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In Memory of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Supreme Court justice who first rose to national prominence as an ACLU lawyer fighting for equal rights for women, has died at 87 years old.   She began Harvard Law School as a young mother and one of only nine women in her class, and became the architect of a legal strategy to eradicate gender discrimination in the United States. She modeled her approach after that of Thurgood Marshall on race discrimination, planning for a series of cases at the Supreme Court, each precedent paving the way for the next that would further expand rights and protections. In 1993, she joined the court as an associate justice, and over the decades became a cultural icon beloved for her vision and passion in defending the rights of women.   Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn in 1933 to Jewish parents with roots in Eastern Europe. Her mother Celia, who died shortly before Ginsburg graduated from high school, instilled in ...

The U.S. Government Tracked, Detained, and Interrogated Journalists. We’re Suing on Their Behalf. As part of a coordinated effort that undermined the freedom of the press, the U.S. government tracked, detained, and interrogated journalists who were reporting on conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Now, we’re suing on their behalf to defend their First Amendment rights. Together with the New York Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties, we’re representing five photojournalists who traveled to Mexico in late 2018 and early 2019 to document the experiences of people traveling by caravan towards the U.S.-Mexico border. Their photographs were subsequently published by news outlets such as The New York Times and The Intercept . On multiple separate occasions, border officers detained each journalist as they sought to return to the U.S. They interrogated the journalists about their coverage of the caravans of people traveling, and asked them about their o...

The Government Needs to Get a Warrant if It Wants Access to Our Private Health Information Choosing between obtaining health care and giving up one’s privacy rights is no choice at all. The Drug Enforcement Administration is once again trying to access private prescription records of patients — this time in New Hampshire — without a warrant, despite a state law to the contrary. Today the ACLU filed a brief in support of the state of New Hampshire’s fight to defend the privacy of our sensitive medical information against unwarranted searches by law enforcement. New Hampshire — like 48 other states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico — has established a statewide Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP), which logs records of every prescription for a long list of “controlled substances,” including Xanax, Ambien, and many painkillers, filled by pharmacists in the state. The PDMP is intended to function as a public health tool to allow physicians a...

Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful’ Wall Crumbles in Court For the first time, a federal judge made clear to President Trump he couldn’t get his wall by illegally diverting taxpayer money. From the beginning of his campaign for president, Donald Trump claimed that he was going to build a wall along the southern border. He said “ nobody builds walls better than me .” He said the wall would be “big” and “beautiful.” He said someone else would pay for it. And he said it would be built so fast that “ your head would spin .” Last night, for the first time, a federal judge made clear to President Trump he couldn’t get his wall by illegally diverting taxpayer money.  The judge’s ruling comes in an ACLU lawsuit on behalf of the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC). Together, the Sierra Club and SBCC represent the communities who live in, protect, and treasure the lands and communities along our southern border. For years, these communities have engaged in the demo...

DHS is Locking Immigrants in Solitary Confinement As ICE detention numbers reach record high, new reports are extremely troubling. In 2012, I visited the federal supermax prison ADX Florence in Colorado and spoke with men living in solitary confinement. I listened closely to their stories of anguish, but I could not understand how they survived it. They told me of the horror of being trapped in a small room, without access to fresh air or sunlight, for at least 22 hours a day—alone, afraid, and not knowing when it would end. I learned that people in solitary confinement talk to the walls, to themselves, to no one — sometimes they stop talking altogether. Those are the types of horrors we now know that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is inflicting on immigrants, thanks to the courage of whistleblower Ellen Gallagher . This week, multiple news outlets reported government documents detailing 8,488 cases of solitary confinement. In half the cases, solitary lasted longer than 1...

Black Trans Women Are Being Murdered in the Streets. Now the Trump Administration Wants to Turn Us Away From Shelters and Health Care. Two new rules from the Trump Administration will leave transgender people vulnerable to violence, discrimination, and even death. It has been a horrific week for transgender and non-binary people. Muhlaysia Booker, Claire Legato, and Michelle Simone are Black trans women who have been murdered in the past week. At least five Black trans women have been killed so far in 2019. On Wednesday, the Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to give federally funded shelters a license to discriminate and turn away transgender people. The policy move is seen by many transgender and non-binary people as an act of violence on our community and our lives. Then Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced its plan to take away protections for trans people from discrimination in healthcare. Like many Black trans women, I struggled to fin...

Alabama Is Trying to Ban Abortion. Today We Filed Suit to Stop Them. Abortion is a right and this attack on abortion rights won’t succeed. Last week, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed legislation banning nearly all abortions. The law, which threatens doctors with up to 99 years in prison for performing abortions, is the anti-abortion opposition’s true agenda on display: ban abortion, jail doctors, and push this essential health care out of reach. These are undoubtedly dark times in the fight for reproductive freedom as Alabama and states across the South and Midwest aggressively push to place such onerous restrictions on abortion so that the procedure is all but rendered inaccessible. And this seemingly relentless attack on our freedom and dignity has had a disproportionate impact on the lives of Black people and other people of color, young people, and people with low-incomes. But make no mistake we have been and will continue to fight back: Abortion remains — and will remain — safe ...

We’re Suing Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery to Release the Records He’s Hiding From Arizonans. Prosecutorial transparency serves everyone. But in Maricopa County, Arizona, secrecy trumps transparency, and the people suffer for it. Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery claims to be a big believer in data. As reported last year, Montgomery has blocked effective, commonsense criminal justice reform proposals from becoming law in part by criticizing them as having “no data to support” them, and as being “pet projects” “based on myths and rhetoric.”  Given this insistence on evidence-based policy, it would be reasonable to assume that Montgomery would happily comply with a public records request seeking exactly the sort of data he wishes folks would utilize. He’s done the exact opposite. In October 2018, the ACLU of Arizona and investigative journalist Sean Holstege (a consultant that the ACLU of Arizona hired to write a report on Arizona prosecutors) sent Montgomery and...

We’re Suing to Block Ohio’s Abortion Ban Abortion is a constitutional right. Today we filed a lawsuit challenging Ohio’s ban on abortion starting at six weeks of pregnancy. Our lawsuit comes a day after Alabama passed a similar law and weeks after Georgia , Kentucky, and Mississippi passed similar measures. A ban on abortion starting at six weeks is a ban on almost all abortions. Before six weeks, most people do not even know that they are pregnant.  Legally, this case is straightforward. A ban on abortion is blatantly unconstitutional under more than 45 years of Supreme Court precedent starting with  Roe v. Wade . The Ohio law we’ve challenged today flies in the face of that precedent and of the Constitution. We’ve asked the court to block the law before it can take effect on July 10. The consequences of this law taking effect would be devastating. Approximately 90% of abortions in Ohio take place at a...

House Funding Bill Shows How Far We’ve Come in the Fight for Reproductive Freedom—And How Far We Have to Go A key bill makes important strides for reproductive health, and shows why we need presidential candidates to show leadership on abortion coverage. This week the House Appropriations Committee advanced the Labor, Health, and Human Services appropriations bill , the annual bill that funds federal health and education programs.  It makes important strides forward on reproductive health and rights--and it also shines a light on the need for presidential leadership on abortion coverage. The bill, under the leadership of subcommittee chair Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and committee chair Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), blocks funding for implementation of the Trump administration’s discriminatory health care refusal rule , thanks to an amendment offered by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA). That sweeping new rule, issued late last week , aims to license discrimination in health care by enabling healt...

The Use of Solitary Confinement in Virginia is Inhumane and Unlawful Instead of keeping its word to courts and reforming its use of solitary, the VA Dept. of Corrections built two massive super maximum-security prisons. William Thorpe has spent nearly 24 straight years in solitary confinement in Virginia prisons stuck in a cell about half of the size of a parking space for more than 22 hours a day, every day, with no outside light and almost no human contact. In his nearly two and a half decades in solitary, Thorpe has seen changes in leadership at the Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) and attempts to reform how solitary confinement is used in our state prisons. The most recent, change to VDOC’s solitary practices was creation in 2011 of its so-called Segregation Reduction Step-Down Program. This program is a behavior modification system VDOC officials have repeatedly touted as an evidence-based approach to corrections that provides a pathway out of solitary for those who fo...

Attorney General Barr Says ICE Has Power to Lock Up Asylum Seekers Without Hearings The Constitution does not allow the government to lock people up without due process of law. Today the ACLU, the ACLU of Washington, the American Immigration Council , and Northwest Immigrant Rights Project  launched  a legal challenge to the Trump administration’s latest assault on people who have come to the United States to seek refuge from persecution: jailing asylum seekers without even allowing a judge to decide if there’s any reason to lock them up. Attorney General William Barr’s recent decision in Matter of M-S- seeks to eliminate this basic form of due process and puts thousands of asylum seekers at risk of being wrongfully imprisoned.  M-S- specifically applies to individuals who enter the United States without documents and are apprehended by the authorities soon after they cross the border. Under the immigration laws, those individuals can be deported immediately—unless ...

The Government Shouldn’t Keep the Public in the Dark Just Because Private Companies Ask It to While it may be a private entity’s prerogative to keep certain information secret, it can’t be the government’s. The government often relies on private entities to carry out its work. It has them running private prisons, designing location tracking technologies, and developing artificial intelligence (AI) systems that automate government decisions, such as determining our Medicaid benefits , bail , and even which children are purportedly at risk of abuse or neglect. Today the Supreme Court heard a case, FMI v. Argus Media , about whether working with private companies changes the government’s transparency and accountability obligations to the public. As we and several other organizations argued in a friend-of-the-court brief, it should not. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the law at the center of the case, requires the government to disclose information to the public upon reque...

Supreme Court Takes Cases of People Fired for Being LGBTQ The court will consider whether to take anti-discrimination protections away from LGBTQ people. Can a business fire someone because they’re LGBTQ? The Supreme Court will soon tell us. After a funeral home outside Detroit fired Aimee Stephens because she is transgender, Aimee won a federal appeals court ruling that the firing violated the federal law barring sex discrimination in the workplace. After Don Zarda was fired from his job as a skydiving instructor because he’s gay, another federal appeals court ruled that his firing, too, was sex discrimination. On Monday, the Supreme Court announced that it would take up Aimee and Don’s cases (plus a third) to decide whether to take those civil rights protections away from Aimee, Don, and all LGBTQ people in America. Not surprisingly, President Trump’s Department of Justice will argue that it should. In Aimee’s case , she worked for six years in a job she loved as funeral direc...

Dialing 911 Can Get You Evicted The eviction of Beverley Somai for calling the police is part of a disturbing trend. Last year, Beverley Somai learned a brutal truth that too many people across the country face: Calling the police can get you evicted. In 2017, Ms. Somai and her adult disabled son moved to Bedford, Ohio, to seek housing stability and better educational and employment opportunities. However, a few months after settling in, Ms. Somai discovered that her neighbor played loud music at all hours of the night, making it impossible for her and her son to rest. Even worse, the neighbor began to intimidate Ms. Somai and her son by following them on their errands and lurking outside their home. She asked for help from her landlord, who told her to call the police. So she did. But then the city of Bedford sent a letter to Ms. Somai’s landlord, citing her calls for help and threatening to impose steep penalties for any future police responses to the property. Because of the lett...