# ACLU (Founded 1920) The American Civil Liberties Union is the oldest and largest civil liberties organization in the United States — **106 years old**, 1.7+ million members (post-2016 surge), annual budget approaching **$300 million**, with affiliates in all 50 states. Founded in 1920 by Roger Nash Baldwin, Crystal Eastman, and others in response to the Palmer Raids (the government's mass arrest and deportation of suspected radicals), the ACLU has litigated more Supreme Court cases than any organization other than the federal government itself. For the KB, the ACLU represents the **legal resistance infrastructure** — the institutional counterweight to the Federalist Society's judicial capture strategy. Where the Federalist Society builds the judicial bench that constrains rights, the ACLU litigates to expand and defend them. The two organizations are locked in a multi-decade strategic competition over the meaning of the Constitution. ## The Organizational Model The ACLU operates as a **dual structure:** - **ACLU (501(c)(4)):** Lobbies, endorses candidates, engages in political activity. The political arm. - **ACLU Foundation (501(c)(3)):** Litigates, conducts research, public education. The legal arm. Donations are tax-deductible. This dual structure — copied by many organizations since — allows the ACLU to operate across the full spectrum from litigation to lobbying to electoral engagement. **State affiliates** (53 total, including DC, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands) operate semi-autonomously, filing state-level cases and running local campaigns while coordinating on national strategy. This distributed structure provides resilience — no single point of failure — but can produce strategic inconsistency. ## Key Litigation Areas (2025–2026) ### Immigration The ACLU has been the primary legal antagonist of Trump-era immigration policy across both administrations: - Challenged family separation (2018: *Ms. L v. ICE*; ongoing enforcement) - Challenged the Muslim travel ban (multiple cases) - Currently challenging mass deportation operations, due process violations, and DOGE-related disruptions to immigration courts - Challenging the use of the [[Alien Enemies Act]] of 1798 for deportations ### Voting Rights Post-*Shelby County* (2013), the ACLU has been central to the fight against voter suppression: - Challenging voter ID laws, purges, polling place closures - Litigating against gerrymandered maps - Fighting restrictions on mail-in and early voting - Challenging the use of citizenship questions and proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration ### Reproductive Rights Post-*Dobbs* (2022), the ACLU shifted to state-level litigation: - Challenging state abortion bans on state constitutional grounds - Defending medication abortion access - Challenging interstate travel restrictions ### First Amendment The ACLU's founding issue remains active: - Defending protest rights against anti-demonstration laws - Challenging book bans and educational speech restrictions - Fighting press access restrictions under [[Trump 2.0]] ### LGBTQ+ Rights - Challenging anti-trans legislation (healthcare bans, bathroom bills, sports exclusions) - Defending same-sex marriage recognition against state-level resistance - Fighting "religious liberty" exemptions designed to enable discrimination ### National Security and Secret Law - **Boat strikes FOIA litigation (2025–present).** With the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU sued the [[Department of Defense]] and [[Department of Justice]] in the Southern District of New York on **December 9, 2025** to force disclosure of the [[Office of Legal Counsel]] memo claimed as authority for the lethal strike campaign on small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. On **September 30, 2026** Judge Paul Engelmayer rejected the government's deliberative-process and attorney-client privilege claims in a 66-page ruling and ordered the memo produced for his own review, plus a list of everyone who has seen it. Jeffrey Stein of the ACLU's National Security Project called it "a huge step in the right direction of ensuring that the government does not get to summarily execute people based on secret law." The case remains ongoing. ## The Post-2016 Transformation Trump's election produced a fundamental shift in the ACLU's scale and strategy: | Metric | Pre-2016 | Post-2016 | |--------|---------|-----------| | Annual budget | ~$150M | ~$300M | | Membership | ~400K | 1.7M+ | | Online donations (election week 2016) | Normal levels | $24M in one weekend | | Litigation pace | Steady | Dramatically accelerated | | Political profile | Technocratic/legal | Mass-movement adjacent | The influx of resources allowed expanded litigation capacity but also created **mission tensions**: the ACLU's traditional role as a principled defender of *all* civil liberties (including unpopular speech) has been in tension with its newer donor base, which expects the organization to function as a progressive advocacy organization. This tension mirrors a broader debate within the resistance about whether institutional defenders should be principled (defend rights regardless of politics) or strategic (allocate resources to the most politically important fights). ## The ACLU vs. Federalist Society Dynamic The ACLU and the [[Federalist Society]] represent opposing institutional strategies for shaping constitutional law: | Dimension | ACLU | Federalist Society | |-----------|------|-------------------| | Founded | 1920 | 1982 | | Strategy | Litigate to expand rights | Capture courts to constrain rights | | Theory | Living constitutionalism | [[Originalism]] / textualism | | Funding | Mass membership + foundations | Dark money + corporate donors | | Timeframe | Case-by-case | Generational (50-year judicial pipeline) | | Current position | Playing defense | Structural advantage (6-3 SCOTUS) | The asymmetry is critical: **the ACLU can win individual cases but cannot overcome a hostile Supreme Court**. The Federalist Society understood that controlling the bench is more powerful than winning any individual case — which is why the ACLU's case-by-case strategy, however successful in lower courts, faces a structural ceiling that can only be altered through political change at the presidential and Senate level. ## See Also - [[Resistance Hub]] — Section overview - [[Pro-Democracy Movement]] — The movement the ACLU serves - [[Brennan Center for Justice]] — Democracy-focused legal and research partner - [[NAACP]] — Parallel civil rights legal infrastructure - [[Federalist Society]] — The strategic opposite - [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] — Framework the ACLU defends - [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]] — Framework the ACLU defends - [[Office of Legal Counsel]] — Target of the boat-strikes FOIA suit - [[Freedom of Information Act]] — The statute the suit runs on