News & Commentary

Documents recently obtained by the Daily Beast reinforce the many problems with the Department of Homeland Security’s attempts at surveillance of immigrants’ social media posts. “Social media vetting” is one part of the Trump administration’s program of “

This piece was originally published by The Arizona Daily Star. Each year, I renew a contract to provide legal services to incarcerated people in an Arizona county jail. I have been do

Earlier this year, a photojournalist headed to a Black Lives Matter protest in Times Square against the New York Police Department, and took out his camera to film it. As he approached a crowd of protesters, he heard a police supervisor instruct his officers to “just take somebody and put them in handcuffs.” An officer stopped the journalist and placed him under arrest for failure to comply with an order to d

I was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. I returned home this month for my brother’s memorial service. The city looked different. The Memphis State University of my youth is now the University of Memphis. The mayor no longer owns a

During the holiday season, many of us think about what we can do to help people struggling with poverty. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on the other hand, decided just before Christmas to rescind a guidance meant to protect low-income Americans. The 2016 guidance, issued by former President Obama’s Justice Department, urged sta

On Nov. 15, Detective David Bomenka of the Baltimore Police Department reported that his partner, Detective Sean Suiter, had been shot by an unknown assailant whom Suiter had stopped in a vacant lot in the city’s Harlem Park neighborhood. In response, the department did something that had never been done before and is constitutionally suspect: it completely shut down several blocks in the community, which is virtually all Black, with a police cordon. For six days, police restricted all vehicles and pedestrians from entering, barred all non-residents, an

A suspect in an armed robbery is sitting alone in a police department’s interview room. He takes out a knife and begins cutting himself with it, including his neck. You would think that the police would recognize this as a mental health crisis, a potential suicide, a sit

Learn about what's happening across the most pressing civil liberties issues of our time, and what you can do.

Update (12/22/17): In its latest filing with the court, the government won’t say whether it is considering requiring the detainee to relinquish his American citizenship in exchange for his release from U.S. detention. The filing also states that the government does not believe it is legally required to allow him to consult an attorney before renouncing his citizenship. The Supreme Court has long held that American citizenship