News & Commentary

Our next president must be committed to protecting and advancing the civil liberties and civil rights guaranteed to all of us in the Constitution, and the current goal for our Rights for All campaign is to educate voters on where the candidates stand on these key issues. We now have most of the results from the Iowa caucuses last week, and one thing stood out to us: Voters overwhelmingly supported candidates who made specific commitments to Rights for All policies.

The Department of Homeland Security has a scary vision for expanding face recognition surveillance into our everyday lives, threatening a dystopian future in which the technology is used throughout our public spaces to scrutinize our identity, check us against watchlists, record our movements, and more. Work on building the infrastructure for this pervasive monitoring has already started, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection currently operating a face recognition system at the gates of departing international flights.  

Rebecca Gill was out of options. At 39 years old, she was arrested and though not convicted of a crime and presumed innocent, confined to a jail cell. This happened because of a cash bail requirement that she couldn’t afford. Her friends didn’t have extra money to help, and she was unlikely to see a judge until she’d been in jail for two full weeks.

More than forty years ago, Congress gave the executive branch a set of exceptional surveillance powers to pursue foreign spies on U.S. soil. Now, the government is increasingly relying on those powers to advance ordinary domestic criminal investigations.

Last month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection adamantly denied that it was detaining U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents of Iranian descent and interrogating them about their religion and political views. The agency also assured the public that it had not issued any directive related to the detentions and interrogations.

Voting should be as easy and convenient as possible, and in many cases it is. But across the U.S., too many politicians are passing measures making it harder to cast a ballot. The goal is to manipulate political outcomes, and the result is a severely compromised democracy that doesn’t reflect the will of the people. Our democracy works best when all eligible voters can participate and have their voices heard.

The federal government recently proposed a rule that would strip graduate student workers of their ability to organize under the National Labor Relations Act, the law that grants most private sector employees the right to engage in collective bargaining. In justifying its proposed rule, the government’s National Labor Relations Board asserted that allowing graduate student assistants to bargain collectively would “uniquely imperil[ ] the protection of academic freedoms.”

The ACLU is back in court today once again to stop Kentucky’s attempt to block access to abortion. We’ve been here before. Over the past three years, the Kentucky General Assembly has passed bill after bill that limits — and even bans — a person’s ability to get an abortion. And time after time, we’ve gone to court to protect people’s rights to get the care they need.    

Today marks one year since the Trump administration implemented its forced Return to Mexico policy. In that time, the U.S. has sent tens of thousands of asylum seekers to dangerous northern border cities in Mexico to wait for their hearings in the U.S. It is the most visible but by no means the only policy that the administration has adopted in its effort to systematically dismantle the U.S. asylum system over the past two years.