• Founded by the American Civil Liberties Union in 1987
• Advocates open borders, unrestricted immigration, and amnesty for illegal immigrants

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) established its Immigrants' Rights Project (IRP) in 1987, ostensibly to protect all newcomers to the United States from discrimination and the violation of their legal rights. In practice, IRP is an open-borders initiative that mirrors the ACLU's dedication to defending and expanding the rights of illegal aliens. Maintaining its offices in New York and San Francisco, IRP litigates cases in federal courts and provides legal support to various immigrant groups across the U.S., focusing its efforts on certain priority areas: the restriction or denial of judicial review; unfair deportation processes; mandatory detentions; and workers' rights.

IRP's Director is Lucas Guttentag, a Harvard Law School graduate who has been with the Project since its inception. Under his leadership, IRP has strategically targeted specific judicial cases aimed at setting precedents. In 1991, for instance, Guttentag won a class action case that guaranteed asylum to 250,000 Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees, notwithstanding their affiliation with the Communist guerrilla group, the FMLN. In 2001, Guttentag argued two Supreme Court cases, INS vs. St. Cyr and Calcano-Martinez, et al. vs. INS; the result was a ruling depriving the U.S. Attorney General of the right to deport non-citizens without judicial review. (St. Cyr was a convicted drug dealer, while Calcano-Martinez and her co-plaintiffs had been convicted of assorted felonies.)

Another key IRP official is senior staff counsel Judy Rabinovitz, who also serves as a steering committee member of the National Lawyers Guild's National Immigration Project. Rabinovitz argued against the detention of HIV-positive Haitian refugees, and against the mandatory detention of illegal immigrants as dictated by the 1996 "Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act," parts of which she has been successful in having struck down by the federal courts. Senior staff counsel Lee Gelernt, who has been with IRP since 1992, has argued against secret deportation proceedings for suspected terrorists.

In 2003, IRP filed amicus curiae briefs in support of Jose Padilla, a Chicago-based al Qaeda affiliate accused in connection with an attempt to detonate a "dirty bomb" on U.S. soil, and Yaser Hamdi, an American Muslim who took up arms against the United States in Afghanistan.

In 2006 the organization condemned the "Fairness in Immigration Litigation Act of 2006," a bill intended to limit the ability of criminal aliens to file repeated frivolous appeals of their legal cases.