News & Commentary

During the first Donald Trump administration, the ACLU fought his unlawful policies more than 400 times. We’re even more prepared now.

As the spread of COVID-19 continues across Tennessee and the United States, it is more important than ever that government officials follow public health experts' recommendations to ensure a response plan that protects the health, safety and civil liberties of all people.The ACLU of Tennessee is monitoring the situation to ensure that the response is ​grounded in science and public health, not politics, and is no more intrusive upon civil liberties than is absolutely necessary.Along with our partners, we have been taking action during the pandemic to:

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We marched with millions around the world. On January 21st, millions of people around the world took to the streets in the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. In Washington D.C. alone, the crowd was estimated at 500,000. Eight marches and rallies for women’s equality including thousands of people were held in Tennessee alone. We became a legislative force, urging state lawmakers to vote in favor of civil liberties over 125,000 times. While it has been a divisive few months at the Tennessee legislature, ACLU-TN’s supporters’ engagement has helped secure some major victories at the Capitol. This session, we asked our supporters to contact lawmakers on bills ranging from abortion access to fair treatment of immigrants to the school-to-prison-pipeline and you answered in force, sending thousands of letters to state legislators. Details can be found at our Legislative Action Center. We helped bring a refugee family home to Tennessee. After the Trump Administration’s first Muslim ban barred him from starting a new life in the U.S., despite his having worked for the U.S. government in Iraq, Fuad Sharef Suleman and his family were finally cleared to travel with the help of ACLU-TN, the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, and others. The family arrived in Nashville in February. We swiftly and decisively stopped the discriminatory anti-Muslim travel bans. When Trump issued a shocking executive