At Liberty

The riot on the Capitol building in the last days of Trump’s presidency was a powerful inflection point in an era of racial reckoning. In its wake, many pundits and politicians declared that “This is not America.” Our guest, ACLU deputy legal director, Jeff Robinson would disagree. The image of a Confederate flag paraded through the halls of the Capitol or cries to disavow an election with high Bl...

This month, in honor of Black History Month, we’ll be featuring a slew of incredible Black leaders who are tackling issues that impact their communities. This week, we’re speaking with Garrett Bradley, a filmmaker passionate about criminal justice reform. The documentary film called Time, streaming on Amazon Prime right now, is at its core a story of enduring love – both romantic and familial. It’...

Weeks ago, President Trump was banned from nearly every social media platform because of his role in the events at the Capitol Building on January 6th. Just before Congress was set to certify Joe Biden as the next president of the United States, Trump instructed his supporters to, quote, “fight much harder” against “bad people” and “show strength” at the Capitol. The social media bans on Trump and...

Yesterday, Joe Biden was inaugurated as President of the United States. And today, as part of his day one agenda, he has rescinded one of the Trump administration’s most incendiary orders: the Muslim Ban. The Muslim ban, enacted within Trump’s first days in office, virtually blocked immigration from countries with substantial Muslim populations such as Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and...

This past weekend the national board of the ACLU convened an emergency meeting to respond to the events at the Capitol building on January 6th. After hours of deliberation, the board voted unanimously to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump, just days before his term is set to end. The resolution published by the National Board states “President Trump has...violated his oath to preserve, prote...

On Wednesday, pro-Trump loyalists stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying the electoral college decision to elect Vice President Biden to be the next President of the United States. At the ACLU, we watched aghast like many of you at home. What we saw was a dangerous attack on American democracy. We know that we will be dealing with the consequences of the events t...

We generate droves of personal data every time we use the apps on our phones, make a call, make an online purchase. We all hope that data is kept private, hidden away from people or entities that might want to surveil us, but sometimes it isn’t. In November, news reports revealed that the federal government had purchased location data mined from apps used by Muslims. One of those apps is a prayer...

This week, we’re revisiting one of our year-end favorites, a conversation about ACLU staffers’ favorite holiday movies. So grab some popcorn and enjoy the show. We’ll see you again in 2021.

How to sum up 2020? Stressful? Uncertain? Hard? If you’re like some ACLU staffers, one note of help came quite literally from listening to music. For a special year-end holiday episode, we asked a few staffers to tell us which song provided the service of escape or inspiration or just comfort. It’s been a long year so we hope you enjoy a momentary departure from our usual talk of the latest civil...

The 2020 election was notable for a lot of reasons, but one winner really stood out: drug legalization. Five states legalized either medicinal or adult use of marijuana. Oregon and D.C. went even further and decriminalized or legalized hard drugs. And the momentum garnered from these cross-country wins helped push the MORE Act through the House in recent weeks. If enacted, this legislation would e...

The holidays can be a challenging time for many. One of the reasons for the extra anxiety we may feel is due to the kinds of conversations and sometimes, conflict, that can come up when we are sharing a meal with loved ones. Your aunt, grandpa, parent, or cousin says something about politics, about race, about any marginalized community, and boom, your blood is boiling. You love your family, but s...

Please note that this episode contains conversation around sexual violence. Calls to “defund the police” or even “abolish the police” are often met with the retort: “But what do we do about the rapists and the murderers?” It’s a question that today’s guest, Camonghne Felix, addressed head-on with an article in New York Magazine’s The Cut titled “Aching for Abolition as a Survivor of Sexual Violenc...

Thanksgiving is a holiday framed by our history books as a joyful celebration between those who arrived on the Mayflower to Plymouth, Massachusetts and the indigenous Americans already living on the land. In reality, the day had marked the end of a brutal battle where white colonizers attacked Indigenous Americans in order to take over and move in on their land. On At Liberty, we are particularly...

As of now, we know the status of two of the three branches of the federal government. We have President-elect Joe Biden in the executive and an even more conservative majority in the Supreme Court with the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. The future of Congress is still unknown as we await the results of two runoffs in Georgia that could hand control of the senate to either party. But wha...

In early October, the United States Labor Department reported that women were leaving the workforce at four times the rate of men. A few months earlier, a report from McKinsey Global revealed that while women made up just 43% of the workforce, they had borne 56% of COVID-related job losses. This data — and much more — led one news source to call this moment “America’s First Female Recession.” What...

The Trump campaign is pursuing legal challenges in battleground states as the pathways to President Trump’s reelection narrow. These challenges involve attempts to stop or challenge the vote count. And because of the record number of mail-in ballots cast during the pandemic, the votes affected are disproportionately those of mail-in ballots. 91.6 million Americans requested a mail-in ballot. And w...

Tomorrow's the big day: Election Day! The last day to vote. Here at the ACLU, we have just one closing argument: Everyone should be able to vote, and everyone’s vote should be counted. So, we want to prepare you to know your rights when you head to the ballot box. We've prepared a short and sweet audio guide for you. We'll see you at the polls!

It’s almost half a year since George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer and the country erupted in protest demanding change. It felt like a turning point in many ways, but was it? Since that day, some cities and states have taken steps towards police accountability. The city of Minneapolis voted to defund their police department, Iowa restricted chokeholds, New York repealed a law th...

Over 5 million Americans are kept from the polls by laws that prohibit people with felony convictions from voting. While the intricacies of these laws vary from state to state, people who have been convicted of a felony are blocked from voting in one way or another in 48 states. But why do felony disenfranchisement laws exist in the first place and where do they come from? On this episode, we spok...

The city of Philadelphia learned in March 2018 that two of the agencies it had hired to provide foster care services would not, based on religious objection, accept same-sex couples as foster parents. The city then told the agencies their contracts with the city were in jeopardy unless they complied with basic nondiscrimination requirements. While one of the agencies agreed to comply, the other —...

For the last few months, we've been gathering your voting questions. Hundreds of you have sent in voice messages, videos and emails with your most pressing concerns. These submissions have informed our At the Polls episodes, but we couldn't answer each question with its own episode. This week, we have recruited the best experts to answer your varied questions about the upcoming election, your ball...

This week on Monday, October 12th, a growing number of states and cities across the country celebrated Indigenous Peoples’ Day. It comes as an important corrective after decades of celebrating the, quote, “discovery” of the Americas by Christopher Columbus each year. We know, of course, that no such discovery happened — what did happen was colonization and centuries of subjugation, murder, disenfr...

One in four American adults lives with a disability. And that doesn’t even include the fact that about 45% of Americans live with a chronic illness. During a global pandemic, that means that a huge portion of the electorate has health conditions that impact their ability to vote safely. A new act introduced in Congress has the potential to really help. It's called the Accessible Voting Act. In thi...

Over the last months, we’ve explored different conversations on the subject of policing: abolition, violence and accountability, protest and activism. Today, we’re exploring a topic that has gained more attention in the wake of Daniel Prude’s death in March at the hands of the Rochester Police Department: the startling connection between mental health 911 calls and police brutality. Studies show t...

American voting rates have hovered in the mid-50s for most of recent history. As these things go, that is not great. But it’s even worse with younger voters. In the 2014 midterms, less than 20 percent of voters under 30 cast a ballot. We saw a shift in the 2018 midterms and now the question is how do we sustain the influx of young voters? As of this year, millennials and Gen Z make up approximatel...