American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, Inc.

We seek to defend and expand Americans’ freedom to vote and to have their vote count, promote systemic equality and racial justice, ensure that LGBTQ people can live openly without discrimination and enjoy equal rights, protect First Amendment rights including free speech and the right to protest, defend and expand the rights of immigrants, protect women’s right to determine whether and when they have a child, advance systemic reform in institutions that perpetuate discrimination against women, end mass incarceration and racism in the criminal legal system, end discrimination against people with disabilities, and hold the U.S. government accountable to universal human rights principles in addition to rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

The ACLU combines litigation with public education, traditional and social media, advocacy, and on- and off-line activism to effect change at the local, state, and national levels. We:

• use litigation frequently and strategically to force attention on systemwide injustice, change hearts and minds, advance civil liberties, and win relief for vulnerable populations. To illustrate, our litigation for years protected hundreds of thousands of long-term, tax-paying U.S. residents—formerly granted “temporary protected status”—from immediate deportation. A recent win finally gave women in Guam access to medication abortion, which they could previously obtain only by travelling 4,000 miles to Hawaii.

• make use of traditional and social media to tell stories of people impacted by civil liberties abuses to generate a shift in public opinion that will help drive policy reform. For example, our years-long successful campaign to win marriage equality for same-sex couples was carried forward by the moving accounts of our clients in the media, a strategy we use today to defend transgender rights.

• mobilize and motivate supporters to advance and defend civil liberties online and in the streets. Most recently, more than 10,000 supporters engaged in weekly actions to support systemic equality, including promoting reparations and student debt forgiveness.

• make use of our 50+ state-based affiliates to conduct nationwide work and generate press; for example, filing “freedom of information act” requests in dozens of states on the same day, or pushing out Know Your Rights materials at state and local events. Our coordinated efforts include more than 200 legal actions responding to COVID-19, including 37 lawsuits to expand vote-by-mail and 83 legal actions to force government authorities to release or otherwise protect vulnerable individuals in jails, prisons, and immigrant detention centers.

• with our allies, coordinate best litigation practices among the many partners who work in our areas of interest so that we can collectively build expertise, sharpen strategies, avoid making bad law, and effect the broadest, highest-impact reforms possible. We are currently working with other leading reproductive rights groups to coordinate strategy to protect abortion access.

• collect and disseminate data and reports on key civil liberties issues, such as family separation, the school-to-prison pipeline, debtors’ prisons, and growing incarceration rates of women, to name a few. To illustrate, our headline-generating research on life-without-parole for nonviolent offenders directly resulted in commutations for almost 900 individuals serving life, and indirectly aided 800 more; our research on the racialized enforcement of marijuana laws across all 50 states continues to drive decriminalization.

Founded by a handful of visionary activists, today the ACLUs strong leadership oversees a high-impact organization that encompasses 1.4 million members, 6 million online activists, approximately 12 million online supporters, 550 national headquarters staff, and 1,200 staff at our affiliate offices in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Additionally, the national organization and our affiliate network are supported by thousands of volunteer litigators, giving the ACLU unsurpassed influence and clout.

Our high-impact work across issues provides crucial support to the many progressive movements whose ideals and achievements are now under attack. Our impact is amplified by our affiliate structure; among civil liberties and civil rights groups, only the ACLU has a staffed presence of litigators, organizers, and lobbyists in every state.
This unique state-by-state infrastructure of affiliates enables us to respond immediately to urgent issues on the local, state, and national levels simultaneously. On any given day, we are engaged in an extraordinary amount of high-impact litigation, advocacy, and constituent mobilization. The national ACLU and ACLU affiliates are involved in some 2,000 cases/lawsuits we pursue because of their importance to advancing or defending freedom. No other non-governmental organization participates in as many Supreme Court cases as the ACLU, typically 25 percent of the Court's cases each term.

In addition to this legal work, our top-notch lobbyists, organizers, and advocacy professionals, as well as millions of volunteers, help advance civil liberties in state legislatures and in Congress via thousands of bills each year often in partnership with allies from across the ideological spectrum. And our cutting-edge digital and communications teams educate the public across all media channels while conducting public opinion research and developing new messaging that shifts peoples perspectives; for example, we injected phrases such as Driving While Black and Vote Like Your Rights Depend On It into the public lexicon. As such, the ACLU is always in the news, routinely generating buzz about complex issues the media would otherwise ignore. At the same time, we are comfortable working in the background if it advances our fundamental goal of protecting civil liberties and civil rights.

Voting Rights: We challenged the poll tax designed to prevent Black Americans from voting decades before a constitutional amendment abolished the practice in 1964, the same year we won the Supreme Court ruling establishing the one person, one vote principal. In the 2020 election, we successfully expanded ballot access during the pandemic and challenged partisan manipulations of the vote count. We continue to challenge voter suppression, with current litigation in Georgia and elsewhere.

Immigrants Rights: The ACLUs first expos in 1920 spotlighted the governments illegal crackdown on immigrants, and we challenged the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Today were fighting policies targeting asylum-seekers and helping to reunite thousands of families previously subjected to the Trump administrations family-separation policy.

Free Speech & Privacy: Since the 1920s, the ACLU has been involved in virtually every landmark speech case to reach the Supreme Court. Our work includes defense of unpopular speech. We also lead efforts to defend the free speech rights of protesters and journalists, targeted by police in the recent waves of protest against police brutality. In protecting privacy, we challenged massive NSA surveillance, and won a landmark Supreme Court victory for digital privacy, requiring police to get a warrant for cellphone location data.

LGBTQ Rights: We defended the play The Childrens Hour against censorship of its lesbian content in 1936 and 50 years later won a Supreme Court ruling establishing that gay people have the right to seek government protection from discrimination. In 2015, we won a landmark Supreme Court victory that affirmed same-sex couples constitutional right to marry. Now were fighting a backlash against transgender youth, targeted by state legislatures.

Reproductive Freedom: We defended birth control pioneers in the 1920s, including winning a reversal of Mary Ware Dennetts conviction for sending sex education information in the mail. In the 1960s and 1970s, we fought contraceptive bans and laid the groundwork for Roe v. Wade, and today our litigation serves as a critical backstop against almost nonstop efforts at the federal and state levels to restrict abortion rights.

Criminal Justice Reform: In the 1960s, the ACLU was key to two landmark Supreme Court decisions that guaranteed criminal defendants right to counsel and right to remain silent, respectively. Today we are immersed in a nationwide effort to challenge racism and police brutality in the criminal legal system and to end mass incarceration. Recent wins include system overhauls in high-incarceration states; helping to decriminalize marijuana, most recently in New York and New Jersey; and working to end the death penalty in 23 states so far, most recently in Virginia. We are currently seeking to replicate pioneering reforms that remove police from dealing with mental health crises and traffic infractions.