ACLU 2025 Annual Report

The ACLU is making good on our promise to protect civil rights and liberties from the Trump administration’s authoritarian tactics. To date, the ACLU has taken more than 200 legal actions, including filing over 110 lawsuits—53 of them within the first 100 days of the president’s second term. In more than 70 percent of our cases, we’ve successfully defeated, diluted, or delayed President Trump’s unconstitutional agenda. We’re holding the line in courts across the country, forcing this administration to back down when it matters most.

As you’ll read in this report, with your steadfast support, we’re defending immigrants’ rights, reproductive freedom, free speech, LGBTQ equality, disability rights, voting rights, and much more against President Trump’s agenda. At a perilous time for the country, the ACLU remains prepared, vigilant, and proactive.

The ACLU is uniquely positioned to defend against such widespread attacks on our rights, as our greatest strength is our reach across issues, tactics, and geographies. With our affiliates in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, the ACLU is responding nimbly to the Trump administration’s unconstitutional actions with litigation, advocacy, and grassroots mobilization of our 7 million supporters and activists. Our 550 attorneys litigated across every state, while our 501(c)(4) advocacy arm influenced policy and galvanized public pressure to defend and advance our fundamental freedoms on the state, city, and local levels.

In 2025, the Trump administration has shown extraordinary hostility toward our First Amendment freedoms. Attacks on free speech are a hallmark of authoritarianism, and the ACLU is successfully defending against the administration’s efforts to dismantle organizations, suppress protest, and silence students, lawyers, government agencies, journalists, and institutions that have the power to push back.

We blocked the Trump administration from deporting four legal residents targeted for their political speech and won their release from ICE detention while litigation proceeds. We filed friend-of-the-court briefs in defense of the First Amendment rights of several law firms, Harvard University, NPR, and PBS. And we sued the administration and the National Endowment for the Arts for censoring the “promotion of gender ideology.”

As President Trump and his political allies across the country repeatedly targeted immigrant communities this year, the ACLU was there. We blocked the president’s effort to dismantle the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship as well as his attempt to close the southern border to asylum seekers. We also secured several rulings blocking the administration’s unlawful use of the Alien Enemies Act—a 1798 wartime law—to accelerate deportations.

In our work to ensure free and fair elections in anticipation of the 2026 midterm elections, we blocked the president’s executive order requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and ensured that district maps in states including Alabama and Louisiana are redrawn so that they do not dilute Black voting power.

The ACLU is countering anti-abortion extremism too. We challenged the unlawful withholding of Title X federal family-planning grants and defended pregnant patients’ right to receive lifesaving abortion care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.

As part of our work for LGBTQ rights, we successfully blocked President Trump’s executive order to enforce a nationwide ban on essential health care for transgender people under the age of 19.

The ACLU is confronting unconstitutional attacks on our civil rights and liberties wherever and whenever possible—and we’re not slowing down.

At the U.S. Supreme Court this year, the conservative 6–3 majority made a show of force—to the detriment of LGBTQ rights, free speech on the internet, and longstanding precedents for the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause. We are disappointed in these decisions, but we are not deterred. We remain committed to our promise to defend, protect, and build our rights inside and outside the courtroom. We have no alternative but to fight—and to demand more.

In our case United States v. Skrmetti, the court made the decision to let stand a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming health care for transgender adolescents, but notably, the narrow ruling does not extend to other cases concerning discrimination based on transgender status. The court also upended precedents in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, our challenge to a Texas law that limits adults from accessing First Amendment–protected content, and Mahmoud v. Taylor, by allowing parents to pick and choose from a secular public school curriculum based on their religious objections.

The Supreme Court still sided with us in key cases: We protected birthright citizenship and curtailed unlawful deportations, and we were on the winning side in six of the 11 cases for which we filed friend-of-the-court briefs. In Trump v. CASA, the court partially upheld lower court rulings that the birthright citizenship executive order violates the Constitution. When the court also narrowed the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions, we immediately filed a new nationwide class action lawsuit.

The court ruled in our favor in two cases challenging the administration’s abuse of the Alien Enemies Act to detain and deport people without due process. These orders prevented our plaintiffs from being disappeared to a notorious Salvadoran prison and reaffirmed individuals’ right to challenge their removal. Regardless of these outcomes, we must remember that the Supreme Court only hears a tiny fraction of the cases presented to it each year. Across the country, the ACLU and our partner organizations file—and win—many other critical cases that not only protect and expand our rights but also truly represent the voice of the people.

Our impact does not stop at the courthouse steps. Every legal battle sparks broader organizing, strengthens our solidarity, and mobilizes activists across the country. This year, our 501(c)(4) advocacy arm expanded our People Power volunteer base and held virtual calls, public events, and Know Your Rights trainings.

We served as a national partner for the nationwide Hands Off and No Kings protests, and in May we unveiled our Freedom to Be quilt on the National Mall in support of trans joy and justice.

ACLU affiliates successfully deployed our Firewall for Freedom proposals in states and cities to mitigate the worst harms coming from the White House and Congress. Federal law serves as the floor—not the ceiling—for many of our rights and liberties, and state and local officials have the power to expand freedoms for their communities. This year, the ACLU’s political advocacy efforts helped to advance more than 78 policy proposals in 43 states, including protections for immigrants’ rights and reproductive freedom through governors and attorneys general.

Together, we repeatedly sent the message that when the Trump administration comes after our rights, it must get through all of us: Compared to the same period during his first administration, the number of peaceful protests tripled this year. The power of the people will always be greater than the people in power.

As we charge ahead into 2026, we are laser-focused on restoring, defending, and expanding our fundamental rights and liberties. As ACLU National Legal Director Cecillia Wang has said, “Win or lose, it matters when we stand up in court to fight for freedom, due process, and the basic notion that the president is not above the law.”

In the courts, in the legislatures, and in the streets, we will continue to be the steady defender of our democracy. Your generous partnership is critical to our ability to keep fighting until we realize the true promise of a free and equal nation.

Over 105 years and 19 presidential administrations, our ACLU community has held the line on liberty—and we aren’t going anywhere.

Thank you for being with us.

Read the full 2025 annual report below. You can download a more print-friendly spreads layout here.