The Trump Administration is threatening the future of Head Start, a program that has provided critical and evidence-based services — from education to childcare — to more than 40 million children and their families. The Administration by gutting Head Start staff and resources, delaying funding, and prohibiting activities that “advance or promote” “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility,” is irreparably harming the young children and low-income families who rely on Head Start.

On October 28, 2024, the ACLU and ACLU of Washington filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit supporting affirmance of a Washington district court decision holding that a religiously affiliated nonprofit organization violated Title VII and the Washington State antidiscrimination law when it rescinded a hiring candidate’s job offer because she is a woman married to a person of the same sex. Should the Ninth Circuit accept the organization’s First Amendment defense—that religious organizations can discriminate on any basis so long as it is grounded in their religious belief—it would gut employment protections for LGBTQ individuals and pave the way for religious organizations to discriminate on the basis of not only sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity but also other protected characteristics like race, color, and national origin.

The ACLU and its affiliates in Southern California and Washington, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, the Law Offices of Stacy Tolchin, and Perkins Coie LLP filed a class action lawsuit in January 2017 challenging a federal government program used to deny or indefinitely delay thousands of law-abiding people—many of them from Muslim-majority countries—from becoming citizens or lawful residents due to unspecified “national security concerns.”