News & Commentary

New Yorkers know that the New York Police Department will treat us differently depending on our zip code and the color of our skin. But many New Yorkers don’t know the intensity and the violence of police contact in neighborhoods heavily targeted by the NYPD. A new report from the NYCLU exposes the radically different ways in which NYPD officers behave depending on wha

We have seen it again and again: A Black or brown person is sitting in a Starbucks, barbequing in a public park, touring a college they hope to attend, or sitting down in the college they already attend. Then someone calls the cops on them for looking like they “don’t belong” or are “out of place.” These calls target former White House staffers and

In response to the Nike ad campaign featuring NFL player and activist Colin Kaepernick, some state and local government officials in Mississippi, Rhode Island, and Louisiana have sought to discourage or prohibit the purchase of Nike products in various ways. While everyone is entitled to have their own opinion about the ads — including public officials — government efforts to boycott a company

Last spring, Kanewakeron Thomas Gray and Skanahwati Lloyd Gray, two Native American brothers, drove from their home in New Mexico to Colorado State University, excited to tour the college where they hoped to enroll. Their excitement and hopes soon turned to something else. A white parent on the tour called the CSU police department to report the teen brothers as suspicious based on the way they looked. The parent questioned whether the two teens belonged on the campus. CSU police did not ask the caller for more factual information. They did not take the time to observe the tour or spea

The piece was originally published by The Guardian.  For more than a decade, the worst-kept secret in the world has been the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency o

When a woman becomes pregnant, the nature of her health care by necessity becomes tailored to her being pregnant. This is no less true when a pregnant woman is incarcerated. But corrections officials across the nation would often rather ignore the fact and needs of incarcerated pregnant women than address their health care needs or even their basic rights. For example, pregnant prisoners are often shackled during childbirth in this country as well as put in solitary confinement, practices that are as shocking as they are pervasive.  When a woman goes to prison or jail, the criminal justice system is very likely to treat her no

I don’t have a lot of memories of my childhood that don’t involve violence. My father beat my mother up all the time in our hometown a few hours outside of Mexico City. He hit her with his hands and with any object he could find. Several times he used a knife to cut her. I think my father’s sexual abuse of me started when I was 4 or 5.  I lived in terror of this man who claimed my body as his and thought of me as disposable. He could hit me or touch my most private parts.

When Lesly Tayes, a Guatemala City-based tax lawyer, first saw images of children locked in cages inside immigration detention facilities near the southern U.S. border, she was stunned. “It made me very upset and sad,” she said. “Later I learned that Guatemala had the highest number of separated families and I felt even worse. I wanted to help.” Within weeks, she’d have her chance.  Earlier this summer, the ACLU sued the Trump administration over its policy of separating parents from their childr

School is back in session, and that means school administrators may be back to surveilling students on social media and unjustly disciplining them for what they say on it. We’ve seen both of these troubling trends before. And in today’s era of