News & Commentary

For more than seven months, the Trump administration has been unlawfully detaining an American citizen in Iraq. Rather than charge him with a crime or set him free, the government wants to transfer him, involuntarily, to a third country. The ACLU is going to court on Thursday to stop the transfer and fight the government’s dangerous claims that it has the authority to violate an American’s constitutional rights. The Trump administration claims that the citizen, who was detained in September by Kurdish forces in Syria and

Since the search last week of the office, home, hotel room, and safe deposit box of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, lots of lawyers have been squaring off about an important legal issue that rarely gets banner-headline billing: How does the government, armed with a warrant for a criminal suspect’s digital files, go about sorting through those files in a way that ensures that constitutional and legal rights are not violated? The risks of wrongful privacy invasions are too great to leave to the prosecutors when the government seizes digital data. Such

Late last week, two Black men in Philadelphia were doing what people do every day in this city — they waited in a coffee shop to meet an associate. While they were engaged in this mundane activity, they were removed from the Starbucks cafe at 18th and Spruce Streets in handcuffs by Philadelphia police officers. This is another example of the kind of daily indignities that African-Americans face every day in Philadel

Police in California have a problem with deadly force. Last year, police shot and killed 162 people in the state, half of whom did not have guns. California departments have some of the highest rates of killings in the nation. In a 2015 report, for example, the Guardian identified central California’s Kern County as the place where a member of the public is most likely to die at the hands of police.Those figures are alarming, but even more shocking were the sentiments expressed by Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood in a recently-unveiled video from 12 years ago. During a meeting with the county’s Detention Officers Association, Youngblood told the audience that it is better financially for the county when his deputies kill someone rather than injure them.“If we cripple them we get to take care of them for life, and that cost goes way up,” he told the union members. “You know what happens if a guy makes a bad shooting on somebody — kills them?” Youngblood asked the audience. “Three million bucks, and the family goes away.” Sheriff Youngblood’s comments show what families and communities affected by police violence already know:

Under a proposal expected to be introduced in the Senate very soon, President Trump would get a blank check from Congress to go to war virtually anywhere on the planet. The ACLU has sent a letter to all senators strongly opposing this new Authorization for Use of Military Force, also known as the AUMF. It would be hard to overstate the depth and breadth of our concern about this new AUMF as it has been described in

Campaigns like #MeToo and #TimesUp have brought sexual harassment to the forefront of the national conscience like never before. But the conversation hasn’t been as inclusive as it should be. The movement must do more to reflect the voices and needs of the transgender community, a demographic that consistently gets overlooked despite facing sexual violence at staggering rates. Although you wouldn’t know it from mainstream advocacy campaigns, trans people have long been i

The pattern is now familiar. An immigrant student in Long Island’s Suffolk County is disciplined for “gang related” activity, often for s

Over the last few years, voters in Houston, Texas, and Anchorage, Alaska, each had anti-trans ballot issues put in front of them. In 2015, we lost. Just last week in Alaska, we won. This naturally raises the question: What did the civil rights community and the trans community

This week, U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Democrat from Illinois, made history by becoming the first senator to give birth while serving in office. But within that headline is a truth unworthy of celebration: Due to outdated Senate policies, Duckworth may be unable to vote on legislation while she’s on parental leave. The problem stems from the interplay of two Senate rules: Senators must be physically presen