BHB Impact submits an amicus brief in support of Mexico on behalf of District Attorney offices across US cities and counties. These areas are then devastated by the ensuing violence and crime directly resulting from guns sales by US gun manufacturers that target and impact Mexico. The crime and violence boomerangs right back up to the US.

In a January 22, 2024 landmark First Circuit decision, the court held that US gun manufacturers knowingly sell guns to dealers that they know will violate gun sale laws and market to drug cartels. As pointed out in the amicus brief, when you put assault weapons into commerce and in the hands of violent criminal gangs that operate across boarders, they will kill people, ‘Defendants have known this for a long time. They just don’t care.’

Press: The New York Times, CNN, Reuters, Axios, The New Yorker, and Democracy Now!

Court Opinion: Estados Unidos Mexicanos v. Smith & Wesson Brands Inc., et al (1st Cir. 2024)

Amicus Brief

In April 2022, BHB filed a lawsuit in Texas to stop the censorship of books in the Llano County, TX, public library. BHB currently represents seven ideologically diverse Llano County, Texas, residents who are challenging the county's banning and removal of library books for pretextual -- and unconstitutional -- reasons. On March 30, 2023, BHB secured a preliminary injunction: District Judge Robert Pitman of the Western District of Texas found BHB’s clients were likely to succeed on the merits of their First Amendment claims and ordered the county to return the banned books to the library, to make them available for check out in the card catalogue, and to not remove any book, for any reason, during the pendency of this case. The case is now before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Little, et al v. Llano County et al. (W.D. Tex)

Press: The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, Wall Street Journal, AXIOS, News Week, and NPR.

BHB represents four individuals and two organizations aiming to stop Clearview AI Inc. from illicitly scraping social media to create a database of millions of faceprints, which it sells to law enforcement. In October 2022, the court denied Clearview AI’s motion to dismiss, allowing our clients’ claims to go forward. This decision sets the stage for a major victory for Californians, protecting citizens’ privacy rights and serving as a bulwark against the surveillance state. 

Renderos v. Clearview et al. (N.D. Cal.)

Partner Organization: Just Futures Law

Press: Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, and CNN Business

BHB represented a class of prisoners who have been systematically denied access to their attorneys in violation of their U.S. Constitutional rights. In December 2021, BHB secured an injunction against the Massachusetts Department of Corrections (“MDOC”), preventing the state from using faulty drug test results to punish inmates. Since the injunction was granted, the MDOC approved a new policy, which tracks the injunction and preserves the confidentiality of the attorney-client relationship inside Massachusetts prisons. BHB also has a federal suit pending against the manufacturer and distributor of the faulty test, who misrepresented its unreliability to the DOC.

Green v. Sirchie et al. (D. MA.)
Green v. Massachusetts DOC (Suffolk, SS.)

Partner organization: Justice Catalyst
Press: Vice, Reuters, and CommonWealth Magazine

BHB sued Management & Training Corporation, a private prison operator, for extreme abuse and torture at Imperial Regional Detention Facility. On April 19 a federal court held that private prison operator Management and Training Corporation (MTC) cannot escape trial or avoid punitive damages for keeping a civil detainee in solitary confinement without justification for fourteen months. The Court denied MTC’s bid to dismiss claims by Plaintiff Carlos Murillo, who was held by ICE at MTC’s private prison in Calexico, CA. He claims that in contravention of federal standards, MTC confined him in a “jail cell so small that he could almost touch both walls” where he spent 23 hours a day alone for 14 months.

Vega v. Management and Training Corporation (S.D. Cal.)

Partner organizations: Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, The Promise Institute for Human Rights, and The California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice

Press: KQED, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post

A settlement was reached in BHB’s lawsuit against the City of Huntington Park and the Huntington Park Police Department to stop its illegal practice of holding immigrants for ICE on the basis of ICE detainer requests. The city agreed to a court-ordered injunction barring it from future illegal conduct and to make a $74,100 donation to the Council of Mexican Federations in North America, a nonprofit immigration advocacy organization, to make amends for its past practice of illegally honoring ICE detainer requests.

Maldonado v. Huntington Park Police Department (C.D. Cal.)

Press: The Los Angeles Times, Los Cerritos News, ABC-7, and Yahoo Finance

Together with the ACLU, BHB filed California Public Record Act (PRA) requests for prosecution policies and data from the District Attorney’s Office in every county in California in order to enable enforcement of the Racial Justice Act (RJA). Passed in 2020 by the California legislature, the RJA prohibits prosecutors from seeking or obtaining convictions on the basis of race and otherwise expands opportunities for defendants to challenge their convictions or sentences by demonstrating that racial bias was a contributing factor, including by showing statistically that people of one race are disproportionately charged, convicted, or given more severe sentences. We successfully brought suit against three counties who refused to respond to our PRA requests.

Partner organization: ACLU

Documents related to the implementation of the Racial Justice Act