News & Commentary

Day after day, night after night, protesters have been taking to the streets since the police killing of George Floyd. Led by local Black activists and grassroots groups, they’re chanting, singing, shouting, kneeling, marching, and even laying on the ground to demand justice for the many Black lives that have been taken by police. Everyone — from parents, grandparents, kids, and more — are showing up. But Donald Trump from day one has expressed extreme hostility towards the Black Lives Matter movement. He has called on NFL owners to retaliate against players who dared to kneel in protest, said it was “terrible” to ask why Black Americans are still dying at the hands of law enforcement in this country, compared police killing and injuring Black people to golfers who “choke,” and has called for law enforcement to “dominate” protesters demanding that our legal system value Black lives. He has even encouraged police to abuse people in their custody. As the movement and calls for change gain broader support from more Americans and people around the world, protesters are being met by even more brutality — in many cases by the same police departments whose racism and brutality they are protesting. Police and federal agents are spreading fear and panic in communities, threatening lives, and relentlessly attacking people simply exercising their First Amendment right to protest police racism and brutality. Law enforcement at all levels haven’t even spared U.S. military veterans, journalists, legal observers, and medics. This assault on the First Amendment has only escalated tensions, and emboldened white supremacists to spread terror and hate. The ACLU is taking to the streets, legislatures and courts nationwide to demand an end to police violence and accountability for rights violations. Here is just a partial running list of federal and local law enforcement abuses against individuals exercising their First Amendment rights in Portland, Oregon:

It’s a pretty basic premise: When we go to the doctor, we expect that they will tell us the truth. It shouldn’t be controversial to expect the information you receive from a medical professional to be accurate and based in science. But if you’re looking for abortion care in Tennessee, politicians are doing everything they can to ensure that’s no longer a case. Today, we — together with the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU of Tennessee, and five abortion providers in the state — sued to challenge a law that requires doctors to lie to their patients. The law, signed by Tennessee Gov. Lee last month, coerces the speech of abortion providers and mandates that they lie to their patients. Under the law, physicians are required to tell their patients that if they have a medication abortion, it can be “reversed.” Doctors then have to refer their patients to a governmental website encouraging them to partake in experimental treatments that run counter to their patients’ best interest, all in violation of their ethical obligation as medical providers. To be clear: There is absolutely no medical basis for this law. The claim that medication abortion can be “reversed” is wholly unsupported by reliable scientific evidence. Leading medical organizations including the American Medical Association have condemned it, saying such laws “undermines [the provider-patient] relationship…with messages that contradict reality and science.” The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has said that there is “no evidence” to support the claim. Still, anti-abortion politicians continue to push ahead. This law is also plainly unconstitutional. It is a clear violation of the First Amendment right than for the state to force doctors to personally speak a government-ordered message with which they and the overwhelming consensus of the medical profession disagree. It’s a direct violation of patients’ privacy rights under the 14th Amendment to be subjected to misleading and inaccurate statements about the constitutionally protected medical care they seek. And, it is a violation of the constitutionally mandated guarantee of equal protection under the 14th Amendment for Tennessee to single out medication abortion providers and patients for state-mandated inaccurate disclosures that aren’t imposed in any other health care context. And this infuriating treatment isn’t limited to Tennessee. Just last year, North Dakota and Oklahoma passed bills requiring doctors to tell this lie about medication abortion, both of which have been blocked by courts. During the course of that litigation, medical professionals emphasized that the laws force them to deliver false information to patients in violation of their ethical obligation. Disturbingly, these “reversal” laws are just one example of “biased counseling” requirements that states have passed in recent years to the control and distort the information abortion patients get from their medical providers by inserting anti-abortion talking points into physicians’ mouths. In four states, doctors have to tell their patients that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer, even though that is factually wrong. Eight states insist that physicians include “negative emotional response” among the lists of risks of the procedure, even though mainstream medical associations have uniformly determined that this is false. Four states require doctors to lie to their patients about the risk having an abortion could have on their future fertility. The intent of all these laws is clear: to shame, humiliate, and deceive people who have decided to have an abortion. The laws are designed to make the process so laborious and so confusing that some patients give up and abandon their constitutional right to abortion altogether. One Kentucky doctor described the scene when she performed a state-mandated ultrasound in which she was forced by the government to narrate the specifics of the scan and show her patient the screen, even over the patients’ objection:

Sports have long been an arena where civil rights and civil liberties questions have taken center stage: Track and field star Tommie Smith raised his fist for racial justice on the 1968 Olympic podium. Tennis great Billie Jean King fought for equal pay for women. Olympic runner Caster Semana challenged intersex bigotry to be able to compete. And of course, NBA players organized a strike this week in protest of the killing by police of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. But one group of athletes has often kept quiet during social movements: college athletes. This is largely because the institutions they play for silence them. At a time when racial justice conversations have ignited across the country, At Liberty took a look at how universities suppress their athletes’ voices and the barriers to holding those universities accountable. Joining us to talk about college athletes and free speech is Frank LoMonte, First Amendment lawyer and director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida, and Toren Young, a former football player at the University of Iowa.

One hundred years ago this month, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution, giving women the right to vote in the single largest voting rights expansion in our nation’s history. However, as we commemorate this historic centennial, we must remember that not all women got the right to vote in 1920. To this day, women who are people of color, transgender, incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, or have disabilities continue to face barriers to voting, along with other marginalized groups. We have more work to do to ensure that all women — and all people, regardless of gender identity — are able to exercise their voting rights. 

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday ruled in favor of American Civil Liberties Union client Gavin Grimm, deciding that restroom policies segregating transgender students from their peers and denying transgender student accurate transcripts are unconstitutional and violate Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education.   The decision comes after a five-year long court battle that began when the American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Virginia filed a sex discrimination lawsuit against the Gloucester Country School Board for adopting a discriminatory policy requiring Grimm and other transgender students to use “alternative private” restrooms.  Here are four highlights from the decision today: 

Tonight, the federal government plans to execute Lezmond Mitchell, a Navajo man, despite the objections of the Navajo Nation and the family members of the victim in the case, and despite a federal statute intended to prevent federal executions of indigenous people over the objections of Native American tribes.     Mr. Mitchell is the fourth person set for execution this summer alone. By carrying out this execution, Barr’s Justice Department will have executed more people this summer than in the last 57 years combined. Daniel Lee, Wesley Purkey, and Dustin Honken were executed within four days in July, the first federal executions since 2003, greenlit after the Justice Department proposed a new execution protocol last year. The DOJ has scheduled three more executions before October. This record-breaking string of back-to-back executions occurs during a global pandemic. In all three executions carried out so far, the government sidestepped due process, public health recommendations, and legal precedent in its rush to kill. In flouting these important procedures, the government is treating human lives — and our laws — like they don’t matter. This should raise serious alarm.  The consequences of the government’s rush to execute will not only affect those on death row. Executions are potential super-spreader events during the COVID-19 pandemic, involving the travel and congregation of hundreds of people from across the country. That the government is choosing to resume federal executions now — at a time when much of our daily lives have ground to a halt — shows an alarming disregard for the lives of all involved, in addition to the inhumanity and the disturbing lawlessness of the capital punishment system.  COVID-19 swept through prisons, where it

In 2018, we did a simple but radical thing: asked a prosecutor to tell us how their office runs. Through an Arizona Public Records Request, we sought basic public information from the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office (MCAO), like who is prosecuted, which crimes are charged, and how long people are sent to prison. We also sought general office policies governing prosecutions in the county. This is fairly basic stuff, and the public has a right to know how the largest and most powerful prosecuting agency in Arizona operates. Yet MCAO, like many prosecutors’ offices nationwide, has operated for years as a black box, fighting any attempt at transparency. Because of this entrenched culture of secrecy, MCAO ignored our Public Records Request for almost a year. So we did another radical thing that rarely happens to prosecutors: We sued.

Every day, nearly 400,000 people in America with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) wake up wondering whether today will bring news of a court ruling that could effectively end their immigration status and put them at risk for deportation. Perhaps worse is the impact the decision could have on their U.S. citizen children. Thousands of young Americans could face an impossible choice: leave the U.S. to stay with their parents or lose their parents if they choose to stay in the only country they’ve ever known. They can’t have both, at least if the Trump administration has its way.   The court case on which the fate of these thousands of people rests is Ramos v. Nielsen, in which the ACLU, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, and Sidley Austin LLP argue that the Trump administration broke the law when it attempted to strip people with TPS of the lawful immigration status they have held in this country for years — often for decades. After a district court ruled in favor of those with TPS, the Trump administration filed an appeal that has now been pending for nearly two years.   Congress created TPS 30 years ago to allow people to stay in America when they cannot return safely to their country of origin. Since its adoption, every administration before this one has invoked it to give humanitarian protection to people when natural disaster, war, or other political, economic, or environmental instability rendered their countries unsafe. When Trump came into office, his administration inherited TPS designations that had granted protection to nearly 400,000 people from 10 countries: El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.   But the Trump administration had different plans for TPS. Individuals from anti-immigrant, white supremacist organizations, which had long targeted this program, came to work at the White House after Trump took office and quickly implemented their agenda. By January 2018, the administration had terminated TPS for 98 percent of the people who held that status when he came into office — all those from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Sudan. The administration also failed to re-designate TPS for Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, thus denying protection to thousands of people already here, simply because they arrived after Trump came to power.   Fortunately, the courts so far have risen to the challenge of protecting people with TPS from the Trump administration’s cruelty. We filed the Ramos lawsuit in 2018 on behalf of those with TPS from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan on the basis that the administration (1) acted out of racial animus against non-white, non-European immigrants and (2) used a new and extremely narrow interpretation of TPS without adequate justification, thereby violating the Administrative Procedures Act. A few months later, we filed a parallel lawsuit to protect people with TPS from Honduras and Nepal. The lower courts’ decisions on this issue have uniformly agreed that the administration’s TPS decisions violated federal law, issuing decisions that protect the 400,000 people with TPS and their families, for now.   But a decision from the court of appeals is due any day now. An appellate ruling in the government’s favor could leave people with TPS at risk of losing their status once again.   However, an adverse decision would not necessarily mean the end of the road, as we could ask the Supreme Court to intervene. Even if the Supreme Court declines that request, the administration would be required to continue TPS for at least six months, during which the 400,000 TPS holders would continue to maintain their right to live and work here.   That six-month period turns out to be awfully important — we are writing this in August 2020. Six months from now takes us into January 2021. By then, a new administration might be evaluating TPS determinations, perhaps applying the TPS statute as it was intended. There might also be a Congress interested in enacting legislation that puts TPS holders on a pathway to citizenship, such as the Dream and Promise Act, which would also help Dreamers and those with Deferred Enforced Departure.   That window of time brings a bit of hope — for the 400,000 people who hold TPS status, for the hundreds of thousands of children in their homes, and for so many other immigrant communities. And for us, as we wait with them — continuing our struggle for justice.

In the 1980s, fewer than 2,000 people were locked up in an immigration detention facility on an average day in America.  Since then, that number has skyrocketed, quadrupling from 7,475 to 32,985 people detained by ICE per day between 1995 and 2016. Under the administration of President Donald Trump, the numbers have shot up even higher — at one point last year, a staggering 56,000 people were behind bars each night in an ICE detention facility. When asylum-seekers and other migrants in Customs and Border Protection facilities are included, the total figure rises to nearly 80,000 people detained by the U.S. government per day. This explosive growth of the U.S. immigration detention system tracks the rise of mass incarceration in America, prompted by punitive legislation resisted efforts to secure their release for public health reasons. A combination of lawsuits and public pressure eventually forced ICE to release more than 1,000 people from detention because of concerns over the spread of COVID-19 between mid-March and early May. Legal actions brought by the ACLU have secured the release of more than 450 people so far. But there are still more than 21,000 people in immigration detention — a drop since last year’s high that is largely attributable to a near-total shutdown of the southern border.   Whenever a new administration takes office, it will inherit an immigration detention system that has become an out-of-control, wasteful, and cruel behemoth. Drastically reducing the number of people trapped inside that system will be a crucial first step towards establishing a more humane and responsible immigration policy.   In recent weeks, the ACLU interviewed a number of immigrants who were released from detention due to concerns over the COVID-19 crisis. They shared the following stories of what it was like to be incarcerated in an immigration detention facility during the pandemic.   *Note: interviews have been condensed and edited.