A Transformational Moment: A Conversation with Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union
Photo credit: Quinn Russell Brown
Anthony D. Romero is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the nation's premier defender of civil liberties.
Throughout his tenure, the ACLU has pursued aggressive litigation and advocacy challenging the greatest injustices of our time, including: high-profile litigation and lobbying efforts to win the freedom to marry for same-sex couples; a nationwide campaign to reduce the prisons and jail populations by 50 percent and combat racial disparities within the criminal justice system; and an innovative legal challenge to the patents held by a private company on the human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer.
Under Romero’s direction, the ACLU has filed 400 legal actions against the Trump administration. In 2017 it won a nationwide stay of Trump’s Muslim Ban just over 24 hours after it was issued, stopping the administration’s family separation policy and blocking the asylum ban. Throughout the Trump administration, the ACLU has been on the winning side of landmark decisions at the Supreme Court, winning cases that extended anti-discrimination protections to transgender employees and blocking the Trump administration’s attempt to distort the U.S. Census by adding an unconstitutional citizenship question. Both of those cases were brought by the ACLU and argued by ACLU lawyers in the Supreme Court.
Since March 2020, the ACLU has filed over 175 legal actions related to COVID-19, focusing on the criminal legal system, with an aim to protect vulnerable people detained in immigration and criminal facilities, and/or to improve conditions for those not released.
Over the last years, Romero has also overseen the ACLU’s expansion into high-impact political work. The organization has expanded its work on state ballot referenda; voter education and turn-out; and issue advocacy around candidate races. A non-partisan organization, the ACLU advances civil liberties and civil rights without respect to partisan politics, it works with Republicans and Democrats and locks horns with both as needed.
Romero is the ACLU's sixth executive director and the first Latino and openly gay man to serve in that capacity. Born in New York City to parents who hailed from Puerto Rico, Romero was the first in his family to graduate from high school. He is a graduate of Stanford University Law School and The Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Tanvi Nibhanupudi (BT): As a graduate of the School of Public and International Affairs, how did your time at Princeton shape your career and your work?
Anthony D. Romero (ADR): Princeton was one of the most transformative moments in my life. It is an institution that took a chance on me at 18 years old. I came from humble roots with parents who were wonderful and provided for me, but had not been exposed to formal education in the US. Princeton was quite an experience for me and for the whole family. At Princeton, I learned how to think critically, how to articulate a viewpoint, how to stand my ground. It was a transformative four years where the young man who left was very different than the young man who arrived. I have enormous appreciation and gratitude to the institution and to the school, in particular.
BT: Looking forward to your career trajectory, could you talk a little bit about your experience as the first openly gay man and also the first Latino man to hold the executive director position at the ACLU?
ADR: I think my position as Head of the ACLU as the first Latino and first openly gay man is more attributed to the work the organization had done years before I arrived, rather than any reflection on me. My arrival was more of a capstone than an inflection point. I think our first LGBT case was a censorship case in the instance of Lillian Hellman’s book, The Children’s Hour. Over the years, we’ve brought the seminal LGBT cases in the U.S. Supreme Court: everything from the challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, to Obergefell, to Bostock, to the case we just argued two weeks ago having to do with the rights of same-sex couples to provide foster care to children in Philadelphia.
In a lot of ways, by the time I arrived, it was really the next logical step for an organization that was deeply committed to LGBT rights. It’s the same thing on Latino rights and the rights of immigrants. It’s an organization that for decades has been deeply committed to the rights of minorities, people of color, and disenfranchised communities. In many respects, I was able to bring both my background and my experience, but I was also able to join a team that was already focused on the core issues that I cared most about.
BT: Under your leadership, the ACLU has expanded its membership, litigation efforts, and advocacy. What do you see as the most successful area of growth for the ACLU?
ADR: The ACLU is distinct from a lot of other advocacy organizations in the US because we have an office in every single state as well as in District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. We have people who are paid to wake up in the morning and go to work to advance civil liberties and civil rights. One of the most consequential expansions in the 19 years I have been here has been to consciously build out the grid of our state affiliates. In Texas, when I first started at the ACLU, there were maybe four people on payroll. Now, we’re close to 70. We’re beginning to think about growing our state offices in the American South more expansively to deal with this moment of racial reckoning.
The second growth that’s notable has been the growth of the membership base. When I started at the ACLU, there were maybe 280,000 members. In the eight years of George Bush, that membership would grow to 550,000. In the age of Obama, membership would contract to 400,000 members. In the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, that number would skyrocket to almost 1.8 million members. Our members are not cheque book participants — these are protagonists in the struggle for us. If you can really use the bodies that comprise the ACLU as your ground troops, then that is more than just the power of eggheady lawyers or inside lobbyists — it’s the power of the people to demand change.
The ACLU from its inception was a membership organization. It’s just that we began to think more strategically and more ambitiously about how to grow the grid for social justice and human rights, especially in some of the battleground states where the ACLU is distinctly the only game in town. That’s what makes it better and stronger today.
BT: So, you talked a little about the power of the people. Looking at what has happened recently, the ACLU has focused on political advocacy regarding voter education and voter turnout. In the leadup to the election, what did you see as the role of the organization?
ADR: Our role is to make sure that the voting public has all the information they need so they can cast an informed vote. We don’t tell people who to vote for. For us, the key thing is to make sure that the electoral process is robust and that voters are as fully informed as possible. They will draw their own conclusions based on information and data that we provide to them.
When most people decide to sit out an election, it’s usually because they don’t think their vote counts. If we can show voters that their vote definitely counts, especially in local races that have real implications for criminal justice, immigration, women’s rights, reproductive rights, and voting rights, then we’re more likely to get people off the bench. That’s part of our approach to electoral work: to help our voters cast an informed vote. It makes the electoral process more vigorous. It also means that elected officials are asked to articulate their viewpoints on these issues with greater clarity. We find that in the process of raising our questions, sometimes the position of a candidate — even an entrenched incumbent — evolves because they also have to withstand the scrutiny of the public spotlight on them. That makes the electoral process much stronger. Most importantly, it is just to make sure that people understand the importance of the political process. This is not just a right to engage in the election system, but also a responsibility of an informed electorate.
BT: Now, the United States has a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. How do you see the work of the ACLU changing in the face of a conservative majority in the Supreme Court?
ADR: I think the fact that the Supreme Court is conservative is nothing really new. Actually, since the 1970s, we’ve brought cases before a predominantly conservative Supreme Court. It certainly has gotten more conservative with the appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was one of our most famous alumna at the ACLU. She was the founder of the Women’s Rights Project and a true defender of gender equality, reproductive rights, racial justice, and LGBT rights. Justice Coney Barrett obviously has a different political ideology.
Still, our work in the court for the last 30-40 years has been about trying to convince a predominantly conservative court to agree with us. In recent years, we’ve succeeded. We just have to keep doing our very best: smart lawyering, good facts, and good records below. Getting someone who starts out in agreement with you to agree with you is a no-brainer. Convincing someone to change their mind or convincing someone whose mind is not fully made up is much of what we have to do. That’s the art of good lawyering.
Obviously, we have to think strategically about how the federal courts have changed. There are some circuits that will be better or worse for us on certain key issue areas. We’ll have to pick those clearly and carefully. We’ll have to explore more state courts for litigation. However, I am not willing to simply bemoan the increasing conservative nature of the bench, and give up. The law is just way too important to just give up the ghost and resign yourself to failure. We keep on keeping on.
BT: More broadly, what do you see as the next step for your organization in this moment of racial reckoning?
ADR: Some of our top demands of the Biden administration will be around racial justice. Clearly, the country is demanding a whole rethinking of our commitment to equality and ending racism. President-elect Biden has the opportunity to be a transformational president of our time. The time demands a boldness of vision to really double down and lead us through the final reconstruction in which we make good on a promise we’ve made halfheartedly before.
Let’s make it with all our hearts, pull out all the stops to level the playing field, and ensure an end to systemic racism in our institutions. I think the fact that so many people of different generations, races, and geographies turned out on the streets this summer following the murder of George Floyd really underscores the fact that there is probably nothing more important than to address America’s original sin of chattel slavery. By unlocking the strategies for addressing racial injustice, we will also unlock some of the entrenched issues when it comes to gender, immigration status, and disability status.
The country really finds itself at a transformational moment. It requires a level of ambition and commitment that this generation is demanding. It’s a question of whether or not our leadership is ready. Part of our collective job is to get them there. Government leaders and powerful people don’t do anything hard because they want to. People are forced to take up the hard stuff. Our job has got to be to make sure we keep their eyes on our prize so that we can really make a difference.
BT: Lastly, because our readership is primarily college students, what advice would you give to college students who are interested in protecting civil liberties but may not necessarily know how to help, especially in light of the pandemic?
ADR: Just get involved. Just start. Pick an issue, pick an organization, and contact someone to see if there is a way to help. If you don’t get an answer, keep trying. Almost nothing significant, in the context of social change, happens by the fruit of one’s own labour. What fuels change is this sense of doing it in concert with other people. Especially for college students, I would not overthink it. Even in COVID, there are ways that groups can put people to work. There is just too great a need right now among all of these issues to be on the sidelines. You will find like-minded spirits who are doing similar work. If you make progress, then it becomes its own engine for change.
This is an exceptional time. You’ve seen people spontaneously turn out on the streets for the Women’s marches, the Dreamers marches, to demand a racial reckoning. There was nothing like this when I was in college. In college, I was one of a handful of activists on Princeton’s campus. We worked on Take Back the Night marches and world poverty. There was some discussion around sanctions on apartheid, but there was no real movement for a lot of social change. Now, Princeton’s campus is alive with a lot of activism. I think that’s true of every college campus I visit or that I know.
It would be a real shame to be in this moment and to have sat it out. We’ll end up regretting it. We’ll all have to ask ourselves, ‘well, what did I do?’ It can be small little things. More people are food insecure in the U.S. than ever before. Volunteering at food banks, and food shelters — day-to-day, person-to-person work. It doesn’t have to be at the macro level. It takes a village to get us through such challenging moments and times.