At Liberty

In this episode, we are diving into the At Liberty archive and returning to a conversation with historian Jill Lepore. We are on the brink of a once-in-a-generation change: Congress is considering a plan to create a pathway to citizenship for up to 8 million people. This September, the ACLU is urging Congress to pass a reconciliation package which includes a path to citizenship for Dreamers, Tempo...

One in 12 American children, more than 5.7 million kids, have experienced parental incarceration at some point during their lives. Black Americans are 50 percent more likely than white Americans to have a family member who is formerly or currently incarcerated. At the ACLU, we are working to reform the criminal legal system in order to significantly reduce its footprint in the United States, becau...

Every two years the Olympic Games promise to be historic. Athletes defy odds, break records, and achieve feats unimaginable to most of us. But the 2020 games have consistently made headlines for the wrong reasons, particularly for the US Olympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee’s poor treatment and discrimination of athletes, especially Black women athletes. From Sha’Carri Richard...

Lawmakers, parents, think tanks, and conservative pundits have waged a war over how to teach students about systemic racism. As of this recording, 27 state legislatures and 165 national and local organizations have made efforts to restrict education on racism. As a result, school board members have been ousted, and some educators have resigned over the death threats, social media bullying, and har...

On July 12th, Texas House Democrats boarded two planes headed for Washington DC in a last-ditch effort to deny Republicans the quorum they would need to pass restrictive voting measures during a special legislative session. The Democratic exodus not only stalled the GOP-led election bills, it also delayed Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s longer agenda for this special session, including legislation to...

In this episode, we continue our celebration of Disability Pride Month with a conversation about representation. Across the top 100 movies of 2019 only 2.3% of all speaking characters had a disability. What’s more, the rare times we do see a character with a disability, they aren’t played by someone with a disability. In fact, one study found that in the top 10 TV shows for 2018 only 12% of disabl...

In 2021, the U.S. experienced over 200 mass shootings. Americans are more likely to be killed at the hands of firearms than in vehicles. This years-long gun violence epidemic continues to spark debate about the 2nd Amendment and who has the right to bear arms.  But often absent from the debate around gun violence is the anti-Blackness at its core. In her latest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a...

In honor of Disability Pride Month, we’re devoting a few episodes to disability rights, starting with a look at conservatorships. Conservatorships are a court-sanctioned way to strip people with disabilities of their civil liberties. The system of conservatorships has gained media attention through the case of Britney Spears. What many have learned through Britney’s story is that under conservator...

The end of the Supreme Court’s term is always a momentous time of year for our guest and At Liberty regular David Cole. David is the ACLU’s legal director and our resident Supreme Court expert. In this episode, he’ll help us answer how the court’s new conservative supermajority has impacted its decisions on the term’s civil rights and civil liberties cases. We’ll also take a peek at the upcoming t...

Just two months ago, Brooklyn Center, a suburb of Minneapolis, was the backdrop of yet another incident of police brutality when 20-year-old Daunte Wright was fatally shot by an officer during a traffic stop. The incident happened just ten miles from the courthouse where Derek Chauvin was on trial for the death of George Floyd. Outraged community members gathered in front of the Brooklyn Center Po...

It’s that time of year again: Supreme Court decision season. Today, we are bringing you a breakdown of the Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a case that touches on whether the city can enforce a nondiscrimination policy with its contractors. Here, Catholic Social Services, a contractor with the city, refused to sign an agreement that would have forced them to...

Over the years, the ACLU’s commitment to the First Amendment has come under attack – both for the cases we take on and for those we don’t. At the ACLU, we are committed to protecting free speech for all – not just those with whom we agree. And that commitment can come into tension with the other work we do defending civil rights and civil liberties. In this episode, we are pulling the curtain back...

In the U.S., it’s easy to think we’re in the final chapter of this global pandemic. Baseball stadiums have replaced cardboard cutouts with screaming fans, and the aroma of fresh popcorn is wafting once again from movie theaters’ open doors. As of this recording, more than 60% of US adults have now received at least one dose of the vaccine, and unused doses are available to anyone over the age of 1...

There were only 18 days last year that did not see a police officer kill a civilian in this country. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Walter Wallace Jr, Daniel Prude, and Rayshard Brooks, were among the 1,127 people killed by police last year. And we know that Black people are more than three times as likely to be killed during a police encounter as their white peers. A year after the murder of Georg...

In the early 1920s, Black Americans were under the siege of direct and indirect racial violence with widespread lynchings, Jim Crow laws, and race riots across the country. And yet, the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma was thriving. Its streets were lined with successful Black-owned businesses and Black professionals. The businesses were so successful the area was dubbed “Black Wall Stree...

Here at the ACLU, we’ve been working remotely from home since the pandemic closed our offices in March 2020, which means this podcast is produced, recorded, and edited, using high-speed internet; even our guests’ participation depends on it! Covid-19 has underscored just how crucial an internet connection is to participate in society. But many people like you and me may take for granted having eff...

Three million Americans currently suffer from Opioid Use Disorder, or an addiction to opioids. Today, adults between the ages of 25 and 44 are more than twice as likely to die from opioid overdose than from COVID-19, yet this epidemic isn’t making the same headlines. When we zoom in on the prison population, the numbers are even more jarring. 85% of people in prison or jail have some kind of subst...

1 in 4 Americans are unbanked or underbanked. That’s because banks across the country are closing branches or they’re penalizing those who don’t have large savings. This means that 64 million Americans -- disproportionately Black and Brown -- can’t easily access basic financial services and are forced to pay thousands a year in fees for alternatives. But one solution to this disparity is within ou...

On April 28th, the Supreme Court will hear arguments for a case that has big implications for student free speech. The case involves then 14-year-old Brandi Levy, a cheerleader at Mahanoy Area High School in Pennsylvania, and her post on the social media platform, Snapchat. One of her cheerleading coaches saw the post, which used an expletive, and suspended her from the team for a year – even thou...

Last year, the world watched Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kill George Floyd in plain sight after arresting him for an alleged counterfeit bill at a convenience store. The footage released from the encounter sparked an international movement as protesters took to the streets for months calling for racial justice and an end to police brutality. On Tuesday, after weeks of arguments, the j...

On Sunday, 20-year-old Daunte Wright was shot and killed by a police officer in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota after being pulled over for traffic violations. The violations? He had expired tags on his license and air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror of his car. This story is heartbreakingly familiar. Just a year ago the country erupted in protest over the death of George Floyd after police...

This week, we are revisiting one of our favorite episodes featuring a conversation with the filmmakers of the documentary, “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution.” Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham use archival footage and interviews to tell the story of a summer camp that seeded a disability rights movement, a movement whose history few know well even though almost 50 percent of Americans live with at...

The Arkansas legislature just passed HB 1570, a bill that would ban gender-confirming health care for trans youth in the state. This comes just one day after Arkansas’ Governor Asa Hutchinson, vetoed the bill amidst pleas from doctors, social workers, and parents of transgender youth. Arkansas is the first state in the country to pass such a bill. We spoke with Chase Strangio, ACLU’s Deputy Direct...

From a Capitol insurrection to multiple mass shootings, recent violence is prompting an old debate: Does the U.S. need a domestic terrorism law? And if not, how do we quell this violence? Our guest today, Hina Shamsi, the Director of the National Security Project at the ACLU, says we don’t need to look far to see how existing laws that claim to target domestic terrorism, in reality, grant the gove...

This week, we’re rounding out our Women’s History Month series with writer and artist, Chanel Miller. Chanel jumped into the spotlight back in 2015, first through a pseudonym, Emily Doe, known in the context of the crime committed against her, a sexual assault that took place on Stanford University’s campus perpetrated by then student, Brock Turner. The victim statement she wrote and delivered at...