At Liberty

Joel Castón was incarcerated when he was 18 years old. He’s now 45 and in November of last year, just two months ago, Joel was released after serving over 26 years. While incarcerated, he received a degree through the Georgetown Prison Scholars Program and started a mentorship initiative called Young Men Emerging. And, because D.C. changed the law to allow incarcerated people to vote, he ran for o...

Today, we’re checking in with LaTosha Brown, Co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund and the Black Voters Capacity Building Institute. We first spoke to LaTosha a year ago after her work in expanding voting access in Georgia proved so successful. But that was then, and this is now. Challenges abound this year, likely as a direct reaction to her work. New restrictions making it harder to vote, s...

For our 2021 holiday special, we are taking you through the holiday food traditions of ACLU staffers and their families. Food is often the glue holding families and cultural identity together. We wanted to celebrate that and share it with you. Listener note: you may find yourself unusually hungry during this episode. We recommend you have something tasty on hand. We are joined by ACLU staffers Bla...

On the podcast, we’ve chronicled some of the year’s biggest stories: the insurrection, the rescinding of the Muslim ban, devastating police brutality, state after state attacks on the rights of trans kids, the abusive system of conservatorships, and the rollback of abortion access, just to name a few. Today we’re going to follow up with guests on some of this year’s most popular episodes to see wh...

As we near the end of the year, we are bringing you an episode of reflection. A lot has happened in the world, in our country, and in our work at the ACLU. We all felt the high stakes of last week's oral arguments at the Supreme Court on abortion. And while that has left us with concern, there is still so much to celebrate this year from our work across the organization. We’ve made meaningful stri...

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a Mississippi abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization that challenges a nearly 49-year-old precedent protecting a pregnant person's right to an abortion established in the landmark case Roe v. Wade. The law in question is a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, violating the 1992...

This week, we are stepping back in time and re-visiting our conversation with author and activist, Glennon Doyle. In this conversation, Glennon talks about how to bring our loved ones into understanding of equity and justice through the use of storytelling, imagination, and conversation. On this podcast, we learn a lot about history, about civil rights issues, and about how we can use the law to m...

I’m Paige Fernandez, the ACLU’s Policing Policy Advocate and I’m so excited to be taking the At Liberty reins for the next month. I have a confession to make: I have had a true crime obsession most of my life. My job at the ACLU and my organizing work and personal beliefs may make this surprising. I spend my time working to help communities divest from their local police forces and I talk openly a...

Today we are running a conversation between Amber Hikes, the ACLU’s Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and disability rights icon Judy Heumann on CVS v. Doe, a case that the Supreme Court was set to hear on Dec 8. The case threatened to attack the very foundation of disability rights laws, specifically by threatening Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. If CVS had pursued the case and...

This week, we are bringing you a story about an upcoming Supreme Court case: FBI v. Fazaga, set to be argued on November 8th. This case will have big implications on the ability for private citizens who have been wrongfully surveilled by the U.S. government to seek redress for the infringement on their personal privacy and the damages associated. There’s a lot to dig into here, both about the case...

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases challenging Texas’ ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy known as SB 8 -- one case brought by the ACLU and our partner organizations on behalf of abortion providers, Whole Women’s Health v. Jackson, and a separate case brought by the Department of Justice, United States v. Texas. The rulings will determine whether or not abortio...

Last month, horrifying images hit the news: border patrol agents on horses were seen whipping Haitian migrants. This was the latest in a long line of anti-immigrant practices that have emboldened border patrol over the last few years. Some of these practices include the invocation and overuse of Title 42, a policy that closed the borders due to public health concerns and the transmission of COVID,...

More than 100 anti-trans bills have been levied in states across the country this year. These bills range from blocking trans youth from seeking healthcare to banning trans students from participating in school sports. In Texas, lawmakers are getting ready to move forward House Bill 25, the law that will change the landscape of sports for trans people in the state. For Schuyler Bailar, former divi...

Imagine you’ve forgotten once again the difference between a gorilla and a chimpanzee, so you do a quick Google image search of “gorilla.” But instead of finding images of adorable banana-obsessed animals, photos of a Black couple show up. Is this just a glitch in the algorithm? Or, is Google an ad company, not an information company, that’s replicating the discrimination of the world it operates...

2021 is shaping up to be one of the most devastating years for abortion access in decades. State legislatures have enacted a blitz of new anti-abortion legislation. As of September 1st, when Texas’s six-week abortion ban went into effect, abortion has become functionally illegal in the state. The law, which deputizes citizens to sue anyone involved in abortion care, has emboldened other states to...

Over the last couple of months, climate disasters have erupted around the world. In the US alone, we’ve seen wildfires in the west, tornadoes in the midwest, and hurricanes pummeling the Gulf and East Coasts. The environments we live in have become hostile to our health, our livelihood, and our community. Many have been forced to leave their homes and some will never be able to return. Globally, n...

As the political divide deepens through disinformation campaigns about the election results, vaccines, 9/11, and more, it can feel like unity and consensus are shrinking on the horizon. And yet, the only way to address the pandemic or the fault lines in our democracy is if we can bridge the divide and find an enclave of common ground. Our guest today has decades of experience finding common ground...

As millions of children head back to school, some states have banned mask mandates on school grounds. As of this recording, school districts in eight states cannot require students to wear a mask in school; if they do, many risk losing crucial state funding. This ban ignores national recommendations by the CDC to wear a mask indoors for those who are unvaccinated or in an area of high COVID transm...

As we pass the 20-year mark since September 11th, we are following up with the clients and the attorney of one seminal ACLU lawsuit on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, a program that ended in 2010 but that continues to haunt its survivors and to stain the U.S.’s international human rights record. The lawsuit Salim v Mitchell was filed in 2015 against James Elmer Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jesse...

Over the coming weeks, kids will be heading back to school – over a million of them to preschool. And while many of these preschoolers will learn about colors, shapes, and the ABC’s, thousands will learn what it’s like to be suspended for the first time. On average 250 preschoolers are suspended each day of the school year. Compared with K through 12 students, preschoolers are suspended at nearly...

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...