In an important victory for civil liberties and defense of anti-genocide protestors, Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Erika Ziegenhorn ruled that UC Santa Cruz was not entitled to the wide breadth of information it sought to access when it seized a student activist’s phone, granting in part a motion to quash the University’s unconstitutional and invasive search warrant. The motion was filed by attorneys at the Center for Protest Law & Litigation, the ACLU of Northern California and Thomas Seabaugh.
The student, Laaila Irshad, a resident advisor, is a named plaintiff in a lawsuit against UCSC over banning her and others from campus for participating in a pro-Palestine, antiwar protest in May 2024. On October 1, 2024, two weeks after Irshad filed suit, campus police seized her phone while she was standing outside her dorm in her pajamas during a fire drill. The University sought to justify what appears as a retaliatory action by stating that it is investigating an incident of vandalism that occurred months earlier and which has never been referred for prosecution.
The University fought to maintain access to all of Irshad’s communications and records dating back to elementary school, including communications with her attorneys. The University even hired a private law firm to advocate for this extreme position in Court. The Judge’s ruling narrows the time frame of the search to a single month, and orders that all communications between Irshad and her attorneys as well as records outside the one month time period be destroyed.
“When the police can search activists’ personal cell phones without limits, freedom of speech is in jeopardy,” said CPLL senior counsel Rachel Lederman. “Yesterday, the court substantially limited the scope of this phone search, even while the university police continued to insist that there is an active criminal investigation. This is one small victory in the battle against universities’ attempts to suppress the Palestine movement, and we will continue to push back on UC and other colleges’ overreach to preserve students’ right to express dissent.”