Lawmakers Can't Turn Classrooms Into Sunday Schools
If state lawmakers have their way, this fall public-school students in Arkansas and Texas will be forcibly subjected to unavoidable displays of a state-approved Protestant version of the Ten Commandments. Inspired by a similar Louisiana statute enacted last year, both states passed laws earlier this year requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments in a “conspicuous place” in every single classroom. But the ACLU is fighting back against these laws and other efforts to turn our public schools into Sunday schools.
When schools impose religious doctrine, beliefs, or practices on students, it marginalizes students who don’t share those beliefs and treats them as unwelcome. Students who do not feel safe and welcome in their school cannot focus on learning.
We’ve already won judicial victories against Louisiana’s, Arkansas’s, and Texas’s Ten Commandments laws. In Oklahoma, where the state’s top education official, Ryan Walters, issued a mandate that teachers incorporate the Bible into their lesson plans for grades five through 12, we won a temporary order from the state supreme court that blocked Walters from spending millions in taxpayer dollars to purchase Bibles for every school district. We also sued in Oklahoma to prevent the state from approving a religious public charter school. In a parallel case brought by Oklahoma’s attorney general, both the Oklahoma Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled against the proposed school. And working with our allies in a number of states, the ACLU has helped fend off legislation and other attempts to impose government-sponsored prayer, school chaplains, and religious instruction on students.
While the separation of church and state is important in any context, it is especially critical in public schools, which must serve children of all religious and non-religious backgrounds. When schools impose religious doctrine, beliefs, or practices on students, it marginalizes students who don’t share those beliefs and treats them as unwelcome. Students who do not feel safe and welcome in their school cannot focus on learning.
That’s why, for more than a century, the ACLU has strived to safeguard secular public education.The First Amendment gives children and families, and all people, the right to decide for themselves which religious beliefs, if any, to follow. Politicians have no business interfering with these deeply personal matters, and misusing our public schools as vehicles to convert children to the state’s favored brand of Christianity betrays the democratic values at the heart of our public-education system. We will keep fighting on behalf of families until lawmakers get the message: Public schools are for education, not evangelizing.
Stefanie Mitchell contributed to this piece.
Published September 4, 2025 at 06:46PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/CUyi1lM
Lawmakers Can't Turn Classrooms Into Sunday Schools
If state lawmakers have their way, this fall public-school students in Arkansas and Texas will be forcibly subjected to unavoidable displays of a state-approved Protestant version of the Ten Commandments. Inspired by a similar Louisiana statute enacted last year, both states passed laws earlier this year requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments in a “conspicuous place” in every single classroom. But the ACLU is fighting back against these laws and other efforts to turn our public schools into Sunday schools.
When schools impose religious doctrine, beliefs, or practices on students, it marginalizes students who don’t share those beliefs and treats them as unwelcome. Students who do not feel safe and welcome in their school cannot focus on learning.
We’ve already won judicial victories against Louisiana’s, Arkansas’s, and Texas’s Ten Commandments laws. In Oklahoma, where the state’s top education official, Ryan Walters, issued a mandate that teachers incorporate the Bible into their lesson plans for grades five through 12, we won a temporary order from the state supreme court that blocked Walters from spending millions in taxpayer dollars to purchase Bibles for every school district. We also sued in Oklahoma to prevent the state from approving a religious public charter school. In a parallel case brought by Oklahoma’s attorney general, both the Oklahoma Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled against the proposed school. And working with our allies in a number of states, the ACLU has helped fend off legislation and other attempts to impose government-sponsored prayer, school chaplains, and religious instruction on students.
While the separation of church and state is important in any context, it is especially critical in public schools, which must serve children of all religious and non-religious backgrounds. When schools impose religious doctrine, beliefs, or practices on students, it marginalizes students who don’t share those beliefs and treats them as unwelcome. Students who do not feel safe and welcome in their school cannot focus on learning.
That’s why, for more than a century, the ACLU has strived to safeguard secular public education.The First Amendment gives children and families, and all people, the right to decide for themselves which religious beliefs, if any, to follow. Politicians have no business interfering with these deeply personal matters, and misusing our public schools as vehicles to convert children to the state’s favored brand of Christianity betrays the democratic values at the heart of our public-education system. We will keep fighting on behalf of families until lawmakers get the message: Public schools are for education, not evangelizing.
Stefanie Mitchell contributed to this piece.
Published September 4, 2025 at 11:16PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/4RnD6HU
Know Your Rights in Encounters with Law Enforcement and Military Troops
Washington, D.C. is in the middle of an emergency manufactured by President Donald Trump to expand his power and create fear in the nation’s capital.
On August 11, President Trump invoked a provision of the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 and temporarily placed the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) under federal control for 30 days, saying he would allow the police to “do whatever the hell they want.” At the same time, he deployed nearly 1000 D.C. National Guard troops and almost as many federal law enforcement agents to patrol the streets. Since he declared this false emergency, Republican governors from six states have sent their National Guard troops to D.C. as well.
For the more than 700,000 people who call D.C. home — and the many more who visit the capital every day — the federal government’s militarized presence is impossible to ignore. Armed National Guard troops are stationed in metro stations, at parks, and on popular streets filled with bars and restaurants, costing taxpayers an estimated $1 million a day. Police checkpoints manned by unidentified federal agencies are popping up across the city, waiting to catch someone who doesn’t have a seatbelt on. Armored military vehicles run red lights and cause accidents in quiet neighborhoods, while heavily-armed, often masked federal agents violently arrest people who are immigrants, and people of color while refusing to identify themselves or provide any information to the bystanders trying to help.
Recently, The Washington Post reported that President Trump plans to deploy military troops and federal agents to Chicago this September, and he has threatened to do the same in Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, and San Francisco, disregarding state and local officials who have loudly proclaimed that this would be unwanted and unjustified.
Credit: Sarah Trindell
At the ACLU, we are making clear to Congress that troops do not belong on our streets and urging Congress to pass the VISIBLE Act, which would ban federal agents from hiding their identities. We also know that no matter what agency someone is with—whether federal or local, law enforcement or the military—the Constitution constrains how government employees can treat us.
If you’re in a city where law enforcement or military troops are present, it’s important to know your rights. If you are stopped on the street, you may ask, “Am I free to go?” If the answer is “yes,” you are free to walk away. If arrested or detained, you have the right to remain silent. In certain circumstances, you can also refuse searches of your belongings or car. If you witness or document police or military activity, you generally have the right to record in public spaces as long as you do not interfere with law enforcement activity.
Credit: Sarah Trindell
If asked about your immigration status, you can remain silent, though if you are not a U.S. citizen, the law may require you to carry with you and provide specific immigration documents for your specific immigration status when an immigration agent requests your immigration papers. If you do not have these papers or if you choose to remain silent regarding immigration or citizenship status, an immigration officer might detain you for longer to verify this information. There may also be immigration and other legal consequences if you make this choice. Never lie or present false documents.
The threats to our rights and safety are real, but so is our power and resilience. Knowing our rights is critical to how we hold power accountable. For a full list of your rights when stopped by law enforcement or military police in D.C., see our Know Your Rights resource or join us for a training on September 5.
Published September 4, 2025 at 02:36AM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/WhdjpDS
Know Your Rights in Encounters with Law Enforcement and Military Troops
Washington, D.C. is in the middle of an emergency manufactured by President Donald Trump to expand his power and create fear in the nation’s capital.
On August 11, President Trump invoked a provision of the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 and temporarily placed the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) under federal control for 30 days, saying he would allow the police to “do whatever the hell they want.” At the same time, he deployed nearly 1000 D.C. National Guard troops and almost as many federal law enforcement agents to patrol the streets. Since he declared this false emergency, Republican governors from six states have sent their National Guard troops to D.C. as well.
For the more than 700,000 people who call D.C. home — and the many more who visit the capital every day — the federal government’s militarized presence is impossible to ignore. Armed National Guard troops are stationed in metro stations, at parks, and on popular streets filled with bars and restaurants, costing taxpayers an estimated $1 million a day. Police checkpoints manned by unidentified federal agencies are popping up across the city, waiting to catch someone who doesn’t have a seatbelt on. Armored military vehicles run red lights and cause accidents in quiet neighborhoods, while heavily-armed, often masked federal agents violently arrest people who are immigrants, and people of color while refusing to identify themselves or provide any information to the bystanders trying to help.
Recently, The Washington Post reported that President Trump plans to deploy military troops and federal agents to Chicago this September, and he has threatened to do the same in Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, and San Francisco, disregarding state and local officials who have loudly proclaimed that this would be unwanted and unjustified.
Credit: Sarah Trindell
At the ACLU, we are making clear to Congress that troops do not belong on our streets and urging Congress to pass the VISIBLE Act, which would ban federal agents from hiding their identities. We also know that no matter what agency someone is with—whether federal or local, law enforcement or the military—the Constitution constrains how government employees can treat us.
If you’re in a city where law enforcement or military troops are present, it’s important to know your rights. If you are stopped on the street, you may ask, “Am I free to go?” If the answer is “yes,” you are free to walk away. If arrested or detained, you have the right to remain silent. In certain circumstances, you can also refuse searches of your belongings or car. If you witness or document police or military activity, you generally have the right to record in public spaces as long as you do not interfere with law enforcement activity.
Credit: Sarah Trindell
If asked about your immigration status, you can remain silent, though if you are not a U.S. citizen, the law may require you to carry with you and provide specific immigration documents for your specific immigration status when an immigration agent requests your immigration papers. If you do not have these papers or if you choose to remain silent regarding immigration or citizenship status, an immigration officer might detain you for longer to verify this information. There may also be immigration and other legal consequences if you make this choice. Never lie or present false documents.
The threats to our rights and safety are real, but so is our power and resilience. Knowing our rights is critical to how we hold power accountable. For a full list of your rights when stopped by law enforcement or military police in D.C., see our Know Your Rights resource or join us for a training on September 5.
Published September 3, 2025 at 10:06PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/nGWmciI
On January 7, 2025, residents of California’s Kern County woke to a startling sight: green-striped Customs and Border Patrol SUVs parked in places they had never been seen before. The SUVs were in small business parking lots and dotted along rural highways. By day’s end, the immigration enforcement raids had begun. More than 70 people were arrested and taken into Border Patrol custody.
In Kern County, immigration enforcement is typically handled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Even then, arrests are usually targeted at specific individuals. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), on the other hand, rarely operates outside its 100-mile zone near the U.S.–Mexico border. Kern County is almost 300 miles away from that area. But on January 7th, Border Patrol agents cast a far wider net. They didn’t go after individual people. Instead, they stopped people of color, especially those who agents believed were farmworkers. Their tactics were aggressive and unprecedented.
For many, the raid — dubbed “Operation Return to Sender” — felt like more than a one-time sweep. It marked the start of a troubling new chapter in immigration enforcement.
“This Was Racial Profiling at Its Most Basic Level”
For Bree Bernwanger, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, the morning of January 7th started just like any other: then the calls began. Reports flooded in from Kern County that immigration agents were spotted in strange places throughout the county.
“They were slashing tires, smashing car windows,” Bernwanger recalls. “They pulled over cars, they grabbed people in parking lots, and there really didn’t seem to have any reason to do it except that people were brown. This was racial profiling at its most basic level.”
Credit: Adam Perez
At first, everyone assumed these agents were ICE officers. But late one night, as Bernwanger checked the government’s detainee locator, she saw something unexpected. The people that had been arrested during the raid were in CBP custody. Border Patrol, which typically operates near the U.S.-Mexico border, had driven 300 miles into the Central Valley for a massive raid.
Agents targeted predominantly Latine neighborhoods and worksites, detaining people indiscriminately. People abducted were taken to a makeshift processing site in Bakersfield, then bused to an “icebox” in El Centro — freezing, windowless rooms with no beds, limited food, and no access to lawyers. Border Patrol coerced many into signing “voluntary departure” forms, misleading them about the consequences, which could include a 10-year ban on reentry.
Roughly 40 people were summarily expelled to Mexico without a hearing. Others, including U.S. citizens and longtime green card holders, were released but left shaken. Families and communities now live with the aftermath — fear, separation, and the knowledge that, as Bernwanger put it: “Everyone subjected to it is now picking up the pieces.”
“These folks’ rights are being violated. This should be concerning for all of us.”
Maricela Sanchez, an investigator with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, has lived her whole life advocating for our liberties and investigating civil rights abuses in the Central Valley. But on the morning of Operation Return to Sender, her social media feed showed something she’d never seen before: Border Patrol vehicles cruising down Highway 99 in Bakersfield.
“I haven’t seen that happen ever,” she recalls.
Through the Kern County Rapid Response Network — a coalition with a hotline and volunteers trained to document enforcement actions — and other partners, Sanchez helped interview dozens of people caught in the raids. Border Patrol foricibly reached into someone’s pocket to grab their ID from them. Another woman was driving home from work when she was pulled over by unmarked agents who never identified themselves. The next day, she was across the border in Mexico, separated from everything she had built in Bakersfield.
The stories Sanchez heard stayed with her: “Whenever I think about that week, I just think about how scary it was, how terrorizing it was. Just how much it affected our community.”
For Sanchez, these stories weren’t just case notes. They were the lives of her neighbors and friends. “So many children just stopped showing up to school. A lot of people didn’t feel comfortable coming to work. Folks completely stopped going to the store. How could that not impact you as a community member? Everyone should be concerned about this.”
“They thought no one would push back. But we did — and we’re not going anywhere.”
In Bakersfield, Rosa Lopez had been preparing for something like this for years. As a senior policy advocate with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, she’d helped build the Kern County Rapid Response Network during the first Trump administration.
When the first calls came in on January 7, Lopez didn’t hesitate. She and her team dispatched volunteers across the county to record what they saw: license plates, uniforms, the way stops were conducted. Reports came in of canines, weapons drawn, and officers breaking windows — a level of aggression she’d never seen before.
Credit: Adam Perez
This raid wasn’t routine. Border Patrol had set up a tent office, busing people straight to the border without legal access. Later, Lopez learned the raid had never been approved by the Department of Homeland Security. It was a rogue operation carried out by agents who thought they could act with impunity.
But the community was ready. Years of organizing meant people knew their rights, had red “Know Your Rights” cards in their pockets, and were willing to speak out. Lopez watched neighbors and community members step forward not just to report what they’d seen, but to stand beside those targeted, offering food, rides, and moral support.
“This is a moment that is going to test all of us,” Lopez said. “You can be afraid and hide, or you can be afraid and still stand up. We chose to stand up.”
The Stakes Beyond Kern County
The ACLU, United Farm Workers, and Bakersfield residents took Border Patrol to court for its unlawful and discriminatory actions during Operation Return to Sender. Agents operated far outside their legal jurisdiction, targeted people based on race, and denied them basic due process — all in violation of the Constitution. In April, in a major win for civil rights, a federal district court in California blocked the U.S. Border Patrol from using stop-and-arrest practices, which has led to zero warrantless arrest since the decision.
The ACLU and our partners will keep fighting in court and pushing for reforms that protect immigrant communities from racial profiling and abuse. We’ll also continue to work alongside residents, organizers, and labor groups to ensure no one has to live in fear of unlawful raids. We know this fight is about more than one county in California — it’s about defending the rights and dignity of people across the country.
Published August 27, 2025 at 11:03PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/9KWU45f
On January 7, 2025, residents of California’s Kern County woke to a startling sight: green-striped Customs and Border Patrol SUVs parked in places they had never been seen before. The SUVs were in small business parking lots and dotted along rural highways. By day’s end, the immigration enforcement raids had begun. More than 70 people were arrested and taken into Border Patrol custody.
In Kern County, immigration enforcement is typically handled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Even then, arrests are usually targeted at specific individuals. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), on the other hand, rarely operates outside its 100-mile zone near the U.S.–Mexico border. Kern County is almost 300 miles away from that area. But on January 7th, Border Patrol agents cast a far wider net. They didn’t go after individual people. Instead, they stopped people of color, especially those who agents believed were farmworkers. Their tactics were aggressive and unprecedented.
For many, the raid — dubbed “Operation Return to Sender” — felt like more than a one-time sweep. It marked the start of a troubling new chapter in immigration enforcement.
“This Was Racial Profiling at Its Most Basic Level”
For Bree Bernwanger, senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, the morning of January 7th started just like any other: then the calls began. Reports flooded in from Kern County that immigration agents were spotted in strange places throughout the county.
“They were slashing tires, smashing car windows,” Bernwanger recalls. “They pulled over cars, they grabbed people in parking lots, and there really didn’t seem to have any reason to do it except that people were brown. This was racial profiling at its most basic level.”
Credit: Adam Perez
At first, everyone assumed these agents were ICE officers. But late one night, as Bernwanger checked the government’s detainee locator, she saw something unexpected. The people that had been arrested during the raid were in CBP custody. Border Patrol, which typically operates near the U.S.-Mexico border, had driven 300 miles into the Central Valley for a massive raid.
Agents targeted predominantly Latine neighborhoods and worksites, detaining people indiscriminately. People abducted were taken to a makeshift processing site in Bakersfield, then bused to an “icebox” in El Centro — freezing, windowless rooms with no beds, limited food, and no access to lawyers. Border Patrol coerced many into signing “voluntary departure” forms, misleading them about the consequences, which could include a 10-year ban on reentry.
Roughly 40 people were summarily expelled to Mexico without a hearing. Others, including U.S. citizens and longtime green card holders, were released but left shaken. Families and communities now live with the aftermath — fear, separation, and the knowledge that, as Bernwanger put it: “Everyone subjected to it is now picking up the pieces.”
“These folks’ rights are being violated. This should be concerning for all of us.”
Maricela Sanchez, an investigator with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, has lived her whole life advocating for our liberties and investigating civil rights abuses in the Central Valley. But on the morning of Operation Return to Sender, her social media feed showed something she’d never seen before: Border Patrol vehicles cruising down Highway 99 in Bakersfield.
“I haven’t seen that happen ever,” she recalls.
Through the Kern County Rapid Response Network — a coalition with a hotline and volunteers trained to document enforcement actions — and other partners, Sanchez helped interview dozens of people caught in the raids. Border Patrol foricibly reached into someone’s pocket to grab their ID from them. Another woman was driving home from work when she was pulled over by unmarked agents who never identified themselves. The next day, she was across the border in Mexico, separated from everything she had built in Bakersfield.
The stories Sanchez heard stayed with her: “Whenever I think about that week, I just think about how scary it was, how terrorizing it was. Just how much it affected our community.”
For Sanchez, these stories weren’t just case notes. They were the lives of her neighbors and friends. “So many children just stopped showing up to school. A lot of people didn’t feel comfortable coming to work. Folks completely stopped going to the store. How could that not impact you as a community member? Everyone should be concerned about this.”
“They thought no one would push back. But we did — and we’re not going anywhere.”
In Bakersfield, Rosa Lopez had been preparing for something like this for years. As a senior policy advocate with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, she’d helped build the Kern County Rapid Response Network during the first Trump administration.
When the first calls came in on January 7, Lopez didn’t hesitate. She and her team dispatched volunteers across the county to record what they saw: license plates, uniforms, the way stops were conducted. Reports came in of canines, weapons drawn, and officers breaking windows — a level of aggression she’d never seen before.
Credit: Adam Perez
This raid wasn’t routine. Border Patrol had set up a tent office, busing people straight to the border without legal access. Later, Lopez learned the raid had never been approved by the Department of Homeland Security. It was a rogue operation carried out by agents who thought they could act with impunity.
But the community was ready. Years of organizing meant people knew their rights, had red “Know Your Rights” cards in their pockets, and were willing to speak out. Lopez watched neighbors and community members step forward not just to report what they’d seen, but to stand beside those targeted, offering food, rides, and moral support.
“This is a moment that is going to test all of us,” Lopez said. “You can be afraid and hide, or you can be afraid and still stand up. We chose to stand up.”
The Stakes Beyond Kern County
The ACLU, United Farm Workers, and Bakersfield residents took Border Patrol to court for its unlawful and discriminatory actions during Operation Return to Sender. Agents operated far outside their legal jurisdiction, targeted people based on race, and denied them basic due process — all in violation of the Constitution. In April, in a major win for civil rights, a federal district court in California blocked the U.S. Border Patrol from using stop-and-arrest practices, which has led to zero warrantless arrest since the decision.
The ACLU and our partners will keep fighting in court and pushing for reforms that protect immigrant communities from racial profiling and abuse. We’ll also continue to work alongside residents, organizers, and labor groups to ensure no one has to live in fear of unlawful raids. We know this fight is about more than one county in California — it’s about defending the rights and dignity of people across the country.
Published August 27, 2025 at 06:33PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/OR7BoIt
Congress Cuts Medicaid to Fund ICE: How H.R. 1 Harms Communities
Earlier this summer, Congress approved its most harmful budget in a generation. H.R. 1 or the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” made the biggest cut to Medicaid since it was created in the 1960s and funneled that money to fund President Donald Trump’s racist anti-immigration agenda.
Instead of strengthening Medicaid, Congress took an axe to it. Instead of reining in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) abuses, Congress gave the agency billions more to terrorize our communities and detain families.
As Congress returns to their home states to meet with constituents and conduct in-district business during the August recess, the preceding six months must be top of mind. Representatives are facing the judgement of their constituents and must answer for their actions: did they capitulate to the Trump administration, or did they fight back? In turn, the American people must make clear that lawmakers' attacks on our health care and civil liberties are unacceptable.
Below, we outline what you need to know about this year's devastating federal budget bill — and how we can fight against this attack.
Cuts to Medicaid Threaten Our Lives
Medicaid is a critical resource across the country, especially for children and people with disabilities. Politicians' vote to cut Medicaid, a program that provides coverage for an estimated 70 million patients, means that in every single state and congressional district, people are closer to rationing medication, missing essential medical treatments, and losing access to the care they need.
Unsurprisingly, the most vulnerable among us will feel the brunt, including 12 million people with disabilities who rely on Medicaid. Medicaid coverage is a lynchpin to ensure people can exercise their right to live in their own homes, rather than dehumanizing institutions. Denying these supports and care forces people into institutions, stripping them of the liberty and autonomy our Constitution protects.
Martha Haythorn, a 25-year-old woman with Down syndrome from Georgia, is among the people whose freedom is endangered by cuts to Medicaid. She shared with the PBS Newshour that Medicaid helps her access her community. “I deserve to be there,” she said. “Without these benefits, I can't do that. Is it really worth taking away someone's benefit, someone's life, someone's accommodation?”
Courtney Leader of Missouri told CNN that she wrote to her senator, Josh Hawley, to share how Medicaid has helped her keep caring for her daughter, who has brain damage and cerebral palsy, at home. “Without Medicaid, we would lose everything – our home, our vehicles and, eventually, our daughter,” she wrote. Sen. Hawley was one of the 50 Senators who voted to cut Medicaid.
Medicaid also covers care for the two-thirds of people living in nursing facilities, and for the nearly 14 million people with mental health conditions or substance use disorders. Millions more could lose insurance coverage because of unclear rules and red tape created by new paperwork requirements and related reporting systems for Medicaid coverage.
Access to health care is essential to our bodily autonomy and our freedom. Without these essential programs, our right to live fulfilled lives and control our futures will be greatly diminished.
Additional Risk to Reproductive Freedom
H.R. 1 also carries out one of the most dangerous goals of Project 2025: “defunding” Planned Parenthood by banning Medicaid patients from using their insurance there. This ban not only means that Medicaid patients can’t use their insurance for birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing, and other preventive care at Planned Parenthood — it also puts access to abortion access at risk even in states where abortion is legal.
A federal court blocked this “defunding” so Medicaid patients can continue to use their insurance for care at Planned Parenthood for now, but the legal battle will surely continue. If Planned Parenthood is truly “defunded”, hundreds of health centers would close, including a quarter of the country’s remaining abortion providers. Patients already struggle to access abortion, and, without Planned Parenthood, that could get even worse.
The ability to access timely reproductive health care will also worsen. There simply are not enough health care providers to serve the millions of patients seen by Planned Parenthood. The Trump administration has already attacked other essential reproductive health providers by withholding funds in the Title X family planning program, leaving patients with even fewer options for care. As a result, patients face longer wait times, travel, and delays in care.
For patients like Jamie Benner-Clemons, "defunding” Planned Parenthood could mean the difference between life and death. Benner-Clemons went to Planned Parenthood when she did not have health insurance. The cancer screening she received caught her breast cancer before it was too late. “The urgency of the health center staff saved my life,” she shared with Planned Parenthood.
Cuts to Medicaid will further endanger pregnant people nationwide. Medicaid covers 40 percent of births in the U.S. Without this coverage during pregnancy, many women would not get essential prenatal care. In rural areas, especially, these cuts will make pregnancy more dangerous. Dr. John Cullen, a family physician in Valdez, Alaska, a remote city of about 4,000 people, told The 19th, that “already we’re seeing [pregnancy care] deserts that are increasing in size, and after the passage of this bill those are going to be markedly worse — where people are going to have to drive hundreds of miles before they can get prenatal care, much less delivery.”
Cutting Health Care to Fund Detention Camps and Deportations
The politicians who supported H.R. 1 took health care away from millions, while giving $170 billion in taxpayer dollars to an immigration police force larger than most of the world’s militaries and detention camps that could, over time, hold 750,000 children, immigrants with legal status, and other long-time residents from our communities. This sends a clear message that, for politicians, care for people with disabilities is out, while $50,000 bonuses for new ICE agents are in.
This budget will reshape, perhaps permanently, immigration enforcement and detention in the U.S., funneling $45 billion into private prison companies and mass tent cities where few people can find a lawyer. This administration has already cut funding for services for unaccompanied children.
At a time when there are increased deaths in custody and appalling conditions at some of the new immigration camps, ICE is already cashing in on its new allowance and is set to expand detention to almost 110,000 beds in the next six months. This is dangerous and unprecedented. We need members of Congress to bring oversight to these expanding sites.
Meanwhile, in multiplying the number of immigration agents on our streets, H.R. 1 is funding a police state where parents—including U.S. citizens— who take their kids to school or the hospital may be asked to “show their papers” by masked agents or even be detained in private prisons and tent cities without counsel or due process.
We’ve already seen how the Trump administration’s immigration machine is terrorizing our communities. Masked ICE agents across the country have refused to provide identification during arrests, where they have forcibly taken people away in unmarked vehicles and left families with no information on where their loved ones are or whose custody they’ve been taken into. Already, there have been numerous cases of people impersonating ICE officers to threaten and harm people who are immigrants. As these raids and arrests grow more common and more aggressive, it is essential that immigration agents can be identified as such, which is why the VISIBLE Act — a commonsense transparency measure that requires DHS and ICE agents to wear visible identification — was just introduced in the Senate. As ICE agents multiply around the country with this new budget windfall, Congress must pass this bill immediately to protect community safety.
Americans Will Hold Congress Accountable
The politicians who voted for this budget monstrosity chose to sacrifice their constituents’ health, rights, and dignity. The American people will hold them accountable.
This August, the ACLU and our partners hosted events across the country to call out the politicians who supported this reckless attack on our health care, our civil liberties, and our very ability to survive. ACLU People Power volunteers mobilized their communities to town halls and confronted their Congress members about their decisions.
In Colorado, 50 constituents walked into Representative Jeff Hurd’s district lobby, holding signs and leaving hand-written notes at his office.
In Arizona, constituents attended a town hall hosted by the ACLU of Arizona in Representative David Schweikert’s district. Speakers and constituents alike focused on the $170 billion turbocharge of the president’s deportation machine, which has been fraught with abuses of power by the federal government and was paid for through cuts to Medicaid for people with disabilities.
Recent public polling demonstrates how extremely unpopular this bill is with Americans across the country. Two-thirds of the American public (64 percent) opposes H.R. 1. We must make this opposition clear to Congress by showing up at public events, calling, writing, and visiting congressional offices to let politicians know how unhappy constituents are, and how much H.R. 1 hurts our communities, our rights, and our society.
Republican leadership in Congress are preparing to create a multi-billion dollar slush fund for the Trump administration to use as their budget, as well as attach countless policy riders that risk our civil rights and liberties. We have the opportunity to tell our representatives to vote no on any of these poison pill spending bills that restrict our rights and we must. Join People Power today to stay informed about what Congress is up to and how you can get involved to protect all of our rights. Together we will fight and win.
Published August 20, 2025 at 11:51PM
via ACLU https://ift.tt/Vr57Svn
Congress Cuts Medicaid to Fund ICE: How H.R. 1 Harms Communities
Earlier this summer, Congress approved its most harmful budget in a generation. H.R. 1 or the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” made the biggest cut to Medicaid since it was created in the 1960s and funneled that money to fund President Donald Trump’s racist anti-immigration agenda.
Instead of strengthening Medicaid, Congress took an axe to it. Instead of reining in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) abuses, Congress gave the agency billions more to terrorize our communities and detain families.
As Congress returns to their home states to meet with constituents and conduct in-district business during the August recess, the preceding six months must be top of mind. Representatives are facing the judgement of their constituents and must answer for their actions: did they capitulate to the Trump administration, or did they fight back? In turn, the American people must make clear that lawmakers' attacks on our health care and civil liberties are unacceptable.
Below, we outline what you need to know about this year's devastating federal budget bill — and how we can fight against this attack.
Cuts to Medicaid Threaten Our Lives
Medicaid is a critical resource across the country, especially for children and people with disabilities. Politicians' vote to cut Medicaid, a program that provides coverage for an estimated 70 million patients, means that in every single state and congressional district, people are closer to rationing medication, missing essential medical treatments, and losing access to the care they need.
Unsurprisingly, the most vulnerable among us will feel the brunt, including 12 million people with disabilities who rely on Medicaid. Medicaid coverage is a lynchpin to ensure people can exercise their right to live in their own homes, rather than dehumanizing institutions. Denying these supports and care forces people into institutions, stripping them of the liberty and autonomy our Constitution protects.
Martha Haythorn, a 25-year-old woman with Down syndrome from Georgia, is among the people whose freedom is endangered by cuts to Medicaid. She shared with the PBS Newshour that Medicaid helps her access her community. “I deserve to be there,” she said. “Without these benefits, I can't do that. Is it really worth taking away someone's benefit, someone's life, someone's accommodation?”
Courtney Leader of Missouri told CNN that she wrote to her senator, Josh Hawley, to share how Medicaid has helped her keep caring for her daughter, who has brain damage and cerebral palsy, at home. “Without Medicaid, we would lose everything – our home, our vehicles and, eventually, our daughter,” she wrote. Sen. Hawley was one of the 50 Senators who voted to cut Medicaid.
Medicaid also covers care for the two-thirds of people living in nursing facilities, and for the nearly 14 million people with mental health conditions or substance use disorders. Millions more could lose insurance coverage because of unclear rules and red tape created by new paperwork requirements and related reporting systems for Medicaid coverage.
Access to health care is essential to our bodily autonomy and our freedom. Without these essential programs, our right to live fulfilled lives and control our futures will be greatly diminished.
Additional Risk to Reproductive Freedom
H.R. 1 also carries out one of the most dangerous goals of Project 2025: “defunding” Planned Parenthood by banning Medicaid patients from using their insurance there. This ban not only means that Medicaid patients can’t use their insurance for birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing, and other preventive care at Planned Parenthood — it also puts access to abortion access at risk even in states where abortion is legal.
A federal court blocked this “defunding” so Medicaid patients can continue to use their insurance for care at Planned Parenthood for now, but the legal battle will surely continue. If Planned Parenthood is truly “defunded”, hundreds of health centers would close, including a quarter of the country’s remaining abortion providers. Patients already struggle to access abortion, and, without Planned Parenthood, that could get even worse.
The ability to access timely reproductive health care will also worsen. There simply are not enough health care providers to serve the millions of patients seen by Planned Parenthood. The Trump administration has already attacked other essential reproductive health providers by withholding funds in the Title X family planning program, leaving patients with even fewer options for care. As a result, patients face longer wait times, travel, and delays in care.
For patients like Jamie Benner-Clemons, "defunding” Planned Parenthood could mean the difference between life and death. Benner-Clemons went to Planned Parenthood when she did not have health insurance. The cancer screening she received caught her breast cancer before it was too late. “The urgency of the health center staff saved my life,” she shared with Planned Parenthood.
Cuts to Medicaid will further endanger pregnant people nationwide. Medicaid covers 40 percent of births in the U.S. Without this coverage during pregnancy, many women would not get essential prenatal care. In rural areas, especially, these cuts will make pregnancy more dangerous. Dr. John Cullen, a family physician in Valdez, Alaska, a remote city of about 4,000 people, told The 19th, that “already we’re seeing [pregnancy care] deserts that are increasing in size, and after the passage of this bill those are going to be markedly worse — where people are going to have to drive hundreds of miles before they can get prenatal care, much less delivery.”
Cutting Health Care to Fund Detention Camps and Deportations
The politicians who supported H.R. 1 took health care away from millions, while giving $170 billion in taxpayer dollars to an immigration police force larger than most of the world’s militaries and detention camps that could, over time, hold 750,000 children, immigrants with legal status, and other long-time residents from our communities. This sends a clear message that, for politicians, care for people with disabilities is out, while $50,000 bonuses for new ICE agents are in.
This budget will reshape, perhaps permanently, immigration enforcement and detention in the U.S., funneling $45 billion into private prison companies and mass tent cities where few people can find a lawyer. This administration has already cut funding for services for unaccompanied children.
At a time when there are increased deaths in custody and appalling conditions at some of the new immigration camps, ICE is already cashing in on its new allowance and is set to expand detention to almost 110,000 beds in the next six months. This is dangerous and unprecedented. We need members of Congress to bring oversight to these expanding sites.
Meanwhile, in multiplying the number of immigration agents on our streets, H.R. 1 is funding a police state where parents—including U.S. citizens— who take their kids to school or the hospital may be asked to “show their papers” by masked agents or even be detained in private prisons and tent cities without counsel or due process.
We’ve already seen how the Trump administration’s immigration machine is terrorizing our communities. Masked ICE agents across the country have refused to provide identification during arrests, where they have forcibly taken people away in unmarked vehicles and left families with no information on where their loved ones are or whose custody they’ve been taken into. Already, there have been numerous cases of people impersonating ICE officers to threaten and harm people who are immigrants. As these raids and arrests grow more common and more aggressive, it is essential that immigration agents can be identified as such, which is why the VISIBLE Act — a commonsense transparency measure that requires DHS and ICE agents to wear visible identification — was just introduced in the Senate. As ICE agents multiply around the country with this new budget windfall, Congress must pass this bill immediately to protect community safety.
Americans Will Hold Congress Accountable
The politicians who voted for this budget monstrosity chose to sacrifice their constituents’ health, rights, and dignity. The American people will hold them accountable.
This August, the ACLU and our partners hosted events across the country to call out the politicians who supported this reckless attack on our health care, our civil liberties, and our very ability to survive. ACLU People Power volunteers mobilized their communities to town halls and confronted their Congress members about their decisions.
In Colorado, 50 constituents walked into Representative Jeff Hurd’s district lobby, holding signs and leaving hand-written notes at his office.
In Arizona, constituents attended a town hall hosted by the ACLU of Arizona in Representative David Schweikert’s district. Speakers and constituents alike focused on the $170 billion turbocharge of the president’s deportation machine, which has been fraught with abuses of power by the federal government and was paid for through cuts to Medicaid for people with disabilities.
Recent public polling demonstrates how extremely unpopular this bill is with Americans across the country. Two-thirds of the American public (64 percent) opposes H.R. 1. We must make this opposition clear to Congress by showing up at public events, calling, writing, and visiting congressional offices to let politicians know how unhappy constituents are, and how much H.R. 1 hurts our communities, our rights, and our society.
Republican leadership in Congress are preparing to create a multi-billion dollar slush fund for the Trump administration to use as their budget, as well as attach countless policy riders that risk our civil rights and liberties. We have the opportunity to tell our representatives to vote no on any of these poison pill spending bills that restrict our rights and we must. Join People Power today to stay informed about what Congress is up to and how you can get involved to protect all of our rights. Together we will fight and win.
Published August 20, 2025 at 07:21PM
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Will Giant Companies Always Have a Monopoly on Top AI Models?
In my post on large language models (LLMs) last week, I argued that the most important question about LLMs is not the outcome of a race with China or when AI will reach human-level intelligence, but whether this striking new technology will be accessible to and serve the interests of ordinary people, or whether it will end up centrally controlled by a small number of highly capitalized companies or governments.
One of the biggest factors in determining which future we face is the question: how easy it is to access the resources needed to build and train a cutting-edge or “frontier” LLM? Inspired by this question, I did a bit of a dive into the training process for LLMs to try to assess the outlook for free LLMs. To explain what I found, I’ll need to look at the basics of how models are trained, as best I understand this fast-moving science from reading what experts in the field are saying.
A turnaround As I mentioned in the prior post, things started off poorly. In 2022 and 2023, around the time OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released to the public, it looked like there was a real likelihood that this powerful new technology would be like nuclear power: centralized, complex, highly capital-intensive, secretive, and subject to strict security controls. The AI “base model” that was the engine driving the ChatGPT application was called GPT-3, which was succeeded by GPT-4 in 2023. Training these models on the vast amounts of data available on the internet and elsewhere was an enormously expensive undertaking that few organizations could afford. The GPT-4 model reportedlycost over $100 million to train, including the acquisition of 25,000 five-figure computer graphics cards and a hugeelectricity bill.
And it looked as though this level of resources was just the start. The seemingly miraculous performance of ChatGPT was largely the product of simply taking past research and scaling it up. LLMs that worked very poorly suddenly worked much better simply by exponentially increasing the amount of computing power (“compute”) dedicated to their training. Even though the computations were relatively simple — involving predicting the next “token” (roughly, word or symbol) in a text — when those computations were repeated trillions of times, unexpectedly smart behaviors appeared through a process known as “emergence.”
Emergence Emergence is a phenomenon in complexity science referring to the fact that large numbers of simple rules can upon repetition produce complex and surprising behaviors that don’t appear to be the predictable result of any characteristics evident in the rules. A classic example is the flocking behavior of birds. Computer programmers trying to recreate that behavior in a computer bird simulation could tie themselves in knots trying to manually direct V-formations and the beautiful merging and diverging of flocks, but it turns out that if each virtual bird is programmed with just a few simple rules (“don’t get too close to your neighbors, but steer toward their average heading and position”) a flock of simulated birds will behave in ways strikingly similar to the complex movements of real flocks. That complex behavior emerges out of the simple rules in ways that nobody could ever predict by looking at the rules.
There are controversies over the precise meaning of “emergence” and the role it plays, but overall it seems to me that there’s no question that when AI systems are scaled up, they become capable of doing things that are surprising to people and far beyond anything they’ve been explicitly programmed to do. And that power is not to be underestimated; AI progress may not soar the way boosters predict — but neither should the technology be reductively dismissed as a mere “word prediction machine” or the like.
The original GPT-1 base model, released in 2018, had 117 million parameters — numbers that represent the strength of associations between different tokens, akin to synapses in the model’s “brain.” The next model, GPT-2, had over 12 times as many, and GPT-3 had 116 times more than that, powering the chatbot that burst into fame as ChatGPT. GPT-4 had an estimated ten times more and performed far better. Simply programming these models to predict the next word in a sequence led to emergent behaviors that seemed surprisingly (and deceptively) intelligent and human in some respects, and soared far beyond what one might expect from a system that, at root, is trained to simply predict the next word in a text.
In 2022 the lesson seemed clear: exponentially scaling up these models was the secret to success. At the rate things were progressing, it seemed plausible to many that with just a few more exponential leaps we might reach human-level intelligence — what is commonly if vaguely referred to as “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI. This fueled a “Manhattan Project” conception of LLM research as a geopolitical “race” toward a definitive goal: a sudden, secret breakthrough in reaching human or superhuman artificial intelligence. The winner of this race would obtain not a nuclear weapon but some sort of AI equivalent that would provide new levers for permanent dominance in business, the military, and the world. The implications of such a conception are bad for freedom: that research efforts should be concentrated and secretive, while cooperation and openness are foolish.
But a funny thing happened on the way to AGI: the benefits from scaling up the base models appear to have reached a state of significantly diminishingreturns. For several years after GPT-4, for example, the AI world was eagerly awaiting, and OpenAI eagerly promoting, GPT-5, but its release was repeatedly delayed until, in late February 2025 the company finally released GPT-4.5 (suspected by some to be an expectations-lowering rename of GPT-5). It was bymostaccounts not dramatically higher-performing. “GPT 4.5 cost about 100x the compute of GPT-4 to train,” one expert observed, but “it is only slightly better on normal user metrics. Scaling as a product differentiator died in 2024.” Indeed, OpenAI’s competitors experienced a similar leveling off of progress in base-model training. The release of a model called GPT-5 in early August only confirmed this trend.
This was true even before the Chinese company DeepSeek made its enormous splash in December 2024 and January 2025, releasing models that achieved much more power at far lower training cost than previous models had been able to achieve. Some compared it to a company offering $50 smartphones more powerful than the latest $1,000 iPhone. This roiled stock valuations and was viewed largely through the lens of US-China geopolitical rivalries. The real significance of the DeepSeek innovations, however, was that it both clarified and accelerated the declining plausibility of the Manhattan Project model of LLM research.
The stages of training
As research continues, however, it is controversial and unclear to what extent the big science character of LLM training will continue to fade. The training of base models, where the returns to scale have apparently leveled off, at least for now, is only one step in creating LLMs. Meanwhile, other steps in the creation of finished models are being scaled up and absorbing more resources.
Overall, there are four basic stages in the creation of a model today, and they vary in what kinds of resources they require.
a. Data preparation
Access to data for training the base model is the first thing that any actor wanting to train an LLM will need. The data that will be used to train the model must be selected, gathered, and perhaps filtered. Typically this means enormous masses of raw textual data (what is often summarized as “the entire Internet,” though it can also include the texts of books, messages, social media posts, and other things that may not be online). Images and video are increasingly being used as well for so-called “multi-modal” models that aim to understand images as well as text.
It’s not just big companies that can access all this data; there are a number of open data sets that are available for anyone to use. The most prominent, perhaps, is the nonprofit organization CommonCrawl’s dataset, which includes regular snapshots of the entire public web gathered since 2008. Other publicly available datasets include the texts of books, Wikipedia, computer code repositories, and research papers. Experts say the biggest LLM players like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, reportedly do their own web crawling instead of just using such databases, and may have more resources to curate and filter the vast oceans of data that are poured into LLM pre-training. It’s not clear how much of an edge such work gives them in the quality of an LLM end product.
One of the reasons that the benefits of scaling up base-model training may have levelled off is that the amount of training data used has not scaled up commensurately with the number of parameters in the newest models at the frontier of research, according to experts. The internet and other prominent data sources have all been tapped by all the most prominent LLMs. But big companies that have exclusive access to other sources of data may as a result have an important leg up. Elon Musk’s model Grok, for example, has been trained on data from Twitter/X that nobody else can access. Other big LLM companies like OpenAI don’t have their own social media networks, and independent scientists certainly don’t. Again it is unclear how much of an advantage access to that kind of proprietary data will prove to be over time.
b. Pre-training
Pre-training is the first step in actually creating a general LLM “base model” (as opposed to smaller or more specialized models derived from it). It involves teaching the model the basics of language by running the vast datasets through thousands of powerful graphical processing unit (GPU) cards to teach it to predict the next token in a string of text, building in the process a map of associations between different words and concepts. The output of this training is a set of model weights — essentially, a large set of numbers (in the largest models, trillions) representing the strength of associations or “thickness of the lines” between different tokens (corresponding roughly to neurons in the model’s “brain”).
As we have seen, pre-training is yielding diminishing returns, but it remains the most expensive step that uses the vast majority of the compute involved in creating a model.
There’s another technical development that may reduce the barriers to entry to training models. Most base-model training has taken place in specialized server farms with expensive GPUs packed close together because of the need to transfer enormous amounts of data many times between GPUs and very quickly (an ability known as “interconnect”) at each training step. This was seen as so vital that U.S. export controls targeted at China didn’t attempt to restrict compute, but only interconnect, on the assumption that would hobble China’s ability to do AI. But advances are being made in distributed training that allow far-flung computers to accomplish the same tasks. One expert, Nathan Labenz, observed that distributed training of LLMs as good as recent frontier models “is the kind of thing now that a well-organized but distributed group could probably potentially patch together the resources to do.”
c. Post-training
In the post-training stage, a base model’s abilities in a specific area are shaped and refined through a variety of techniques. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can be used to refine the model’s abilities by providing it with a cultivated set of examples in a specialized area — for example, if you want the model to write about finance, health care, or the law, you might fine-tune it with data from those specialties. Another technique is “reinforcement learning from human feedback” (RLHF), in which humans give a model’s outputs thumbs ups and downs to nudge it toward behaving in certain ways and not others. A model can also be trained with synthetic data, feedback from another model, internal model self-critiques, or in some areas from self-play in which a model competes against itself.
Post-training is becoming an increasingly significant part of model building today. Several years ago it was mostly focused on style and safety, but its applications have gotten much broader. Post-training techniques are now used to shape a base model into a variety of derivative models. It could not only be trained to answer questions in a helpful and engaging manner for a chatbot, but also to actively search and retrieve new information (for “retrieval-augmented generation,” or RAG), to carry out tasks (for agents), to include images (for language vision models), or to specialize in answering objective scientific questions (for reasoning models).
Experts say that growth in the importance of post-training will likely continue. As Nathan Lambert of the nonprofit Allen AI research institute put it, “it’s very logical that post training will be the next domain for scaling model compute and performance” — meaning that like post-training scaling while it lasted, ever-larger resources may be needed to stay on the post-training cutting edge. Lambert points out that post-training is “still far cheaper than pretraining,” but that “post-training costs have been growing rapidly” into the tens of millions of dollars.
Still, there are many organizations that can spend tens of millions of dollars, compared to the billions of dollars that many expected model training to eventually cost. In addition, experts Like Labenz say that the lower technical difficulty of post-training makes it accessible to many more parties than base model training. “One of the biggest developments has been the recent revelation that reinforcement learning, on top of at least sufficiently powerful base models, really works and actually can be a pretty simple setup that works remarkably well,” he says.
d. Inference
Inference-time compute is the processing that takes place after a user has made a query. When ChatGPT was first released, and for some time afterwards, LLMs did very little of this kind of processing, but the trend has been toward much more. Partly that is a result of reasoning models, which are created in post-training by giving LLMs large numbers of problems where there are objective right and wrong answers, a technique called reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR). When training on problems with objective answers, such as in coding, science and math, models can be trained quickly and in great depth without human participation — teaching themselves, essentially. The researchers at Deepseek discovered that one of the emergent (spontaneously emerging) behaviors produced by such training was chain-of-thought reasoning, in which the model explicitly “thinks” step-by-step about the query it has received, explaining its reasoning along the way, and backtracking if necessary, before arriving at the answer. Although this emerges from training on science and math arenas, it appears that it generalizes to other, more subjective domains as well, making the model do better at all kinds of queries, including such things as legal reasoning. Wherever deployed, chain-of-thought reasoning increases the inference-time compute and thus the cost of running a model.
Another development that adds to the costs of inference is a trend toward larger “context windows.” In many ways LLMs are like the protagonist of the movie Memento or a dementia patient who can access a lifetime’s worth of background memory and knowledge, but is unable to form new memories. In answering queries, LLMs always have at hand the world-knowledge that they gained during pre- and post-training, but this knowledge is frozen. In terms of new input — what they can keep in “mind” during a single conversation — they have rather small short-term memories.
The original ChatGPT is thought to have had a context window of 8,192 tokens. Increasing context windows is expensive because in preparing an answer, an LLM must compare every token in the window to every other token. That means that the amount of processing compute needed rises roughly by the square of the number of tokens in memory. Nevertheless, some models now have relatively enormous context windows, such as Llama 4 Scout with 10 million tokens. This is in part due to clever innovations that are making it possible to reduce the compute needed to work with a window that big. But it’s still expensive. And even as inference becomes more compute-intensive, there is a strong demand for faster inference times, which is desirable for those who are want to use them for coding or for real-time applications like audio chat and live translation.
When inference costs are low, creating an LLM is like creating a railroad — it involves enormous upfront capital costs to build it, but then once built, relatively low marginal costs to run it. To the extent that inference costs grow, that raises ongoing operating costs. Providers are increasingly vying to offer large context windows and fast inference speeds — competing demands that are fast becoming major vectors of competition among LLM providers and reward computing power, scale, and centralization.
A diffusion of training ability
Overall, LLM research is in many ways “spreading outward” compared to its initial Manhattan Project-like character, and becoming more broadly accessible, giving us reason to hope that — especially with active measures by policymakers — LLMs may just not become the latest center of growing corporate power over individuals. The picture is complicated and fast-changing, however. It’s hard to know what direction progress will come from and how accessible the data, compute, interconnect, and other resources required for such progress will be. But that is the thing to watch — and the thing that policymakers should be actively trying to affect.
In the next installment of this series, I’ll look at another crucial factor in determining the future democratic character of LLMs: the state of open source LLM research and models.
Published August 20, 2025 at 04:37PM
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New Detention Camp at Fort Bliss Marks Dangerous Expansion of Militarized Immigration Enforcement
The Trump administration opened an immigration detention camp at Fort Bliss, a U.S. military base in Texas. It is slated to become the largest immigration detention site in the country.
Fort Bliss, in El Paso, will hold up to 5,000 people in the base’s new tent camp. The military base is home to 90,000 service members and their families. Opened at the height of the Texas summer, where temperatures regularly soar above 100 degrees and sandstorms are frequent, detainees are at serious risk of heat-related illness and other harsh conditions. In response, local elected officials in El Paso have already passed a resolution demanding transparency and accountability from the federal government.
Built behind the walls of a military installation and away from public view, the facility is a calculated move to militarize immigration enforcement, reduce transparency, and fast-track deportations with minimal accountability.
Opening an immigration detention camp at Fort Bliss is just the latest step in President Donald Trump’s dystopian plan to detain and deport millions. In the coming months, the administration plans to open detention camps on at least two more military bases, with additional troops being deployed to support Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations nationwide. This coordinated use of the military to carry out a deportation agenda is unprecedented, and deeply dangerous. It’s a tactic straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and we cannot let it go unchallenged.
A Disturbing History of Fort Bliss as a Detention Site
Throughout history, Fort Bliss has served not as a place of refuge or justice, but as a staging ground for policies driven by cruelty and exclusion. Reopening it as an immigration detention site in 2025 would add yet another dark chapter to that legacy. Allowing this base to become the blueprint for exploiting military spaces and resources for immigration enforcement would set a dangerous precedent.
Fort Bliss has long been used to carry out government policies rooted in xenophobia and racism. During World War II, it was one of several Texas military bases used as internment camps for people of Japanese descent, as well as German and Italian immigrants. During the Mexican Revolution more than 20 years earlier, the base served as a temporary holding site for thousands of Mexican refugees, many of whom were kept in military tents and exposed to toxic chemical delousing agents. Some of the chemicals were later used in Nazi gas chambers.
In more recent history, Fort Bliss was used during Trump’s first term to detain children who were separated from their families. In 2021, under the Biden administration, government investigators reported children detained at the base experienced panic attacks and other forms of emotional distress due to inadequate staffing and improper care.
Funding Inhumane Detention
The Department of Homeland Security collaborating with the Department of Defense to detain thousands of people in tents on a military base is not only inhumane, it is ineffective and unnecessary. People held in remote facilities like Fort Bliss face steep barriers to accessing legal counsel and medical care, as well communicating with family members. Isolating people on military bases heightens the risk of abuse and neglect. It’s a punitive tactic designed to break people down, strip away hope, and pressure them into giving up their cases and accepting deportation.
This latest detention expansion is fueled by a massive influx of federal funding. Congress recently passed a reconciliation bill that allocated $170 billion toward immigration enforcement, including $45 billion specifically for detention. ICE’s detention budget is now 62 percent larger than the of the entire federal prison system. The Trump administration has already spent a staggering $1.2 billion on the Fort Bliss tent camp, rather than funding public services Texans urgently need, such as disaster relief, health care, education, and housing.
Texas already leads the nation in immigration detention, and the human cost is mounting. Since October, 13 people have died in ICE custody, already surpassing last year’s total. Meanwhile, ICE continues to obstruct oversight efforts by denying members of Congress and their staff access to detention facilities across the country, making transparency nearly impossible.
We Must Act Now to Stop This
El Paso County’s introduction of a resolution opposing the Fort Bliss detention center marks a critical first step in holding the federal government accountable. The ACLU applauds its call for transparency, local oversight, and the humane treatment of detainees. The public deserves to know what is happening behind the walls of its own military base. No one should be detained at Fort Bliss in the first place, and every individual held there deserves dignity, legal representation, and medical care.
In addition to state and local efforts, members of Congress must build on this momentum. They must demand full transparency from ICE by:
Conducting oversight visits and releasing public reports on detention conditions.
Opposing any more funding for militarized detention sites and tent cities and redeployment of military resources for the reckless deportation drive.
Holding private contractors accountable for abuse and neglect.
Supporting legislation that shifts immigration enforcement away from punitive approaches and toward permanent protections for immigrant communities.
The meaning of the word “Texas” comes from the Caddo word meaning “friend.” But this detention camp is anything but friendly. It is a cruel, reckless, and costly operation launched with little input from local communities or elected leaders. This is the Trump administration’s test case to see whether it can quietly convert military resources into tools for mass detention and deportation. We urge Congress and local leaders to act swiftly, decisively, and publicly. Our military bases are meant to defend our freedoms, not become the site of new human rights violations.
Published August 18, 2025 at 05:44PM
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