-wing conservative members about the actual merits of the case, whether the birthright citizenship [00:13:00] executive order is lawful. If there’s any policy from this White House that they’re going to strike down, I think this is a very good candidate.
In addition to kind of the bigger litigation I mentioned, we at ACLU NorCal have also brought a couple of individual habeas petitions, and this has been in response to the practice of ICE arresting people at courthouses and check-ins. They’ve been arresting people who ICE has already once decided, you are not a danger, you are not a flight risk, and so you can pursue your immigration case at liberty from the outside, not in detention. And they have been arresting those folks without notice and without any change circumstances and just saying, now we have bed space, and so now we’re just gonna arbitrarily detain you.
We have a client who was a 19-year-old young man, asylum seeker.You know, he has a, a job, he pays his bills. He has followed every rule that has been asked of him and he has a lawful work permit, and he, um, was picked up at a courthouse and sent hundreds of miles away. The thing is, there’s so many stories like this, and we were able to bring a [00:14:00] habeas petition for him.
We argued that the Constitution did not allow his detention. The court agreed and ordered his release on the spot, and he was released that day. People are bringing these individual cases for freedom across the country. Virtually all the judges who are hearing these claims are ordering people’s release because the manner in which ICE is conducting these arrests is so clearly unconstitutional. And if ICE has not shown you to be a flight risk or danger, they cannot arrest you and detain you. They’re doing it because they can get away with it. Because the truth is, there are so many more people who need these habeas petitions than there are lawyers to bring them because they have to be done either one by one or just a few people at a time. Because the way the Supreme Court has interpreted certain laws, if there’s a lawsuit around detention to challenge someone’s detention, those have to be brought on a one by one basis, or at most, a few people in one case, they cannot be brought in a class action.
So this is just an example of how what the Supreme Court does has such a profound [00:15:00] effect in creating these structural barriers to what civil rights lawyers can do.
Lisa Katovich: So much of this is performative. The numbers aren’t even as large as under Biden.
Minju Cho: I, I totally get what you’re saying. Like the number of ice arrests. Yes, and people called Obama, the Deporter in Chief because he deported so many people, and a lot of them were at the southern border, expedited removal, which is deportation without a judge, you know, it’s just a, an immigration agent that makes the decision. Because the Trump administration has effectively sealed the southern border and yet they’re putting so much pressure on ICE to deport people. You know, a quota of 3000 a day is what has been reported, which is completely unrealistic. What ICE is doing is they’re going into the interior of the country and seeking out people inside the country who’ve been here for a long time and who have stronger ties to the country, to arrest them to meet this artificial quota.
Lisa Katovich: Wow.
Minju Cho: And that is why we are seeing these videos of [00:16:00] incredibly traumatic arrests. I mean, the, the volume of them, the, the extreme brutality in them is unlike what the public has seen until now because there is so much pressure to conduct arrest and what ICE is doing is going into communities with many immigrants, including in California, places where they know they can pick up immigrants. So that includes people who are going to immigration court for the hearings just like they have been ordered to go. People who are going to ICE to check in as they have been ordered to do.
People who are following every rule that ICE has given them, that the immigration system has told them to follow, who are pursuing their asylum cases or other immigration cases in the courts. And ICE knows who they are and has their information, and that is why they are going to these courthouses or, you know, asking people to come into offices and then arresting them right then and there.
Lisa Katovich: What should you do if confronted here in California by ICE?
Minju Cho: Everyone has constitutional rights in this country, no [00:17:00] matter your immigration status. One important right to know about is your Fourth Amendment right, and that’s your right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure. If an ICE agent or border patrol agent approaches you and starts asking you questions about who you are, what is your immigration status, the Fourth Amendment says you do not have to answer questions if you are not being detained. So what you can say is, ‘Am I free to go?’ If they say yes, then the Constitution says you have the right to walk away and the officer cannot do anything about it. It is important not to run away because if you run, then the case law says that that can create a reason why they may have lawful belief that you are fleeing for some reason, and they can then detain you. So walk calmly away and do not answer questions. If they say, ‘no, you are not free to go’, then you are being detained and at that point you have the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. You [00:18:00] can say ‘I do not want to answer questions without an attorney present’.
Of course, knowing your rights only goes so far as the federal agent who’s going to respect them. Um, and people have to make decisions about how to keep themselves safe if they are trying to assert their rights and for one reason or another, the agent is not allowing them to. If you are being arrested, even if it’s unlawful, if they don’t have a warrant and there’s no reason for them to think you are going to flee. Um, if they do have a warrant or they say they have a warrant, but they refuse to show it to you. I would say do not resist arrest, but do not say anything. You know, the place to contest an unlawful arrest is later in the courts.
Try to remember everything you can about the facts of what happened so that you can relay it to a lawyer later, and the lawyer can then help you suppress the arrest or whatever it is. But if you are, for instance, an immigrant who could be put into deportation [00:19:00] proceedings, then, you know, in the immigration court, a lawyer can say, I moved to suppress whatever happened from the arrest and to terminate this case because the arrest happened in violation of my client’s Fourth Amendment rights.
But it is essential that you don’t start saying things that could then harm your case. And that’s where the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent comes in. Agents do have the right to continue to question you if they think that you might answer. Like it’s just part of their interrogation techniques.
They’ll just keep pestering you with, with questions. And unless you say out loud, “I am invoking my right to remain silent and I will not answer questions without an attorney”, um, they, they may continue to, to ask you questions to try and get you to say something.
Lisa Katovich: So what about the part about getting an attorney? What, what is the process there?
Minju Cho: Immigration agents are supposed to give you a list of pro bono lawyers that might take your case for free, but the need is so much greater than the resources available of free legal [00:20:00] services providers. I understand realistically it can be difficult, um, for people in that situation.
If you have family members, loved ones that you can call and tell them, you know, this is what happened to me. Can you find me a lawyer? Family members can then try and hire someone to represent you and try to get you out.
Lisa Katovich: California has a reputation as a sanctuary state. So many programs with the police are funded by ICE. Even in Alameda County, they have accepted money from the federal government in exchange for sharing sensitive information.
Minju Cho: California has a great sanctuary law, the California Values Act, but it has plenty of carve outs. What you’re describing is one of those carve outs. There are a lot of ways for state agencies to cooperate or collude with ICE in ways that are not covered by the sanctuary law.
One huge gap is the role of California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, [00:21:00] CDCR, which runs the prisons in the state. The California Values Act does not actually prohibit collusion between CDCR and ICE. It covers county jails, but not the state prison system. And so today in California, a huge number of the ICE arrests are people who are being transferred from CDCR custody to ICE.
But what people might not know is that we have a lawsuit against CDCR pending. You know, we filed it in the previous administration because we uncovered evidence that CDCR was making lists of people that they thought were foreign because of being born outside the United States or having a foreign sounding name and sending lists of those names to ICE and asking them, do you wanna come pick them
But 55% of foreign born people in CDCR custody are actually US citizens. So they were [00:22:00] basically just racially profiling, based on name and appearance, sending lists of people who are non-white over to ICE, including US citizens, simultaneously preventing those individuals even if they were citizens, for instance, or ineligible for transfer to ICE, from participating in rehabilitative programs that would be important for a parole application or even, you know, if they were transferred to an immigration docket for showing that, you know, they had put time and investment into improving themselves. So we have a lawsuit to try and stop that practice once and for all.
Lisa Katovich: So how can immigrants feel comfortable using any kind of hotline? Are there mutual aid networks in California that have been supporting immigrant families that can be trusted?
Minju Cho: There are so many community groups that uplift the rights of immigrants and have been working in this space for many years. We saw a large increase in the number of nonprofit organizations serving immigrants in the first Trump administration.[00:23:00]
They’ve been in place ever since. So they are really well situated to support immigrants during these terrifying times. And I want to point people to Rapid Response Networks in your local area. The California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, which is a partner organization, there are hotlines for rapid response networks all over the state.
If you see ICE activity, immigration activity, you can call them. They can send volunteers to that place to observe what’s going on, to verify if it’s going on, to help people, um, know their rights and to assert their rights in the moment. There are a lot of rumors going around these days because of how scared people are. If they have already debunked a rumor, they can assure you on the phone, you know, we looked into it, this is a rumor, you know, you don’t have to worry. What’s important for our communities is power, not panic.
Lisa Katovich: The government has given ICE access to the records of 80 million people on Medicaid, and that includes undocumented immigrants, I assume. What is the [00:24:00] ACLU’S position on this unprecedented release of personal information?
Minju Cho: The ACLU absolutely opposes this kind of sensitive information sharing with this government. I think it is so nefarious and absolutely chilling and will really harm Californians from accessing the social services that make us all a stronger and healthier state.
It affects health. It affects so many children. It affects people with disabilities. The amount of information sharing about immigrants has been really terrifying. We saw that in their efforts to get IRS tax data because so many undocumented immigrants pay taxes every year, taxes that they’ll never see the benefits of through social security benefits.
And. they have been assured up until now, your information will be protected. It will not be turned over to immigration enforcement. Unfortunately, we’ve seen, you know, the Supreme Court said DOGE could access the social security information of all Americans, um, including if [00:25:00] you’re an immigrant.
Lisa Katovich: How is the state of California’s economy uniquely tied to this immigrant population and what risk does this current federal policy have on the future of California? It must be massive.
Minju Cho: I think you’re absolutely right. People who live in communities with a high proportion of immigrants, you can see with your own eyes that grocery stores are emptier, people are not going shopping, not spending money, not being part of the community in the way that they were before. because people are so scared is an agent gonna come up out of nowhere? A masked armed federal agent covering their face. Am I going to be kidnapped in broad daylight? People just have no idea. Farm workers are tremendously affected by the raids that are going on, and you see Republican Congress people in California saying, we don’t want our farm workers, our hardworking farm workers. to be affected by the administration’s [00:26:00] immigration enforcement.
We saw the White House a month or two ago, acknowledging that, and saying that we’re going to scale back on agricultural rates, but at the same time, we’ve seen them continue. There were recent raid in Camarillo, for instance, and many workers were severely injured, one even died. And psychological trauma that people have experienced because of these raids speaks to the real brutality of them, you know, excessive force against unarmed innocent people has been truly shocking.
Lisa Katovich: What can we do as regular people to support immigrants right now and push back against these abuses that you’re talking about?
Minju Cho: Yeah, there are a lot of things that come to mind. So one is just letting your immigrant neighbors and friends know that you care about what is happening in the country. that you are someone that they can come to, um, that they can depend on. If they are afraid, offer to go grocery shopping for them. Help them feel more safe and [00:27:00] supported, um, during these really terrifying times. It’s also important for non-immigrants, for Americans to know their rights.
If you encounter ICE, you want to know what are my rights? What am I allowed to do? For instance, it is lawful for you to film an immigration arrest, but you must do so openly, not covertly. If, um, there is ICE activity in your area, you, you just educate yourself on, on what a bystander can safely do and lawfully do to try and protect your immigrant friends and neighbors.
You can also donate to community organizations, to mutual aid networks, that are supporting immigrants during this time. People can also call their local representatives, make your voice heard, tell them that you do not support what’s going on and that you expect them to stand up for immigrants in your community.
Lisa Katovich: Despite all of these challenges you’ve been telling us today, what gives you hope for the future of immigration rights in the U.S.?
Minju Cho: I have always wanted to be working in civil rights and human rights. Someone who can make a [00:28:00] positive difference for the world. And I didn’t quite understand how difficult that would be, how many setbacks there is in this work, because as a little girl, I thought, there is a relentless forward march to progress.
I didn’t quite understand until I, I really started doing the work that it really is, at best. two steps forward, one step back, because when you are vindicating the rights of someone with less power, the deck is stacked against you. I mean, we’re in California and it’s hard. Like I know that my colleagues in the South face much greater structural challenges, but what keeps us going is the clients and the community of partner organizations that are all in this fight together.
Being able to be with my fellow advocates and other immigrants rights supporters, people who are fighting every day to protect the rights of immigrants. It really gives me a sense of community, of support, a feeling that no one is in this alone. [00:29:00] Everyone is sharing knowledge and supporting each other.
That is really what keeps me going. And then of course, the victories when we get them, you know, we have a lot of victories in California or in the Ninth Circuit, and then it goes to the Supreme Court. It’s so much more of a conservative court than what we have in California and is very tilted toward the right.
And um, yeah, that has just been devastating. But you have to find a way to pick up the pieces and keep going because like ultimately I’m a US citizen. I’m not the one that is facing the brunt of the harms of this administration. No matter how devastated I feel, it’s a million times worse for the people who are actually facing the real effects of this administration’s cruelty, and so I have to do my job, which is to fight for them in the courts. You know, take what is happening in real life and translate it into language that a court will listen to. Every single person in this country should know their rights. Everyone has constitutional rights, nobody’s gonna be telling you what they are. So it is important to educate [00:30:00] yourself beforehand, uh, so that you are comfortable asserting them. So if you go to our website, www.aclunc.org, we have information about the cases that we filed. about the rapid response networks that I mentioned, the hotlines. We have a lot of know your rights materials gathered there. specifically as relates to immigration enforcement.
Lisa Katovich: Minju, thank you so much for doing the hard work of protecting our constitutional rights.
Minju Cho: Thank you so much for having me.
Lisa Katovich: Our guest today was Minju Cho, Senior Staff Attorney for the Immigrants Rights Program at the ACLU of Northern California.
You’ve been listening to Berkeley Brainwaves on KALX Berkeley.
