2021 began with the promise of change. The year wasn’t even a month old when it became clear that many Trump-era attacks on civil liberties lived on, and that we would continue to fight attacks on abortion rights, anti-trans discrimination, systemic racism, and much more. As we close out yet another unprecedented year, we look back at some defining moments that show how far we have come and what lies ahead amidst a rapidly changing world.

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Jan. 20: President Biden signed 17 executive orders on his first day in office, many upturning discriminatory Trump-era policies. Among them was an order making it clear that LGBTQ people are protected from discrimination.     

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Feb. 18 and Feb. 25: The House reintroduced and voted to pass the Equality Act, which would codify last year’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County by adding explicit protections for LGBTQ people throughout federal law. The bill would also update our federal civil rights laws to address modern forms of discrimination, including against all women, people of color, and LGBTQ people in areas such as transportation, retail spaces, and taxpayer-funded programs. The bill must now pass in the Senate to become law.      Feb. 9: The ACLU launched the Systemic Equality agenda striving to dismantle systems deeply rooted in racist policies, practices, and attitudes that harm Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. The Systemic Equality agenda includes specific policy asks of the Biden-Harris administration and Congress that will advance societal equity for and empower the civic participation of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, close the racial wealth gap, and seek reconciliation for our racist past.

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Mar. 30: The ACLU joined other civil rights groups in filing a new federal lawsuit against Georgia’s sweeping voter suppression law making it harder to vote, particularly for voters of color and voters with disabilities.      

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Credit: ACLU

April 13: The ACLU and partners filed a federal lawsuit seeking damages on behalf of Robert Williams, a Black man who was wrongfully arrested by Detroit police based on a faulty face recognition match. Face recognition technology discriminates against people of color and people from other marginalized communities, who are more likely to be misidentified and targeted as a result.      

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Credit: ACLU

May 25: The ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging an Arkansas law that bans gender-affirming care for trans youth. This is the first — and currently only — law in the nation to ban gender-affirming health care for minors, and is one of hundreds of anti-trans bills introduced or passed in state legislatures in 2021 and 2020.     May 17: The ACLU and partners challenge two new Montana laws that hinder Native American participation in the state’s electoral process. The first, HB 176, ends same-day registration, which reservation voters have relied upon since 2005, and the second, HB 530, blocks organized ballot collection on rural reservations.      May 28: The ACLU commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, when a white mob of several thousand murdered up to 300 Black residents and destroyed almost every Black business, church, and home in a 35-square-block neighborhood.

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June 23: The Supreme Court reaffirmed the importance of free speech rights of young people and students by ruling that school authorities must respect students' rights to express themselves outside of school, including their right to express dissenting or unpopular views. The case involved Brandi Levy, who was removed from the junior varsity cheerleading team at Mahanoy Area High School in 2017 after she posted a “snap” on Snapchat with a photo of her and a friend with their middle fingers extended accompanied by the text “fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything.”     June 17: The Supreme Court again refused to rule that the Constitution protects a license to discriminate. The case involved Catholic Social Services, a taxpayer-funded foster care agency, which had sued Philadelphia claiming a constitutional right to discriminate against qualified same-sex parent families because of a religious objection. The ruling means other taxpayer-funded government programs such as homeless shelters, disaster relief programs, and health care should continue to ensure that LGBTQ individuals have equal access to necessary social services.     June 23: The launch of a new report provides for the first time an in-depth, nationwide examination of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s abuse and retaliation against people who initiate hunger strikes in U.S. immigration detention to protest their conditions of confinement.

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July 13: Along with a coalition of 25 civil rights and disability rights organizations, the ACLU and ACLU of Southern California filed an amicus brief in support of Britney Spears’ right to select her own attorney for her conservatorship proceedings, and urging the court to ensure Spears has access to assistance and tools, including supported decision-making, to make this choice.     On the same day, the ACLU, Texas abortion providers, and other partners file a lawsuit to block SB 8, Texas’ radical new abortion law that bans abortions as early as six weeks of pregnancy and includes an unprecedented provision that asks private individuals — including anti-abortion protestors with no connection to the patient — to file lawsuits seeking “enforcement” of the ban. Since going into effect, the law has harmed millions of Texans as it continues to be challenged in court.

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Aug. 12: The U.S. Census Bureau released census population data for redistricting, the redrawing of electoral district boundaries across the country. These boundaries determine representation in Congress, state legislatures, and many county and municipal offices. Politicians often use redistricting for gerrymandering, a practice that undermines democracy by manipulating the outcome of elections. In the following months, the ACLU joined other civil rights groups in filing lawsuits against states for gerrymandering in Ohio, South Carolina, and Alabama.      Aug. 9: A federal appeals court ruled that Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in schools, prohibits discriminatory dress codes but that this federal law doesn’t apply to public charter schools in a case involving a K-8 public charter school that requires girls to wear skirts as a condition of attending school.On Dec. 10, we went back to the federal appeals court and asked them to rule that federal laws like Title IX apply to public charter schools.

American Civil Liberties Union

How Much Do You Know about Redistricting? | News & Commentary | American Civil Liberties Union

It’s official: the once-in-a-decade redistricting process has begun. How does redistricting become gerrymandering, and what does that mean for...

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Sept. 1: Texas’ radical new abortion ban went into effect. The law, known as SB 8, is a stark example of what’s at stake in the nationwide fight for reproductive freedom, and its impact could spread to millions more nationwide if other states follow suit with copycat bills.      Sept. 3. and Sept 28: A federal district court blocked Iowa’s law prohibiting schools from requiring masks. The court ruled that the law violates the civil rights of children with disabilities, including children with underlying conditions, who are more vulnerable to severe illness or death as a result of COVID-19. Later in the month, South Carolina's ban on mask mandates in schools was also blocked by a federal district court.      Sept. 11: On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the ACLU commemorated victims, families, and all those impacted by the tragic attacks and outlined a roadmap to ending unconstitutional policies enacted in its aftermath, such as closing Guantanamo and ending corrosive, suspicionless, post-9/11 security surveillance.

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Oct 12: The Supreme Court heard arguments in a case about Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s last-minute effort to intervene in a case challenging a Kentucky abortion ban that had already declared unconstitutional by two courts. The case is one of several abortion ones that the court will decide this term     Oct. 15: Mastercard’s new policy regulating adult content sellers went into effect. The policy makes it harder for sex workers to do business online and makes sex workers more vulnerable, especially those who are trans women of color.     

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Nov. 8: The Supreme Court heard arguments in a case about the FBI’s practice of unlawfully targeting Muslim Americans in violation of their constitutional rights to religious freedom and privacy. The FBI attempted to stop the litigation of the plaintiffs’ religious discrimination claims using a post-9/11 “state secrets” loophole frequently abused by the government to escape accountability.     

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Dec. 1: The Supreme Court heard arguments in a Mississippi abortion case challenging Roe v. Wade. At question is a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy — one of many attacks on reproductive freedom at the Supreme Court this term. Jennifer Dalven, director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, joined the At Liberty podcast to discuss what we heard in the oral arguments and what we can do moving forward.     

Supreme Court Hears Mississippi Abortion Case That Could Overturn Roe

Supreme Court Hears Mississippi Abortion Case That Could Overturn Roe

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...

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...

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     Dec 2: The Biden administration, citing a court order, announced it will soon restart the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), more commonly known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which people seeking asylum are forced to wait in Mexico while their asylum claims are pending in the U.S. MPP is widely recognized by advocates and experts as a humanitarian catastrophe designed to deter people from seeking asylum by trapping them in miserable and dangerous conditions.      Dec. 16: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced patients can more easily obtain mifepristone, a drug used in early abortion and miscarriage care, through the mail, removing a medically unnecessary rule that previously required the drug to be dispensed in person at a medical facility. The announcement came in response to a case filed in 2017 by the ACLU on behalf of abortion providers and medical groups.

Twenty-one months into the pandemic, many people outside of jails, prisons, and civil detention centers in the U.S. are rushing to get their booster vaccines and are spending time with friends and family in ways that felt impossible less than a year ago. The pandemic is far from over, as the omicron variant has made clear. Still, heralding vaccines and rapid tests, public officials are urging vaccinated Americans to celebrate the holidays together, carefully. “We’ll get through this,” President Biden said in his address this week.

Yet for people who are incarcerated, the risks of COVID-19 infection remain extraordinarily high, and the risk of death is even higher than for those outside these facilities. Carceral institutions haven’t equitably applied, or in some cases even made available, advances made beyond prison walls — even in the face of court orders requiring basic public health measures. And as omicron spreads rapidly across the country, people in jails and detention are among the most vulnerable, yet again.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the need to decarcerate more urgent than ever. More than half a million people incarcerated in prisons have been infected; this number doesn’t even account for people in jails or ICE detention and is surely an undercount. Further, there is abundant proof that the failure to protect incarcerated people from the virus contributes to the spread of COVID-19 in surrounding communities.

As the latest highly transmissible variant sweeps through the country, the ACLU and our partners continue to hear from incarcerated clients who fear for their safety. One client incarcerated in the Maricopa County, Ariz. Jail, D,* has been held in an area full of bunk beds, crammed in with as many as 130 other women. Despite the fact that she is medically vulnerable to COVID-19 infection, she waited more a month after filing a medical request for a vaccine to receive one. L, who is held at the massive Broward County, Florida jail, testified at a court hearing that he requested a vaccine multiple times but didn’t receive one, and that the jail never tested or symptom-screened him or others when they were moved from one housing unit to the next or even when they had obvious COVID-19 symptoms.

C, who recently immigrated to the U.S., was first held in a detention center at the Southern border and then transferred to an ICE facility in Washington state. Even though several people in the group had cold-like symptoms or fevers, nobody was tested before this transfer. They spent a full day shackled next to each other on buses and a plane, unable to move or socially distance. A few days later, C received a positive test result for COVID-19.

These disturbing stories are far from anomalous, and if swift action isn’t taken, we will continue to hear more of them as omicron spreads. Local jails, prisons, and civil detention facilities like those operated for ICE all have the responsibility under the U.S. Constitution to care for the people in their custody. Despite that fact, incarcerated people remain at least three times as likely to be infected with COVID-19 and around three times as likely to die of the disease than people in the free population. These statistics are likely even higher because, researchers have discovered, so many corrections systems either don’t report numbers at all or vastly under-report information based partly on their widespread decisions not to provide sufficient COVID-19 testing.

In the United States, carceral facilities are among the worst places to be when it comes to the risk of illness and death from COVID-19. The virus can spread and adapt in such places, which lack social distancing, adequate hygiene, and health care. Jails, prisons and detention facilities are congregate living settings designed to cram large numbers of people into small spaces. Vaccine education and availability is also limited and ineffective, often leading to “shockingly low” rates of vaccination among incarcerated people, as one health expert testified at a hearing about a Tennessee jail holding more than 2,100 people. Making matters worse, many jails and prisons refuse to even ask their staff if they’re vaccinated, much less require it. Staff go in and out to the community daily, becoming the primary vectors for COVID-19 transmission.

Even as Biden and other officials urge people nationwide to get their initial vaccinations and booster shots as quickly as possible, aNew England Journal of Medicine article concluded that “vaccination alone will not be enough to stop carceral outbreaks.” And even if there were very high rates of vaccination in jails and prisons and adequate physical distancing, the article says, “even a vaccine with 90 percent efficacy will leave many people at ongoing risk for COVID-19, given the extraordinarily high rate of transmission in jails and prisons attributable to rampant overcrowding, inadequate testing and health care, high-volume daily inflow and outflow of staff and detainees, lack of personal protective equipment, and normalized systematic neglect of the welfare of incarcerated people.”

Jails and prisons know what they have to do to keep people as safe as possible from COVID-19 — the CDC has issued and updated detailed guidance specifically for those facilities. But they’re still not doing it. Courts have found “widespread callous disregard for the safety of immigration detainees” across the country, a “vaccination rate at the jail … [that] signals a population in deep peril,” and many more failures of jails and prisons to take precautions.

All across the U.S., incarcerated people have sued their jailers to get even the most basic public health protections. The ACLU represents people in 83 of those cases, along with local legal partners and community-based allies. Our clients are suing to be released whenever possible, and for adequate masks, cleaning supplies, physical distancing, ventilation, vaccinations, educational materials, and no-cost COVID-19 testing and medical care. They are also seeking to require staff who enter the facility from the outside to be vaccinated so that they are less likely to bring the virus into the facility.

These cases, along with advocacy and legislative efforts, have resulted in the release of tens of thousands of people at serious risk across the country. Even in successful cases where courts have issued injunctions and approved consent decrees, though, many of those jails and prisons are refusing to comply with court orders. There remains much more work to be done, and jails and prisons are filling up again.

How Can You Help?

It’s difficult to get the attention and empathy of many people in centers of power when it comes to their community members who are locked up, but that attention is there in communities, faith groups and activists, and especially among the friends and families of loved ones who are incarcerated.

The community can show it cares. This is especially important for your county’s jail, which your local sheriff often controls. Speak out, keep the focus on the sheriff or other decision makers, publish op-eds, hold forums, and listen to the wisdom of people who are or were incarcerated and their loved ones. You can call on the authorities to:

• Immediately identify as many people as possible for rapid releases and let them out;
• Reduce arrests and prosecutions for low-level crimes to prevent population increases in jails (a policy that has proven to actually decrease public complaints of these crimes);
• Require staff vaccinations or achieve high vaccination rates among staff;
• Provide appropriate vaccine education to incarcerated people, with the chance to ask questions privately of trusted medical personnel or community leaders;
• Increase COVID-19 testing; and
• Make tests, vaccines, and COVID-related medical care free of charge.

If the situation seems dire, that’s because it is. But you don’t have to sit back and watch this disaster unfold — you can take meaningful action in your own community to make it clear to your elected leaders that decarceration is essential, and that it is their responsibility to keep the people in their custody safe.

*Names have been abbreviated to protect the privacy of our clients.

On August 23, 2020, a white officer in the Kenosha Police Department shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back, leaving him paralyzed. Protests erupted in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin suburb, and two nights later, Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two people and injured another amidst the unrest. More than 40 different local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies descended on the suburb of Milwaukee that summer night. While Rittenhouse’s high-profile trial was monitored by people across the country, the underlying role of law enforcement and their interactions with right-wing militia groups has drawn less attention.

To better understand what happened that night and how we can prevent such tragedies in the future, a team from the ACLU and the ACLU of Wisconsin launched an investigation. The team filed dozens of public records requests to local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies; reviewed more than 800 records and 50 hours of video footage; and conducted more than 40 in-depth interviews with community members. The ACLU published an analysis of the actions — and inaction — of Kenosha law enforcement in that 72-hour period. Here’s a look at the events that unfolded on August 25, 2020.

August 25, 2020

August 26, 2020

Our findings reaffirm that law enforcement not only failed to protect protestors, but actively put them in harm’s way by enabling and encouraging predominantly white, right-wing armed civilians and militia groups that night. These actions escalated tensions, heightening rather than diffusing a situation that would ultimately turn deadly.

To see all of the public records we retrieved during our investigation, click here.