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Ange Samma, a 22-year-old green card holder from Burkina Faso, came to the United States seven years ago, when he was still a teenager. After studying electrical engineering at community college, he decided to enlist in the U.S. Army in 2018. He wanted to give back to his adopted country and also hoped joining the military would help him achieve his goal of becoming an electrical engineer.   Ange currently serves on active duty as a soldier in South Korea. But despite serving this country on a U.S. military base in a foreign country, he still hasn’t been able to obtain citizenship through his military service, as required by law. Without citizenship, Ange faces risks his U.S. soldier counterparts do not, for he does not have a right to consular services and protection. Ange also fears that his lack of citizenship sets him apart from his fellow soldiers serving in South Korea.    Ange is unable to exercise the various privileges afforded to U.S. citizens, including voting in an election year, and sponsoring immediate family members. Ange has also found that, without citizenship, many of the roles in the military best suited to his skills and career goals are closed off to him.   Today we, together with the ACLU of Southern California and the ACLU of the District of Columbia, filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Ange and thousands of non-citizens serving in the nation’s military who, like him, are entitled to apply for naturalization but have been obstructed from doing so. The lawsuit — Samma v. Department of Defense — challenges the Trump administration’s 2017 policy making it difficult, if not impossible, for non-citizen U.S. military members to obtain expedited citizenship, as Congress has long promised them.   Non-citizens have enlisted in the U.S. military in large numbers throughout our nation’s history, serving in the Revolutionary War and in every major conflict since the founding of the republic. They continue to make up a significant number of those fighting in today’s wars. Between 2011 and 2015, there was an average of about 10,000 non-citizens serving in the Army per year. The Department of Defense estimates that approximately 5,000 green card holders enlist in the military every year.   For more than 200 years, Congress has recognized the critical role non-citizens play in the military by promising them an expedited path to citizenship. Since 1952, that promise has been reflected in a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which provides that any non-citizen who has served honorably in the U.S. military during a period of armed conflict may naturalize, regardless of their immigration status or length of residence in the United States. By waiving the typical requirements for naturalization, Congress intended for non-citizens to apply to naturalize almost immediately upon entering service and prior to deployment. Since 9/11, over 100,000 non-citizens have taken this expedited path to citizenship to naturalize on the basis of their military service.   The government’s 2017 policy deprives non-citizen service members of the path to citizenship promised by Congress and that they have earned through honorable military service. For decades, non-citizens could obtain the certifications of honorable service required for naturalization almost immediately upon entering service; now they must wait months, long after they have deployed to their duty stations. The policy also forces non-citizens to submit to lengthier, more invasive background checks and severely restricts the number of officials who can issue such certifications.   Government statistics demonstrate the devastating impact the government’s 2017 policy change has had on military naturalizations. In the year following its implementation, the government reported a 72-percent drop in military naturalization applications from pre-policy levels.   The 2017 policy is part of the Trump administration’s immigrants, including those serving in the military. The government has specifically targeted immigrant service members through policies designed to deter them from enlisting. Several of our clients were also subjected to this policy and had to endure months, in some cases years, of waiting before they could ship to basic training and begin their service. Once enlisted, they and thousands of other immigrant service members must wait again, under the policy they’re now challenging, to become citizens. ICE has also ramped up its deportation of veterans, disregarding policies that require the agency to consider military service in immigration cases.   The government’s policy is causing real harm to immigrant service members. Two of our clients, whose immigration statuses are in question, fear the government may deport them at any time. Many of our clients are also unable to access professional advancement opportunities within the military because so many roles, including more specialized positions that suit their skill sets, are only available to U.S. citizens. Others are unable to sponsor their families to unite with them in the U.S. The government’s policy also harms the military because immigrants are so critical to it. Non-citizen enlistment is integral to maintaining military recruitment numbers; in nearly every recruitment year between 2002 and 2013, the Army would have failed its recruitment goals for its active duty force without non-citizen enlistments. The Department of Defense itself has recognized that non-citizen recruits tend to be of “higher quality” than their citizen counterparts. They also perform better than U.S. citizen recruits once they enter the military, exhibiting substantially lower attrition rates. Finally, non-citizens are likely to possess skills vital to the military, including linguistic diversity and medical and information-technology expertise.   The promise of citizenship Congress made to non-citizen service members is not just an important recruitment tool. It is a moral imperative embedded in our history, values, and laws. If you are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for America, you are — and should be — entitled to be an American.

On April 27, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ACLU of Florida, and our litigation partners will go to trial in U.S. District Court against the state of Florida to win the ability to vote for hundreds of thousands of eligible state voters now being denied that basic right.

“You’re on the list.” It took a few seconds for Chalana McFarland to grasp what was happening. Her name was one of just a few on the list of people who would be released from prison early due to COVID-19. Behind her stood a line of dozens of other women waiting to see if they made it. Only some of them had. But as Chalana received the news, they started cheering, and caused such an uproar that the correctional staff had to reprimand them. That’s when it finally clicked for Chalana — after 15 years in prison, she was finally going home.  Chalana immediately contacted her daughter. “I was watching a movie with my roommate when I got the news,” says Nia, who is 19 and lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she attends university. “At first I was like, ‘What?’ I didn’t think it was real. Then I just fell over crying. I couldn’t even talk. Later, when we talked on the phone, I could hear the happiness in my mom’s voice that this was all finally going to be over.”

The Trump administration optimistically projects that “substantially under” 100,000 people will die from COVID-19 in the United States. Horrific as that statistic is, a new model suggests it could be a huge underestimate. The government models fail to consider the impact of the virus on the incarcerated population, who will be infected and die at higher rates. And any prison or jail outbreak is bound to spill over into the broader community — causing more people to die in the general public, too.

In the latest development in a fast-moving court case, on Monday the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to block nearly all abortion services in the state. The ruling came after a legal challenge to Abbott’s inclusion of abortion care in a March 22 executive order instructing health care facilities across the state to “postpone all surgeries and procedures that are not immediately medically necessary.” For Abbott and his allies, the COVID-19 pandemic is proving to be exactly the cover they need to accomplish a policy objective they’ve long held: eliminating access to abortion care. The ruling is a reversal of the court’s April 10 decision to allow medication abortions to continue. With Abbott’s executive order due to expire on April 21, the court will likely continue to weigh in over the coming days. But this ruling represents a disturbing milestone: For the first time since 1973’s landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, a court has allowed a state law banning almost all abortion to take effect. The court battle highlights a new frontier the COVID-19 crisis has created in the fight over reproductive rights: Against the advice of public health experts, some states in the South and Midwest are trying to use the pandemic as a cover to ban abortion.   States across the country have issued orders to postpone non-essential surgeries and other medical procedures. Most have left it up to doctors and other health care professionals to determine what is “essential” on a case-by-case basis. Medical experts agree that abortion services are time-sensitive and fall under that category. But eight states — Arkansas, Alabama, Iowa, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas — have used the pretext of the COVID-19 crisis to specifically target those services, claiming broad authority to order abortion providers to stop offering them. Texas, for example, has threatened to jail them for up to six months if they offer abortion care. Lawmakers in those states claim that halting abortion services will conserve hospital resources, save Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), and slow the spread of the virus. Organizations representing medical professionals are united in denouncing the inclusion of abortion care in those states’ public health orders. “[I]t is unfortunate that elected officials in some states are exploiting this moment to ban or dramatically limit women’s reproductive health care,” said Patrice A. Harris, president of the American Medical Association (AMA) in a statement.  Advocacy groups including the ACLU, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and Planned Parenthood have filed emergency lawsuits challenging the orders in all eight of those states.    The suits argue that the orders to shut down abortion services are unconstitutional and will cause irreparable harm to people seeking time-sensitive reproductive care during the pandemic. Clinics have already implemented social distancing measures such as spacing out appointments, they say, pointing out that far more medical resources will be used by people forced to continue a pregnancy than what would be expended in an abortion procedure.  Already, the orders have forced some women to travel to clinics in other states, burdening them with painful obstacles and provoking concerns that the restrictions could wind up facilitating the spread of COVID-19.   One 24-year-old woman who filed an affidavit in support of the Texas lawsuit said she found out that her abortion was canceled on March 23, just a few weeks after losing her job due to the pandemic. A staff member from the clinic called to explain what the state’s new restrictions meant for her. “I started to cry, and she cried too,” she wrote. “She told me my only option at that point was to go out of state or delay my abortion and possibly be forced to have a baby. I was dumbfounded.” Worried and uncertain of when the restrictions would be lifted, she drove 780 miles to a clinic in Denver along with a friend, rather than her partner, who couldn’t take time off of work to travel out of state. “Obviously, had this pregnancy not been a factor, I wouldn’t be traveling during a pandemic,” she wrote. “I already felt like it was risky for me to travel to a nearby clinic in Fort Worth to have my appointment. Instead, I was forced to drive across the country, to stop at dirty gas stations, to stay in an unfamiliar home, just to get health care. I feel like Texas put me, and my best friend, in danger.” On April 2, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, along with the AMA and 18 other leading medical experts, filed an amicus brief supporting the challenge to Texas’s order.   “The Governor’s ban on abortion in the state, except in cases of emergency, is not supported by accepted medical practice or scientific evidence in the state,” they wrote, adding, “There is no evidence that prohibiting abortion during the pandemic will mitigate PPE shortages or promote public health or safety.”   Advocates say that — just as with other measures those states have taken in their years-long campaigns to restrict abortion — public health and safety isn’t the point of the new rules, and that lawmakers are simply exploiting COVID-19 to attack reproductive rights.   “It’s not surprising that the states that are now using the COVID crisis to stop people from getting abortion care are the very same states that have a history of passing laws to ban abortions or using sham rationale to shut down clinics,” said Jennifer Dalven, director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.   The states that have moved to restrict access to abortion during the pandemic are among those which have passed some of the harshest anti-abortion laws in the country in recent years. Alabama, Iowa, and Ohio each passed near-total bans on abortion in the last two years, and Arkansas passed at least 12 abortion restrictions in 2019 alone. Louisiana is currently

Marijuana arrests clog the criminal legal system with people who should not be there. This puts even more people in harm’s way as COVID-19 threatens to devastate jails and prisons, where the virus can spread rapidly. Officials must respond by reducing both arrests and the incarcerated population. Take action now. For decades, marijuana laws have been used to criminalize Black and Brown people, waste taxpayer money, and fuel the mass incarceration crisis. However, states

As millions of people in the U.S. shelter in their homes, and millions more who aren’t able to stay indoors practice social distancing or other measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19, a crisis is brewing in the facilities where immigrants are detained. Cramped conditions and inadequate access to hygiene or medical care have created what one medical expert called a “tinderbox” for the disease in a letter to Congress.   Many of those in detention are asylum seekers, who came to the U.S. to ask for protection after fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. Many others were long-time U.S. residents who were picked up by ICE during workplace raids or traffic stops in recent months. Some have been fighting deportation for years-old criminal charges that may have been as minor as marijuana possession or a DUI. The Trump administration’s appetite for detaining people rather than allowing them to stay on supervised release during their immigration proceedings has been relentless. As public health experts warn that congregate facilities like immigration detention centers put detained people and the greater community at greater risk for infection, we are reminded that this obsession has endangered us all and forced tens of thousands of people to face the pandemic with virtually no protection at all.   The ACLU has been fighting to secure the release of as many detained immigrants as possible. While ICE says it’s released nearly 700 people from detention as of late this week, lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have fought the ACLU’s lawsuits tooth and nail. In one case, after a judge ordered 22 medically vulnerable immigrants released from two jails in Pennsylvania, DHS rushed to request a stay that would force them to remain inside.   Now, at least 100 detained immigrants have tested positive for COVID-19, according to ICE, and their numbers are growing every day.   Two of those who were released because of the ACLU’s suits are Alfredo Garza and Mario Rodas, Sr. Both have life-threatening medical conditions. In this week’s At Liberty podcast, we hear from them about what it’s like to be in an immigration detention facility during a pandemic, as well as Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Prison Project. Eunice is part of the team that is working around the clock to file litigation and get medically vulnerable immigrants out of detention.   Listen to the new episode here, and for more details on Alfredo and Mario’s story, read our

Apple and Google last week announced a joint contact tracing effort that would use Bluetooth technology to help alert people who have been in close proximity to someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Similar proposals have been put forward by an MIT-associated effort called PACT as well as by multiple European groups.   These proposals differ from the traditional public health technique of “contact tracing” to try to stop the spread of a disease. In place of human interviewers, they would use location or proximity data generated by mobile phones to contact people who may have been exposed.    While some of these systems could offer public health benefits, they may also cause significant risks to privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. If such systems are to work, there must be widespread, free, and quick testing available. The systems must also be widely adopted, but that will not happen if people do not trust them. For there to be trust, the tool must protect privacy, be voluntary, and store data on an individual’s device rather than in a centralized repository.   A well-designed tool would give people actionable medical information while also protecting privacy and giving users control, but a poorly designed one could pose unnecessary and significant risks to privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties. To help distinguish between the two, the ACLU is publishing a set of technology principles against which developers, the public, and policymakers can judge any contact tracing apps and protocols.   Technology principles that embed privacy by design are one important type of protection. There still need to be strict policies to mitigate against overreach and abuse. These policies, at a minimum, should include:

As many Americans round out the end of their first month of social distancing, it’s clear that the toll of “stay at home” orders during the COVID-19 pandemic is much more than economic. The anxiety and fear that wash over us each day that we spend alone, away from friends, coworkers, and family, inflict their own kind of emotional damage.   The cost of social isolation is a worthy cost in this case — staying home can quite literally save lives. But for some people, the advent of social isolation came long before the coronavirus. At the ACLU, we work with many communities who deal with the long-term impacts of social isolation: people living with disabilities who often experience accessibility issues, people held in detention, and people imprisoned in solitary confinement, just to name a few.  Joining us on this episode of our podcast, At Liberty, is Dr. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University who understands the psychological and physiological impacts of isolation, and how we can mitigate them for both ourselves and others. We also spoke with a few people — Anna Landre, TreShaun Pate, Jason Hernandez and Claire Goldberg — who know a thing or two about social distancing. Their circumstances have made them familiar with isolation long before COVID-19. Listen here to learn from their experiences, and for tips from Dr. Holt-Lunstad on how to ease the pain of isolation during this pandemic.