ArcaMax

*Jean Paul is a pseudonym. All names have been changed to protect those identified in this story.

I hail from Cameroon, a beautiful country tucked away in Central Africa that's sometimes called "Africa in miniature" for its diverse geography, culture, food and languages. Sadly, since 2016, this diversity has also contributed to conflict between...Read more

Fifteen years ago it was unfathomable -- and a bad idea -- to imagine that your digital messages could automatically self-destruct. Once your message is on someone else's machine, you simply cannot guarantee that it will be destroyed when you want it to be. Fooling people into thinking they have more security and privacy than they really do ...Read more

There is widespread concern today about the use of generative AI and deepfakes to create fake videos that can manipulate and deceive people. Many are asking, is there any way that technology can confidently establish whether an image or video has been altered? A number of techniques have been proposed. They include -- most prominently -- a ...Read more

Sports stadiums around the country have begun using face recognition to identify ticket holders, threatening to normalize a uniquely powerful surveillance technology that has already been used for abusive purposes. Worse, companies involved are already planning big expansions, raising the specter of a world where our faces become not just our ...Read more

President-elect Donald Trump has said that he intends to issue an executive order to end birthright citizenship for millions of children. Trump's campaign website states that, to qualify as a citizen, any baby born after his executive order would need to have at least one parent who is a citizen or lawful permanent resident. Scholars across ...Read more

From a young age, I enjoyed playing around with gender roles, but it wasn't until later in my adolescence that I started to have more complex thoughts about my gender identity. What I discovered, both in my childhood and later in my development, was that a lot of trans folks have similarly nonlinear approaches, or nonlinear journeys, to their ...Read more

The opioid epidemic has gripped communities for more than 20 years. From 1999 to 2022, nearly 727,000 people died from an overdose involving prescription or illicit opioids.

Litigation has dramatically changed the substance-use disorder policy landscape, and today, more than $50 billion in opioid settlements from pharmaceutical companies, ...Read more

President-elect Donald Trump has made mass detention of immigrant communities a central part of his political platform. Trump's cabinet nominees are reportedly laying the groundwork to expand detention capacity in cities around the country. The Trump administration's proposed plans include making detention mandatory, which would trap ...Read more

President-elect Donald Trump has chilling plans to use his second term to expand the federal death penalty. This expansion continues the killing spree he initiated in the final six months of his first presidency when Trump oversaw more executions than any president in the past 120 years. His plans for a second term include sentencing more ...Read more

The results of the election are in: Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States.

Trump's win comes after a campaign in which he consistently targeted immigrants, transgender youth and other vulnerable communities with hateful rhetoric. He also threatened retribution against dissidents and political opponents.

I know that ...Read more

As we near Election Day, the ACLU is in conversation with state and local activists about how to prepare for, and respond to, the election outcome. Many people we spoke with are grappling with how they can best protect their communities and fight back against unprecedented attempts to restrict our rights. Right now, there's real concern about ...Read more

Greeted by the newly constructed "Detroit" sign, my colleagues and I arrived in the Motor City for the final stop on the ACLU's Know Your Rights bus tour. We didn't actually ride our Know Your Rights bus to Detroit. Instead, we arrived to find the bus in all its glory parked outside the Garden Theater, just off the bustling Woodward Avenue. ...Read more

In the spring of 1999, young people across the country began to prepare for that singular teenage right of passage: prom. For Diamond Stylz, this time included not just finding the right dress and corsage but fighting for her right to attend prom at all. School administrators had told the then-17-year-old Stylz just two days before prom that ...Read more

For more than two years, the immigration debate has revolved around one issue: "the border."

Despite the fact that issues related to the border are vast and complex, the entire U.S. immigration system -- flaws and all -- has been boiled down to grainy images of barbed wire atop a border wall and videos of families and others seeking safety ...Read more

Since 2021, 24 states have banned hormone therapy for transgender youth with gender dysphoria. Leading medical experts and organizations -- such as the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics -- oppose these restrictions, which have already forced thousands of families across ...Read more

For many of Texas' 3 million border residents, going through federal interior checkpoints -- where Border Patrol agents are permitted to screen vehicles for suspected noncitizens and can ask passengers about their citizenship and travel plans -- can be an intimidating but predictable part of daily life. But for undocumented or mixed-status ...Read more