We initially planned for this annual report — a wrap-up of 2019 in its entirety, from the vantage point of 2020 — to reach your mailboxes and inboxes in March.
Then, the coronavirus hit. Along with everything else, the pandemic threw our timeline into disarray. As with many unprecedented crises in the last 100 years, the ACLU has sprung into action to confront new threats to our rights. The era of COVID-19 is no different.
This pandemic has exposed the fault lines of a society that we know has always been unequal. To be sure, the response to COVID-19 is a racial justice issue. Every institution in our country has been plagued with systemic racism, and those injustices have further surfaced and been exacerbated by this pandemic. In short, we see our role as ensuring that we limit the spread of the virus so that it does not devastate the most vulnerable communities, and addressing the injustices that are created by both insufficient and overzealous government response.