News & Commentary

An American being held without charges by the U.S. military in Iraq has asked for an attorney, the ACLU finally learned last night following an extraordinary court hearing. The government is resisting our efforts to make contact with the man so he can challenge his detention, in an outrageous violation of the basic rights guaranteed to every American by the Constitution. The military has held the “unnamed detainee” — as the government refers to him

In a year of extraordinary challenges, people living with HIV and their allies are continuing the fight to decriminalize HIV and defend health care, a battle that remains as urgent as ever in Trump’s America. Since the 1980s, many jurisdictions have created felony crimes specific

This piece was originally published at NBC's THINK. Facebook has admitted a serious problem with the platform’s advertising function that is allowing racia

As a gay person, I grew up knowing I was different. Hearing other kids call anyone who deviated from traditional gender expectations a “fag.” Getting called a “lesbo” at age 11. I hadn’t come out to anyone and didn’t even really understand what it meant, but I knew it was an insult. At an early age, we learn that it’s at best different to be LGBT. And many of us are taught that thi

New Jersey stands at a crossroads on a defining civil rights struggle of our time: the enforcement of unjust marijuana possession laws. Each year, New Jersey police have set new records for marijuana possession arrests, making the largest number ever in 2015: 24,985. Enforcement of marijuana prohibition exacerbates deep racial disparities in our criminal justice system and costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually. All of this for a substance that the majority of

The USA Patriot Act, passed hurriedly after 9/11, taught us that rushing a surveillance bill through Congress is a bad idea, producing complicated statutes ripe for abuse. Yet the leadership of the House Intelligence Committee is taking a page out of President George W. Bush’s playbook and trying to do just that. Tomorrow, the committee will debate a bill that dramatically expands NSA surveillance authorities, including one that

Yesterday morning, President Trump shared three videos on Twitter that purport to show Muslims committing graphic acts of violence. He retweeted all three from the account of Jayda Fransen, deputy leader of the ultranationalist party Britain First, who was convicted of religious aggravated harassment in November 2016 after abusing a woman wearing a hijab. The president’s move prompted public outcry and a rebuke from Prime Minister Theresa May, whose spokesman underlined that Britain First is a source of “hateful narratives which peddle lies and stoke tensions.” We should all be outraged that the president of the United States is

Kansas officials are scheduled to appear in court tomorrow to defend a state law designed to suppress boycotts of Israel. There’s just one problem: The state quite literally has no defense for the law’s First Amendment violations. The ACLU

Thanks to a growing number of state and local government officials, not to mention national actors like President Trump, questions abound these days about the constitutionality of public officials blocking people on social media. The answers to those questions are complicated and depend on the facts of any given case