Tag: ACLU

Watch: ACLU People Power Resistance Training

3/12/17

What is the ACLU’s Freedom Cities campaign

President Trump is seeking to recruit, and where that fails, compel local law enforcement agencies to help his administration pursue its mass deportation agenda.

In response to this effort and many other Trump administration plans that fly in the face of our Constitution and norms, the ACLU is launching an ambitious campaign called “Freedom Cities.” Immigration will be the first battle we wage, but many others are coming. On immigration, just like activists organized locally to demand the release of people detained at our airports by federal authorities, People Power activists we will organize in our communities to ensure that our local law enforcement officials defend – not threaten – our friends, families, and neighbors. People Power will be a powerful grassroots force supporting the ACLU’s efforts to propose, support, and win local laws that make it more difficult for President Trump to pursue his dangerous agenda. And make no mistake about it, America’s cities, counties and towns are places we can and will win.

As part of this local grassroots strategy, the ACLU has identified areas in which municipal opposition to, or lack of cooperation with, the Trump administration will impede objectionable policies the president is pursuing.

ACLU’s “Freedom Cities” plan brings local grassroots activists together and provides a blueprint for local-level campaigns – in cities and counties – to defend our communities and block the worst abuses of the Trump administration. These are campaigns that will generate victories in the short term even as we work towards comprehensive protections nationwide in the long term.

The ACLU is calling for help on a grassroots level, with your mayor, your police chief, your city council.  The ACLU streamed an online training event on 3/11/17.  You can still watch a video of the event on their website and sign up for updates.  

Watch: ACLU People Power Resistance Training

ACLU Promises ‘Rapid Response Team’ to Combat Deportations

By MICHAEL EDISON HAYDEN
Feb 12, 2017, 3:57 PM ET

But ACLU senior attorney Lee Gelernt told ABC News that while they were “not pleased” with Obama’s handling of deportation raids, his group is concerned that the Trump administration will expand those efforts.

The rapid response team would bring together the ACLU, private law firms and local community groups to ensure that individuals facing deportations have access to counsel right away.

“This administration is just getting started and we’re anticipating much worse,” Gelernt said in a phone interview, citing the language Trump uses about immigrants as his reasoning for his concern that Trump’s approach could be more severe than Obama’s. “His rhetoric is already scaring a lot of people in immigrant communities.”

ACLU Promises ‘Rapid Response Team’ to Combat Deportations

This week in the Resistance: 2/11/17

Think Global and Act Local

5calls: Act local – provides phone numbers and scripts for your local representatives “so your calls have more impact”

Indivisible: Find a group, register a group, group meetings, indivisible action

Sign up for ACLU text notifications for “opportunities to sign petitions, contact elected officials, and take other actions.”

Sign up for ACLU email notifications “to keep informed and know when to act.

Women’s March: Hear Our Voice: Join the 10 Actions for the first 100 Days campaign.  How to find or start local groups.

Small-Town Activists Stand Up to a Coal Ash Landfill and Win a Major Victory for Free Speech

By Lee Rowland, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project

February 9, 2017 | 11:45 AM

Esther Calhoun, Ben Eaton, Mary Schaeffer, and Ellis Long helped create Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice,
a community organization dedicated to battling pervasive racial and
environmental injustice in Uniontown, where more than 90 percent of
residents are Black and the median per capita income is around $8,000.

As
part of their advocacy against a host of problems in Uniontown, these
four activists decried the presence of coal ash in a landfill located in
their residential neighborhood. And they were right to be concerned—the
Uniontown landfill accepted the very same coal ash that had
leaked out of a Tennessee facility, causing an environmental disaster.
In return, the two corporations that own the landfill sued them for $30
million in federal court, claiming defamation and slander over Facebook
posts that said things like “we should all have the right to clean air
and clean water.”

…

As my colleague Dennis Parker and I wrote when we took on this case, Uniontown has an unfortunately large and varied collection of injustices that need to be called out:

In
Uniontown, seeking health and justice means highlighting a municipal
sewage “system” that sprays fecal water onto a field while emaciated
cattle graze nearby. It means fighting the suffocating smell of aerated
whey that is shot into the sky, making the town reek like putrid
processed cheese — on a good day. It means following the trail of a $4.8
million Department of Agriculture grant that residents feel just
evaporated without any benefit to the citizens it was intended to help.

Fighting
for justice in Uniontown means opposing the trains that roll into town
carrying hazardous coal ash from 33 states to deposit it at the
Arrowhead landfill — a dump bewilderingly located in a residential
neighborhood, near wetlands, within this spacious county full of rolling
fields and open space. It means worrying about the safety of that coal
ash — the very same coal ash that catastrophically leaked out of a
Tennessee facility in 2008 and destroyed the surrounding environment
before it was hurriedly redirected to Uniontown.

Small-Town Activists Stand Up to a Coal Ash Landfill and Win a Major Victory for Free Speech

ACLU Announces Expansion Plan to Fight Trump Policies

By Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director

February 8, 2017 | 10:30 AM

…we will go to court to defend the constitutional rights of immigrants
and citizens alike — just like we have these past two weeks.

This is what we do. It’s why the ACLU was created.

The
day Trump took the oath of office we filed a Freedom of Information Act
request demanding any and all government documents that addressed
conflicts of interest and violations of the Emoluments Clause of the
U.S. Constitution. … We are now searching for a
business competitor to Trump who would have standing to challenge the
violation of the Emoluments Clause.

…

During Trump’s first week in office, we filed a constitutional challenge
to Trump’s Muslim ban. We now have several cases challenging its
constitutionality …
Just last week, 50 ACLU affiliates filed coordinated Freedom of
Information Act requests seeking information from Customs and Border
Protection field offices about how the Muslim ban was interpreted and
implemented at airports across the country.

And we have another lawsuit
in the works to file the minute Trump tries to allow federal government
employees and agencies the right to discriminate in the areas of LGBT
and reproductive rights under the guise of religious freedom.

…

We plan to spend over $40 million to build up our state offices. Among
advocacy groups, the ACLU is the only organization with boots on the
ground in every state. … Already, we see anti-reproductive rights laws, anti-immigrant
bills, and anti-Muslim policies being introduced in state legislatures.

…

We are also taking a close look at those states where the politics are
in flux — where our advocacy can be particularly impactful as people go
to the polls to vote in the near future.

…

We also plan to spend over $13 million to build a grassroots
member-mobilization program. With the surge of new members, we now have a
growing army of people who don’t just want to write a check. They want
to join the fight. We will be asking our volunteers and members to join
our team and partner with us to do grassroots calls-to-action, local
town halls, lobby days, acts of protest, and engagement on our core
priorities. Ultimately, we want to have our membership surpass that of
the National Rifle Association. We are now half the size of the NRA, but
with continued growth, mobilization, and activism, we can build an even
bigger force across a broader range of issues.

…

We plan to spend over $21 million to hire new lawyers, advocates, and
other staff in the headquarters of the ACLU to strengthen the core
functioning of the headquarters. We are still the David to the
government’s Goliath. We have 300 litigators on payroll nationwide — 100
of them in our headquarters. The government has over 19,000 lawyers on
its payroll. 11,000 of them belong to Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department

…

Our program/management ratio is 86 percent program, 14 percent management, including fundraising.

…

We are poised to launch a full-throttle response to whatever lies
ahead over the next four years. There is no limit to how big a
resistance to Trump we can build at the ACLU. It has been our history
for over 97 years to fight the worst assaults against justice, equality,
and democracy. It is our mission — our mandate — to rise to that
challenge again.

With your help, we will continue to do so.

ACLU Announces Expansion Plan to Fight Trump Policies

ACLU National on Twitter

Lee Gelernt:  “The judge, in a nutshell, saw through what the government was doing and gave us what we wanted, which was to block the Trump order and not allow the government to remove anybody who has come and is caught up in the order, nationwide.  They cannot remove anybody.  Plus, she said they need to give us a list of the names who are being detained, because as you all know, we have not been ale to track everyone down despite diligent efforts.  The government must now give us a name.  We’re going to go see each of the people, provide counsel, try to get them out of detention, right now.  But at minimum, they will not be returned back to danger.  The court has set further briefing and will hear this case some time in February, but the key tonight was making sure that no one was put back on a plane and some people were threatened to be put back on a plane as of 9:30 tonight.  Hopefully that will be blocked.  She told the government to get the word out to their people at airports, “Don’t put people on planes.” So, if you hear of that, you need to let us know immediately, because it would be in defiance of a court order.”

~*~

If you can’t protest, and you can donate money, consider donating now. Promises to match donations are popping up all over the ACLU feed.  Donate now and you can double the effect of whatever you can give.

Twitter thread with people volunteering to match donations to the ACLU

You can also find more news and more people volunteering to match donations to the ACLU at @ACLUnational twitter feed.

ACLU National on Twitter

Federal court halts Trump’s immigration ban

1/28/17 at about 8:45 EST:  Per Dale Hoe, Director, ACLU Voting Rights Project

image

updated to add:  from The New Civi Rights Movement

A federal judge in New York on Saturday evening issued a nationwide order blocking the deportation of people detained in the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s immigration and refugee ban.

U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly, an Obama nominee who took the bench in 2015, issued the ruling in response to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, the National Immigration Law Center and other groups on behalf of two Iraqi men detained at JFK Airport earlier Saturday.

Both men had U.S. Visas and were in the air when Trump signed the order Friday, which blocked people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the country for 90 days. The order also halted the U.S. refugee program for 120 days, and indefinitely suspended the intake of refugees from Syria.

Initial reports on Twitter indicated that the judge’s order applies only to those who were either in transit or had already been detained. That means it won’t necessarily prevent the Trump administration from implementing the ban going forward.

So, it looks like it only includes those who are currently detained or are in the process of traveling to the US.

Federal court halts Trump’s immigration ban