The 2020 election was a historic year for lawmakers who identify as transgender; voters across the country elected six trans lawmakers to state office. Sarah McBride, was one of those lawmakers. Elected as a State Senator for Delaware’s first district, Sarah is now the highest-ranking trans lawmaker in America. Her candidacy and her voice in trans advocacy have shown how trans people can become powerful leaders in public life.

Sarah joins us to discuss her journey into politics and trans advocacy and to let us know what we can all do to build a more inclusive public life.

Welcome to March! This month, in honor of women’s history month, we are featuring conversations with women and non-binary leaders who are working to address issues in their communities. This week, we’re speaking with Amanda Nguyen.

Amanda is the CEO and founder of RISE, a millennial-driven social change incubator for citizen lawmaking. Because of her work passing legislation for sexual assault survivors, she was nominated for a 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. More recently, Amanda has been working to mobilize a nationwide response to the surging attacks on Asian Americans.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Asian Americans across the country have reported being targeted in 3,000 hate incidents. According to NYPD data, anti-Asian American hate crimes are up 1900% in the last year. And just weeks ago,, an 84-year-old Thai American man was murdered in San Francisco, a 91-year-old man was shoved to the ground in Oakland’s Chinatown, a 64-year-old Vietnamese woman was assaulted in San Jose and a Filipino American man was slashed in the face on a subway in New York City. These assaults are happening during a pandemic where Asian Americans have disproportionately lost their jobs or had their businesses boycotted.

In response to the recent attacks and to the relative silence of mainstream media, Amanda posted a now-viral video on Instagram naming the attacks and calling for media attention and public action.

Amanda joins us to talk about this wave of violence and what she’s doing about it.

This country watched as the people of Georgia helped deliver both the presidency and the Senate to the Democrats this past election cycle, defying the perception that the state was a Republican stronghold. After Stacey Abrams’ contentious loss in the 2018 race for governor, the effort to thwart voter suppression in the state and mobilize Black voters ramped up. As a result, Black Georgians showed up to the polls in droves and turned the state Blue.

One of the activists responsible for this turn is LaTosha Brown, a political strategist who has been working at the intersection of social justice and political empowerment for decades. LaTosha is the co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund and BVM Capacity Building Institute, a movement to expand voter access and build political power for Black Americans, particularly in the South.

She joins us to discuss the impact of expanding the right to vote and building a more diverse and inclusive future for the South.

Imagine you’ve forgotten once again the difference between a gorilla and a chimpanzee, so you do a quick Google image search of “gorilla.” But instead of finding images of adorable banana-obsessed animals, photos of a Black couple pop up.

Is this just a glitch in the algorithm? Or, is Google an ad company, not an information company, that’s replicating the discrimination of the world it operates in? How can this discrimination be addressed and who is accountable for it?

Our guest today, UCLA professor and best-selling author of “Algorithms of Oppression,” Dr. Safiya Noble answers these questions.

The riot on the Capitol building in the last days of Trump’s presidency was a powerful inflection point in an era of racial reckoning. In its wake, many pundits and politicians declared that “This is not America.” Our guest, ACLU deputy legal director, Jeff Robinson would disagree. The image of a Confederate flag paraded through the halls of the Capitol or cries to disavow an election with high Black voter turnout is America; it’s just not the one we like to talk about.

In this episode, we speak with Jeff about how building a more equal nation must be rooted in dealing with the racist policies, practices and attitudes that were calculated to keep people of color at a disadvantage. We’ll also talk about the ACLU’s multi-year plan to tackle some of those racist policies.

This month, in honor of Black History Month, we’ll be featuring a slew of incredible Black leaders who are tackling issues that impact their communities. This week, we’re speaking with Garrett Bradley, a filmmaker passionate about criminal justice reform.

The documentary film called Time, streaming on Amazon Prime right now, is at its core a story of enduring love – both romantic and familial. It’s also a film about mass incarceration. The film follows Sibil “Fox” Richardson as she raises her six children, works as the owner of a car dealership, and relentlessly fights for her husband’s release from a Louisiana prison. The film’s original footage is interspersed with home videos that Fox made for her husband during his 21 years in prison.

We’re joined by the director of Time, Garrett Bradley. The film, her first nonfiction feature, won Garrett the 2020 Sundance Film Festival’s best director award for U.S. documentary.

Weeks ago, President Trump was banned from nearly every social media platform because of his role in the events at the Capitol Building on January 6th. Just before Congress was set to certify Joe Biden as the next president of the United States, Trump instructed his supporters to, quote, “fight much harder” against “bad people” and “show strength” at the Capitol. The social media bans on Trump and his supporters ignited a debate about whether these social media companies have too much power over the speech of their users. Should they have banned Trump sooner? Are these bans legal? What kind of precedent does banning Trump and others set for the speech of marginalized communities? And should the government rein in the private sector power of these companies? 

Joining us to address some of these questions is Kate Ruane. She's senior legislative counsel for the First Amendment of the ACLU.

Yesterday, Joe Biden was inaugurated as President of the United States. And today, as part of his day one agenda, he has rescinded one of the Trump administration’s most incendiary orders: the Muslim Ban. The Muslim ban, enacted within Trump’s first days in office, virtually blocked immigration from countries with substantial Muslim populations such as Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen.

With no warning, the order sent people across the world scrambling to avoid permanent separation from their families, their jobs, and their education. Amidst a national outcry and protests in airports and on the streets across the country, the ACLU was able to secure an early victory in the courts.

But, over the years, fighting the Muslim ban became like a game of whac-a-mole. The administration would come up with superficial tweaks of language to dodge judicial scrutiny, and the ACLU and others would fight anew. In the end, we were left with a ban, rubber-stamped by the Supreme Court, that blocked entry to people from 13 countries around the world, mostly in Africa and the Middle East.

In this episode, we share stories that highlight the impact the ban has had and discuss what ending it will and won’t do for the future of Muslims in America.

A listener note: the conversations that follow were recorded prior to the Biden administration’s move to end the ban.

This past weekend the national board of the ACLU convened an emergency meeting to respond to the events at the Capitol building on January 6th. After hours of deliberation, the board voted unanimously to call for the impeachment of Donald Trump, just days before his term is set to end. The resolution published by the National Board states “President Trump has...violated his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and poses a ‘grave and imminent threat to civil liberties.” On Monday, Congress followed suit, filing an article of impeachment.

Joining us to discuss this historic moment and how the ACLU came to its call for impeachment, is Susan Herman, ACLU President and Ruth Bader Ginsberg Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School.

On Wednesday, pro-Trump loyalists stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying the electoral college decision to elect Vice President Biden to be the next President of the United States. At the ACLU, we watched aghast like many of you at home. What we saw was a dangerous attack on American democracy. We know that we will be dealing with the consequences of the events that took place for quite some time, but we wanted to come together to respond to the moment: particularly focusing on moving forward with electoral integrity and a deeper commitment to racial justice. On this special episode of At Liberty, you’ll hear experts from the ACLU in conversation: Monica Hopkins, the Executive Director of the ACLU of the District of Columbia, who will also act as moderator, Jeffrey Robinson, ACLU’s Deputy Legal Director and Director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality, and Dale Ho, Director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.