ACLU of Massachusetts Staff Attorney Laura Rótolo contributed the following:

It’s Friday afternoon. Time for another hollow announcement by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) purporting to fix its controversial “Secure Communities” program. These announcements—exquisitely timed to avoid media attention—have become such a pattern that advocates have come to expect “Friday surprises.”

This time, ICE announced its response to the criticisms of a task force comprising a diverse group of stakeholders hand-picked by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The task force criticized Secure Communities (S-Comm) for its inconsistent messaging, lack of transparency, and interference with community policing.

ACLU of Massachusetts Development Director Steve Hurley wrote this guest blog.

"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Those words--originally directed to U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy by Massachusetts resident Joseph Welch, lead counsel for the U.S. Army during the "McCarthy hearings" in 1954--came to mind earlier this week upon hearing of Nate Little's verbal attack on Harry Belafonte.

Little is the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Republican Party, who contacted the press this week to call Belafonte's political views "extreme," "repugnant," and--here comes that last refuge of any scoundrel--"anti-American." State GOP Chairman Bob Maginn kept up the attack today.

Despite what others may say, justice has not been done in the Trayvon Martin shooting death simply because the accused shooter, George Zimmerman, has been indicted for second-degree murder.

If we had real justice in America, Trayvon Martin would still be alive.

ACLU of Massachusetts Education Director Nancy Murray contributed the following guest post:

Tarek Mehanna is no David Stone.

David Stone and members of his Hutaree anti-government militia amassed a huge arsenal of weapons, including the ingredients for explosives, and allegedly plotted to kill a police officer and bomb his funeral. A federal judge in Michigan said they were just venting and exercising their First Amendment rights.

Mehanna, a 29-year-old pharmacist from Sudbury, Massachusetts, emailed friends, downloaded videos, translated and posted documents on the web, and traveled to and from Yemen in 2004.

Watching court arguments for and against equal marriage in a federal appeals court in Boston today, I have to wonder how "equal protection under the law" can have any meaning if Congress is permitted to discriminate against an entire class of Americans.

I was particularly perplexed by Paul Clement, the attorney flown in by Republican House Speaker John Boehner and the US House of Representatives' Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group to defend the "Defense of Marriage Act" (DOMA) after the Department of Justice refused to defend the law. Just last week, Clement was arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court that Congress trampled on the Constitution when it passed a law that regulates the health insurance market by requiring everyone to participate or pay a fine.