News & Commentary

Last month, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana announced that Ronald Sullivan, a professor in the law school, would no longer serve as faculty dean of Winthrop House, a residential dorm at Harvard. Sullivan was the first African American to serve as a faculty dean and had served in that role at Winthrop House for a decade. But when he chose to join the legal team defending Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein in his upcoming criminal trial on allegations of sexual assault, his decision sparked protests and sit-ins, as students demanded his ouster as dean. In the end, Harvard caved to the pressure.The decision sacrificed principles central to our legal system. The ACLU is committed to fighting sexual assault, in the workplace, the home, on campus,

Housing discrimination takes different forms in different eras. More than fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act (FHA), it’s rare to see an advertisement for housing that says “Whites Only.” But in Chesterfield County, Virginia, where a Black resident is almost three times as likely as a white resident to have a criminal record, an explicit policy barring any individual with a conviction from housing has a similar effect. Sterling Glen is an apartment complex in a white neighborhood in Chesterfield County. Since at least 2017, Sterling

As of Thursday, May 30th, New Hampshire is a state without the death penalty. It took decades to be able to say that. In the end, it came down to a single vote in both the state House and Senate. Thursday’s Senate vote means that all of New England is free of the death penalty, making it the first full region of the country to reject capital punishment. The victory is a credit to the 279 representatives and 17 senators who voted in support of the repeal bill ea

This piece originally ran at Slate. Discussing the origins of the FBI’s Russia investigation, Attorney General William Barr recently claimed that “

This morning the ACLU, along with 169 other civil rights, medical, scientific, patient advocacy, and women’s health organizations, including the Mayo Clinic, Breast Cancer Action, Lung Cancer Research Foundation, the Huntington’s Disease Society of America, the Women’s March, University of Washington, and many others sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property strongly opposing a draft bill that would allow companies to patent our genes. Yes. You read that right. The draft bill is deeply concerning because if it becomes law, it would allow private compan

Last week, while the Department of Health and Human Services was rolling-back Obama administration protections for transgender people, it was reported that HHS is also preparing to issue a nationwide rule that would allow for discrimination against same-sex couples seeking to open their hearts and homes to children in the foster care system. While we don’t yet know what form this rule will take, one thing is clear: It will be bad for the over 440,000 children in governmen

The Drug Enforcement Administration is once again trying to access private prescription records of patients — this time in New Hampshire — without a warrant, despite a state law to the contrary. Today the ACLU filed a brief in support of the state of New Hampshire’s fight to defend the privacy of our sensitive medical information against unwarranted searches by law enforcement. New Hampshire — like 48 other states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico — has e

From the beginning of his campaign for president, Donald Trump claimed that he was going to build a wall along the southern border. He said “nobody builds walls better than me.” He said the wall would be “big” and “beautiful.” He said someone else would pay for it. And he said it would be built so fast that “your head would spin.”Last night, for the first time, a federal judge made clear to President Trump he couldn’t get his wall by illegally diverting taxpayer money. The judge’s ruling comes in an ACLU lawsuit on behalf of the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC). Together, the Sierra Club and SBCC represent the communities who live in, protect, and treasure the lands and communities along our southern border. For years, these communities have engaged in the democratic process and successfully persuaded their congressional representatives to deny President Trump funding to build his wall.Our lawsuit centers on the question of whether the president abused his power to divert funds for a border wall Congress denied him. Unfortunately for President Trump, the Constitution is clear on the matter: only Congress has the power to decide how taxpayer funds are spent. And Congress, like border communities, said no to the President’s wall.Congress didn’t bow to Trump’s pressure even after he caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history over his demands for billions of dollars for his wall. Congress allocated only a fraction of the money that Trump demanded, and imposed restrictions on where and how quickly any border barriers could be built. In a blatant abuse of power meant to circumvent Congress, President Trump declared a national emergency on February 15, 2019, and announced he would illegally divert $6.7 billion from military construction and other accounts for the border wall project. From the beginning, the emergency was obviously a sham. Trump said as much himself when he declared the emergency, saying he “didn’t need to do this” but he’d prefer to build the wall “much faster.” He added that he declared a national emergency because he was “not happy” that Congress “skimped” on the wall by denying him the billions he demanded.Despite this, the Trump administration tried to argue in court last Friday that Congress never actually “denied” President Trump the billions of dollars he is now trying to take from the military. The court rejected the administration’s argument, reminding the administration that “the reality is that Congress was presented with—and declined to grant—a $5.7 billion request for border barrier construction.”The court’s ruling blocks the sections of wall that the Trump administration announced would be built with military pay and pension funds. It also invites us to ask the court to block additional projects as they are announced in the future. The judge emphasized the government’s commitment to inform the court immediately about future decisions to build.It may be easy to ridicule President Trump’s desperation for a border wall — an absurd and xenophobic campaign promise for which he has only himself to blame. But as pointless and wasteful as it may be, Trump’s campaign promise now threatens to cause irreparable and real damage to our constitutional checks and balances, the rule of law, border communities, and the environment.The wall is part of an exclusionary agenda that President Trump has targeted, over and over, at people of color. From his notorious Muslim Ban, to his efforts to eliminate protections for immigrants from Haiti, Sudan, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, courts have found “evidence that President Trump harbors an animus against non-white, non-European” immigrants. Trump has repeatedly justified his wall by lying about border communities, falsely claiming that America needs a wall.Border communities know firsthand that walls are dangerous and wasteful. They divide neighborhoods, worsen dangerous flooding, destroy lands and wildlife, and waste resources. As our clients explained to the court, “we are a community that is safe, that supports migrants, that works well together and supports one another, that is worthy of existence.”  What border communities truly need is infrastructure and investment, not militarization and isolation. The court’s order is a vindication of border communities’ advocacy for themselves, and of our Constitution’s separation of powers. As the court wrote, “Congress’s ‘absolute’ control over federal expenditures—even when that control may frustrate the desires of the Executive Branch regarding initiatives it views as important—is not a bug in our constitutional system. It is a feature of that system, and an essential one.”

In 2012, I visited the federal supermax prison ADX Florence in Colorado and spoke with men living in solitary confinement. I listened closely to their stories of anguish, but I could not understand how they survived it. They told me of the horror of being trapped in a small room, without access to fresh air or sunlight, for at least 22 hours a day—alone, afraid, and not knowing when it would end. I learned that people in solitary confinement talk to the walls, to themselves, to no one — sometimes they stop talking altogether. Those are the types of horrors we now know that Immigration and Customs Enforc