News & Commentary

UPDATE: As this blog post was being sent to press, the court denied the Justice Department’s request to delay Thursday’s hearing. The court said, “The Government’s motion is untimely. To postpone the public hearing at the eleventh hour would be to unduly burden and inconvenience the Court, the other parties, and, most importantly, the public.” Why is everyone in Baltimore ready to move forward with police reform except Donald Trump's Department of Justice?

Two weeks ago, Esperanza, a mother of two young children, was driving to church in Mendota, California, when local police pulled her over for having tinted windows. The officer issued Esperanza a fix-it ticket for the tinted windows and told her that Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be showing up at her home. Within 30 minutes, ICE officers were at Esperanza’s door to arrest and deport her.Esperanza is now in hiding. Although alarming, Esperanza’s experience is commonplace in California and across the country. Approximately 70

Three weeks ago, people from across the country tuned in on a Saturday night as the ACLU kicked off a new grassroots mobilization program called People Power, which laid out a new strategy and vision for resisting the Trump administration’s worst abuses of our freedoms. We wanted people to do more than donate and march — we wanted them to organize in their communities, meet with local law enforcement officials, and change local policies to establish Freedom Cities where immigrants and Muslims would be better protected from the Trump administration’s attempts to trample on civil liberties.The response that night was incredible: #PeoplePower was the number one trending topic on Twitter across the nation. The event attracted more than one million views online, and Americans attended more than 2,300 events to begin forming activist groups in their communities. That’s what happened on March 11. Here’s what’s happened since. In the past three weeks, People Po

If you find yourself in Times Square between now and June, look up. You may catch a glimpse of the First Amendment — in Spanish, English, and Arabic. The ad on the Reuters Digital Tower at 3 Times Square is part of an ACLU campaign to raise awareness about

Although spring is in the air and we are well into 2017, if you’re a woman, your paycheck is stuck in time, specifically at December 31, 2016. That’s because women — on average — earn just 80 percent of what men make, meaning that they must work until today, April 4, 2017, to earn what men earned by December 31, 2016. Welcome to Equal Pay Day 2017: The “holiday” we would prefer not to celebrate.

In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia that the government could no longer execute people with an intellectual disability, then called “mental retardation,” because the practice violated the Eighth Amendment. Texas skirted the ruling by creating wholly unscientific criteria to determine intellectual disability, based on, of all things, the fictional character Lennie from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. A new ruling last week by the court in Moore v. Texas should put an end to that and other unscientific measures states have used to execute people with intellectual disabilities. This is a victory. But as with many victories in modern Supreme Court jurisprudence, they come after many defeat

In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia that the government could no longer execute people with an intellectual disability, then called “mental retardation,” because the practice violated the Eighth Amendment. Texas skirted the ruling by creating wholly unscientific criteria to determine intellectual disability, based on, of all things, the fictional character Lennie from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. A new ruling last week by the court in Moore v. Texas should put an end to that and other unscientific measures states have used to execute people with intellectual disabilities. This is a victory. But as with many victories in modern Supreme Court jurisprudence, they come after many defeat