The lawsuit was filed by Deshanae L. Brown, who alleges she was subjected to discrimination based on her race, sex, and disability, citing violations of federal and state laws including Title VII, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Family and Medical Leave Act.
The ruling upheld a lower court's preliminary injunction, the latest rebuke to a major shift that advocates warn would push 170,000 people in federally subsidized housing back into homelessness.
We're spread so thin that nobody's really been given the opportunity to be adequately trained for some of the assignments that we're sent off to. The situation hasn't gotten any better, and our concerns are the same, and they're growing. Staffing shortages have existed for years in the criminal division and are being exacerbated as the San Francisco district attorney's office files more cases.
"What's most problematic is that the extraordinary has become ordinary. It's just a matter of course now that when you issue an opinion that some people don't like, you're going to get threats, you're going to get death threats, and that is obviously problematic on many levels."
People who've been waiting for years to have their asylum case adjudicated are now going to wait even more. Atkinson said she is already seeing cases that were on the calendar for this year being pushed to 2028 and 2029.
Drawing from years in public defense and her work co-founding Partners for Justice, she explains why the criminal legal system often punishes instability rather than crime - and how policy choices, not individual morality, frequently determine who enters the system.
"At first it was a message that you better fall in line or you're going to get fired," said Jeremiah Johnson, a former immigration judge who worked in San Francisco's court until his termination last year. Now, "it's a message that your court is going to be closed."
