The New York Times Magazine on Monday published an article on the ACLU’s advocacy and litigation efforts in the days following the 2016 presidential election. Below is a preview of “Inside the A.C.L.U.’s War on Trump:”
On the morning of Friday, June 22, the American Civil Liberties Union won a major Supreme Court decision in Carpenter v. United States, which was possibly, at least in terms of pure jurisprudence, the most important case argued before the court this past session. It was a landmark ruling that changed the future of digital privacy in America, but news of the win was only the second most important thing happening at the A.C.L.U. offices that day. At 3 p.m., a conference call was scheduled to discuss the more than 2,000 children whose fates were tied to another A.C.L.U. suit against the government.
That case — Ms. L. v. ICE — was filed in late February, long before most of the rest of the world was aware that thousands of children were being separated from their families at the border. (As a point of comparison, a coalition of 18 state attorneys general filed a suit to stop family separation on June 26, four months to the day after the A.C.L.U. filed its suit.) It began with a single client, a 39-year-old Congolese woman, Ms. L., whose daughter was taken from her in November 2017, but it quickly grew into a national class action on behalf of every family whose children had been taken from them.
Read the full article at The New York Times.
