News & Commentary

For decades, the ACLU of New Mexico has worked alongside communities to defend civil liberties and expand the promise of the constitution. Today, with fundamental freedoms under intensifying attack and the stakes for our democracy higher than ever, that work has never been more urgent.

With 53 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration and counting, we will not surrender our freedoms to a lawless executive branch.

I want to see Bosque School become a high-quality place of learning where every single student, regardless of identity, is embraced, valued, and honored.

The far right wants to get rid of DEI offices, end anti-bias training, and stop public statements of support for diversity. It’s the latest effort to dismantle systems designed to foster racial equity and progress.

Clifton White spent years in and out of prisons, eventually becoming a “jailhouse lawyer,” husband, father and finally community leader, whose activism would once again land him behind bars.

Why does the Biden administration's Department of Justice continue to rely on cases that presume people in the territories are “alien races” composing “savage tribes”?

Police brutality is not new, nor is systemic racism in policing. Police forces in the United States were used to catch runaway slaves and later to enact a campaign of terror against Black people during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. Police were employed to brutally suppress striking factory and farm workers in the 20th century. Police were used to violently disperse protesters during the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements. Police are the front line soldiers in the ongoing “War on Drugs” that has led to the over policing of communities of color, mass incarceration, and the highest rate of officer-involved shootings in the developed world.

Our client, D’Andre, should have been able to stand on his own street corner and exercise his constitutional right to film police from a safe distance without retaliation. Instead, he wound up handcuffed and detained for four days.

Originally published in the Albuquerque Journal.