News & Commentary

When President Joe Biden came into office, he promised to end the cruelty and inhumanity of President Trump’s immigration policies. W

When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 8 (SB 8) into law in May, I felt an unwelcome sense of déjà vu. In January of 2016, I was dialing every phone number I could find, trying to locate a clinic where I could receive abortion care in Austin, where I live. After many phone calls, some of which I accidentally made to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, I finally found one of the last open abortion clinics and got an appointment. I was seven weeks pregnant, and their schedule was packed; the earliest opening they had was more than two weeks later. This was the wreckage of House Bill 2, a restrictive abortion law passed in 2013 that forced approximately half of all abortion clinics in the state to close. The U.S. Supreme Court would ultimately overturn the law in June 2016, just months after I had my abortion, bringing relief to Texans seeking basic health care. T

It’s official: The once-in-a-decade redistricting process has begun. Communities and jurisdictions across the country are crunching 2020 census data to redraw district lines. The way these lines are drawn will determine political representation, resource allocation, and the weight of your vote. T

Last month, people detained in a Fayetteville, Arkansas jail became the unwitting subjects of an unsafe experiment — like many incarcerated people before them. In late August, a county official revealed during a budget meeting that a doctor employed at the Washington County Detention Center had been treating COVID-19-positive incarcerated people with ivermectin. The anti-parasitic drug has garnered increased media attention in the last few weeks as poison control centers across the country field an increasing number of calls from people who have misguidedly attempted to treat or prevent COVID-19 with the drug. T

I first met Damon Thibodeaux early in 1998, on death row at Angola Prison in Louisiana. I was his lawyer for the next 15 years, while he successfully fought for and won his exoneration and freedom in 2012. I was his friend until he died, on August 31, of COVID-19. T

Gaining the public’s trust in artificial intelligence (AI) will take more than just setting technical standards. It will require that institutions using this technology first prove they are worthy of our trust. Earlier this year, Congress passed its most significant law to date on AI. As part of this law, Congress tasked the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with creating a framework to manage risks associated with the use of AI. While this is a critical first step towards AI accountability, technical standards alone can’t guarantee trustworthiness in AI development and use. That’s why last week we sent a letter responding to NIST’s draft proposal on methods to manage bias in AI. A

Update 9/14/2021: This week, the House Judiciary Committee will begin markup of immigration provisions in the Build Back Better reconciliation bill. As of Monday morning, the language restores access to diversity visas for people who were selected in the diversity visa lottery but were denied visas due to Muslim, Africa, and immigrant travel bans and COVID-19 related disruption. Now the fight continues to ensure the language stays in the reconciliation bill and becomes law. I

In the early days after 9/11, I hoped desperately — alongside so many others around the country and the world — that our government would make wise choices, that it would meet violence with justice, transparency, accountability, and a commitment to fundamental rights. We knew that too often in American history, political leaders respond to traumatic events by clamping down on our civil rights and liberties, and only come to regret it after terrible human costs. And we knew that those costs are borne primarily by Black and Brown people and immigrants, whom the government has always wrongly viewed through a security threat lens. S

COVID-19 was not the only deadly public health crisis of the past year and a half. The overdose epidemic killed a record 93,000 Americans in 2020, ravaging communities across the country, and may be on track to be worse in 2021. While the nation has combated COVID-19 by prioritizing medical research, vaccine production, treatment development, and implementation of common-sense public health measures, our response to the overdose epidemic has been tragically meager. In this moment of investment in our nation’s infrastructure, it is time for federal, state, and local governments to change course and invest in proven, life-saving public health tools to finally stem the tide of overdoses across the country. I