ACLU popularity grows

LOS ANGELES -- Outside the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, N.Y., last weekend, hundreds of people chanted like sports fans as they awaited the end of a court hearing inside: "A-C-L-U, we are here, we stand with you!"

When the attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union emerged, the crowd roared, hailing them as heroes. As the nonprofit has done many times in its 97-year history, the ACLU had taken on the government and won.

"It was unbelievable," ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt recalled, calling it the biggest crowd he'd seen in two decades of civil-rights law. "It was just one of those classic civil-rights moments."

On a day when thousands of Americans had gathered to protest at airports around the country, the ACLU was among the legal organizations that sued the federal government over President Donald Trump's executive order banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries.

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Stunned visa and green-card holders were detained on arrival in the U.S., and Gelernt had just persuaded a judge to temporarily block the government from sending them back.

"What we've shown today is that the courts can work. They're a bulwark in our democracy," ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said, addressing the crowd.

Trump has moved quickly to issue orders and make appointments that many of his opponents fear will infringe on the rights of immigrants, Muslims and other minority groups. With Congress under Republican control, many liberals are turning to outside organizations to block the new administration's progress.

Subscriptions to mainstream news publications and nonprofit investigative news organizations such as ProPublica and the Marshall Project have soared; so have donations to left-leaning nonprofits such as the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood.

And the ACLU, for the moment, has captured activists' imaginations in a way that the Democratic Party has not. The organization's membership has doubled to more than 1 million people in the months since Trump's election, when the organization issued a vow on its website and over social media: "We'll see you in court."

The ACLU is promising, as it often does, to take a place on the front lines of a liberal resistance, defending causes including voting rights, reproductive rights, LGBT rights, freedom of the press, and the rights of Muslims and immigrants.

Conservatives have long been critical of the organization, with their ire often focused on the group's contention that the Second Amendment's guarantee of a "well-regulated militia" refers to a collective right, not an individual right, to gun ownership.

They have also opposed the group's campaigns against religious expression within public institutions and restrictions on abortion and same-sex marriage.

Twitter wasn't the only technology enterprise to offer support. Lyft, the ride-sharing company, pledged $1 million over four years, as its rival, Uber, was targeted with a consumer boycott for sending drivers to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport during a taxi-driver strike in protest of the Trump administration's travel ban.

GV, the venture capital arm of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., has devoted much of its home page to an invitation to donate to the ACLU.

Yet much smaller donors have been a key part of the fundraising effort. During last weekend's protests, the organization gathered at least $31 million in donations, many of them from baristas, actors, musicians, tech figures and from owners of restaurants, bookstores, bakeries and coffee shops.

The ACLU was founded in 1920 after the Palmer Raids, in which the federal government, fearing the rise of communism, began detaining and deporting alleged radical leftists.

"This, in some ways for us, is like business as usual," said ACLU president and Brooklyn Law School professor Susan Herman, who likened the organization's fight against Trump's travel ban to its work against the Palmer Raids.

One of the ACLU's first handbills from the 1920s laid out the organization's strategy early: "Rights can be maintained only by insisting upon them -- by organization, protest, demonstrations, test cases in the courts, and publicity."

While officially nonpartisan, the ACLU has been criticized since its birth for heavily favoring liberal and leftist causes, although the group has also taken up highly unpopular First Amendment cases defending the rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

The group is a life raft for liberals when conservatives are in power; the group's membership has typically surged under Republican presidents.

The ACLU led a drive for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon during the Watergate affair, proclaiming in a newspaper ad, "If he is allowed to continue, then destruction of the Bill of Rights could follow."

The group's membership also doubled to more than 500,000 under George W. Bush's presidency as the administration expanded its national security powers after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Recent campaign finance data show that individual ACLU staff members overwhelmingly donate to Democratic candidates, though the organization as a whole does not endorse candidates or Supreme Court appointments.

Romero said his strategy is to block any legal overreaches by the new administration in court and to rally mass public support.

"If you can ball up the machinery of the Trump administration and rob them of momentum in the way we did last weekend, we make it harder for them to go to the next thing on their to-do list," Romero said in an interview.

A Section on 02/05/2017