At Liberty

It’s been a dizzying few days in U.S. immigration policy. Earlier this week, the Trump administration issued rules to ban most refugees arriving through the southern border. Despite legal setbacks, the administration continues to try to build a border wall. At the same time, the president has launched sustained attacks on four American congresswomen of color. Cecillia Wang, deputy legal director at the ACLU, talks to At Liberty about all of these developments and the ACLU's legal efforts to push back.

Surveillance technology is slowly encroaching on every part of our lives. With regulation at the federal level slow to materialize, local governments are taking action. Two American cities — San Francisco, Calif. and Somerville, Mass. — recently passed local laws to ban the use of facial recognition technology by police and other government agencies. Is local advocacy our best bet for keeping the surveillance state at bay? Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, discusses a growing local movement to protect privacy.

Hundreds of thousands of Washington, D.C. residents currently lack full political representation. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents them in the House of Representatives, is currently leading an initiative to make the District of Columbia the 51st state.

It was another dramatic year for the Supreme Court. A new justice was sworn in against the backdrop of scandal. A beloved justice got sick and recovered. And, of course, major precedent-setting decisions were handed down. David Cole, the ACLU’s legal director and a seasoned Supreme Court litigator, makes sense of the highs and lows of the past term and talks through what’s to come when the court reconvenes this fall.

In one of the most highly anticipated decisions of its term, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration cannot add a citizenship question to the U.S. census – at least not for now. Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, who argued the case, explains the decision.