The American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday that border inspectors have used excessive force and performed humiliating body searches on travelers entering the United States from Mexico.

Judge Murray Snow issued a ruling that created a class action, giving every Latino stopped, questioned or detained by the Sheriff’s Office since January 2007 standing in the 4-year-old civil-rights lawsuit.

Cineo Gonzales recounts how, in front of the entire class, his daughter received a Spanish-language pamphlet explaining HB 56. When Gonzales asked why the teacher gave the document to his daughter, the principal told him that they only gave the document to children who looked like weren’t from there.

The civil rights group alleges that about 55 Latino students at Glendale's Hoover High School were illegally detained, searched and interrogated.

Today Alabama law enforcement officers will have the right to question and detain anyone they suspect may be an undocumented immigrant, Gov. Robert Bentley said, after a federal judge upheld key provisions of the state’s immigration law on Wednesday.

Though immigration detention facilities look very much like prisons — and indeed often share space with jails — roughly half the people now in immigration detention have never been convicted of any crime.

Just as quickly as states have been signing their restrictionist immigration bills into law, so have immigrant and civil rights groups been responding by filing lawsuits to challenge them.

The Birmingham City Council unanimously approved Tuesday on a resolution that characterizes Alabama’s new immigration law as cruel and immoral.

With a federal judge striking down the most controversial parts of a tough immigration law in Georgia this week, a pattern has emerged of how such laws are being interpreted at the federal level, though their final fate remains uncertain.

In the battle over Tucson’s ethnic studies program, opponents of the program have been able to more or less hide their political agenda behind vague worries about the district’s Mexican American studies program. Not so now, say supporters of the ethnic studies program after an independent audit found that the programs are perfectly legal.

Alabama's new immigration law is drawing comparisons to SB1070, the anti-illegal immigration crackdown signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer last year before a judge quickly blocked it from going into effect.

An American-born high school student from New Jersey has been denied state tuition assistance because her mother is an illegal immigrant, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley signs a bill that, among other things, bars illegal immigrants from enrolling in or attending college; prohibits them from applying for or soliciting work; and makes it illegal to rent them property. The ACLU says it will sue to try to overturn the law

Alabama has jumped on the anti-immigrant bandwagon, with a new state law so nativist that news outlets have taken to unequivocally describing it as the new “toughest immigration law in the nation.”