News & Commentary

An important ruling handed down by the Supreme Court today recognizes that when banks systematically discriminate against their customers, entire communities and cities are harmed. Today’s decision reje

We marched with millions around the world. On January 21st, millions of people around the world took to the streets in the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. In Washington D.C. alone, the crowd was estimated at 500,000. Eight marches and rallies for women’s equality including thousands of people were held in Tennessee alone. We became a legislative force, urging state lawmakers to vote in favor of civil liberties over 125,000 times. While it has been a divisive few months at the Tennessee legislature, ACLU-TN’s supporters’ engagement has helped secure some major victories at the Capitol. This session, we asked our supporters to contact lawmakers on bills ranging from abortion access to fair treatment of immigrants to the school-to-prison-pipeline and you answered in force, sending thousands of letters to state legislators. Details can be found at our Legislative Action Center. We helped bring a refugee family home to Tennessee. After the Trump Administration’s first Muslim ban barred him from starting a new life in the U.S., despite his having worked for the U.S. government in Iraq, Fuad Sharef Suleman and his family were finally cleared to travel with the help of ACLU-TN, the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, and others. The family arrived in Nashville in February. We swiftly and decisively stopped the discriminatory anti-Muslim travel bans. When Trump issued a shocking executive

The NSA indicated today that it will halt one of its most controversial spying practices, related to its surveillance of virtually all text-based communications entering or exiting the United States. If true, this is a significant step forward in the fight to restrict the NSA’s wildly expansive spying powers. But, unless Congress codifies this restriction, there is a risk that this practice will be resumed. Moreover, the NSA’s change still leaves in place a warrantless surveillance regime that sweeps up countless Americans and must be reformed. While we need to know far more about how the NSA will implement this change, it affects a form of warrantless spying known a

For months, the Trump administration has tried to bully local communities into signing up to become extensions of the federal deportation system. That campaign of threats and public shaming based on flawed data — which has been mostly unsuccessful — suffered another major blow yesterday. A federal court in San Francisco ruled in two cases that the president’s threats were unconstitutional, and stopped the government from carrying them out anywhere in the country. The ruling vindicates the constitutional rights of cities, counties, and states to refuse to participate in deportations. And like the court orders halting the president’s Muslim ban, the ruling shows the crucial role that courts play in preventing presidential overreach. The cases involve “sanctuary cities,” a term that generally refers to cit

On April 13, private prison company GEO Group announced its first new contract to detain immigrants under the Trump administration: a 1,000-bed detention center that will be built in Conroe, Texas, just north of Houston and next door to an existing GEO Group detention center. The Conroe contract is only the beginning of what promises to be an enormous, multi-year boondoggle for p

In 1951, doctors harvested cells from Henrietta Lacks while she was receiving treatment for cervical cancer and discovered that her cells had an amazing capacity to reproduce. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” which aired last weekend on HBO and is based on the book of the same name, tells the dramatic story of how scientists used the “HeLa” cells in research for decades without the knowledge of her family.Because of the book and film, the story of the Lacks family’s fight to understand and influence how Henrietta’s cells are used is finally getting the attention it deserves. But echoes of what she went through exist to this day, as I learned when navigating my own family history of cancer.I have lost many family members to breast, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers. Three years ago, when I was 52 years old, I was diagnosed with advanced bladder cancer. After some family members obtained genetic testing, I decided to do the same, and some of us tested positive for an uncommon mutation of the BRCA1 gene. The gene is most known for its connection to hereditary breast and ovarian cancers, but it also has been linked to prostate and pancreatic cancers. Scientists have not yet determined whether it may be linked to increased risk for bladder cancer. Most Americans likely don’t know that when