News & Commentary

A federal court has blocked the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, stating that it constitutes an “egregious” violation of federal law. The ruling deals a serious blow to the administration’s plan to use the 2020 census to attack the financial and political resources of immigrants and communities of color. In a decision released Tuesday, Judge Jesse M. Furman determi

Same-sex couples in North Carolina won the freedom to marry in 2014, but LGBTQ people continue to be denied equal protection under the law in many other areas of life. North Carolina is currently the only state in the nation that prevents those in same-sex rel

McDonald’s isn’t just a fast-food restaurant. It’s an American institution, with sales of $37.6 billion in 2017. And we don’t just flock there as customers. The company employs more than 1 million people at its U.S. corporate offices and more than 14,000 franchise stores. Indeed, according to one estimate, nearly 13 percent of all Americans have worked for the company at some point in its history. But in the past few years, female McDonald’s employees have begun speaking out about the ugly cost of serving up Big Macs: egregious sexual harassment. Most recently, in May 2018, 10 women working in McDonald’s restaurants stretching from California to Florida filed charges of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — the first step toward a federal civil rights lawsuit — alleging a wide range of unchecked harassment, perpetrated by supervisors and co-workers. And on Sept. 18, 2018, thousands of McDonald’s workers in 10 cities protested the company’s culture of harassment by walking off the job. As one striking worker from Chicago put it at the time, “You will hear us today. We will not stay silent anymore.”    On Monday, the ACLU joined forces with the Fight for $15 movement and the law firms of Altshuler Berz

On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will begin hearings on William Barr’s nomination to be the next attorney general of the United States, offering senators an opportunity to scrutinize his record and views. Such scrutiny is especially crucial in the Trump era. As we’ve seen throughout his time in office, from imposing the Muslim

Amid rising floodwaters from Hurricane Florence in September, two women in the custody of the Horry County Sheriff’s Office were left to drown in the back of a transport van. The facts are as straightforward as they are damning. The two deputies, Joshua Bishop and Stephen Flood, transporting Nicolette Green and Wendy

Last month, news broke that in June 2018, President Trump’s current nominee for attorney general, William P. Barr, sent an unsolicited 20-page memo to the Justice Department critiquing special counsel Robert Mueller’s current investigation into Russian election interference. Barr, who previously served as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, penned the memo as “a former official deeply concerned with

Last week, USA Today ran a hit piece on federal prisoners with the tabloid headline, “Government shutdown: Federal inmates feast on Cornish hens, steak as prison guards labor without pay.” Not to be outdone, The Washington Post followed this up with their own shameful story under the headline, “‘I been eatin like a boss’: Federal prisoners served steak by unpaid guards during shutdown.” The problem here is twofold. First, the shutdown has nothing to do with the food served to federal prisoners and, second, the food descriptions are wildly exaggerated. I should know. I was a federal prisoner from 2007 to 2013 and ate thousands of

Standing up for your First Amendment right to protest can be challenging — especially if you’re a government employee. Since Dec. 22, nearly 800,000 government employees nationwide have been affect

In 1992, a little less than a year into his new job, Attorney General William P. Barr added to the zeitgeist of “tough-on-crime” policies when he issued the Bush administration’s “24 Recommendations to Strengthen Criminal Justice.” Barr’s harsh approach, which included expanding capacity for pretrial detention and offsetting the cost of such expansion with the labor of inmates, was distilled by the Office of Policy and Communication and given an unequivocal title, “The Case for More Incarceration.” At the time, there were about 850,000 people incarcerated across America’s state and federal prisons — the highest number to that point. With Barr’s confirmation hearings for attorney general scheduled for next week, his writings on criminal justice deserv