Whether pension plans established by religiously affiliated health care providers are exempt as “church plans” from federal law protecting employees’ pension rights and retirement benefits.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit against the fifth largest health care system in the U.S., Dignity Health, because it denies transgender employees health insurance coverage for medically necessary transition-related health care.

The ACLU of Northern California, in partnership with ACLU National’s Criminal Law Reform Project and the firm Paul Hastings LLP, have filed a lawsuit against California, Governor Brown, and Fresno County seeking a writ of mandate and injunctive and declaratory relief to fix the county’s failing public defense system—which is supposed to provide a rigorous legal defense to people who are accused of crimes in Fresno and cannot afford to hire their own lawyer.

On June 14, 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union, along with the ACLU of Northern California, and the firms Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and Van Der Hout, Brigagliano & Nightingale, have filed a settlement agreement in the class-action suit Lyon v. the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement agency (ICE). The settlement requires the agency to give detainees at four Northern California immigrant detention facilities improved access to telephones, including creating private spaces for free and direct calls, delivering phone messages, removing arbitrarily short limits on call duration, and making accommodations for indigent immigrants.

The ACLU of California, the ACLU, Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus, and the law firm Bingham McCutchen have filed a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s Suspicious Activity Reporting program — a vast expansion of the federal government’s domestic intelligence network. The SAR program supposedly facilitates the collection and sharing of information about activity that appears “suspicious,” but in practice it targets First Amendment-protected activity, encourages racial and religious profiling, and violates federal law. The plaintiffs are five U.S. citizens whose information has been entered into counterterrorism databases for engaging in lawful conduct, and who have been subject to unwarranted law enforcement and scrutiny. The lawsuit was filed in July 2014 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In March 2017, the District Court granted the government’s motion for summary judgment, upholding the SAR program’s standard for data collection. We are appealing that ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.