Julia Harumi Mass

      Julia Harumi Mass is a staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California and lead attorney in the ACLU’s lawsuit against the Sonoma County Sheriff Department and the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) agency.

      Born in Bellflower, California, Julia received her BA in philosophy at Reed College and law degree at UCLA. “From an early age, I've been concerned about civil liberties,” she said. “My mother, who was a Japanese American citizen in Los Angeles during World War II, was incarcerated with her family in this country’s internment camps as a child. She was active in the redress movement and I learned about governmental abuses of power, race discrimination and our constitutional promise of equality before the law as a child.”

      Since joining the ACLU in 2003, Julia has worked on a variety of civil rights and civil liberties issues involving criminal justice and the rights of students, immigrants and public employees. In 2005, she worked to bring home two American citizens the U.S. government refused to allow to return from Pakistan without submitting to interrogation and a lie-detector test. In the last two years, Julia has been Involved in monitoring immigration enforcement practices, including a lawsuit on behalf of a young American boy who was held in immigration detention with his father in March 2007. Before joining the ACLU, Julia worked as a union lawyer in Pasadena and clerked for the Honorable Warren J. Ferguson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.