Before 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union could expect to bring in between $3-$5 million annually in online donations. But over a single weekend in 2017, the 100-year-old civil rights and civil liberties group, whose lawyers were on the ground in airports across the country fighting President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, raked in some $24 million from thousands of small donors.
Hundreds of nonprofits, news outlets, and advocacy groups benefited from huge cash infusions since 2016, a phenomenon dubbed the “Trump Bump,” but arguably no single organization has seen a bigger spike in support than the ACLU. This was in large part thanks to Trump’s unapologetic war on civil rights and civil liberties, but the organization’s explosion is also the result of strategy and expansion plans that had been brewing for more than a decade. In 2009, the ACLU was bleeding donors and cutting staff; the rise of the Tea Party and the legal fight for marriage equality gave the group a much-needed shot in the arm, while Trump’s election juiced their funding and membership numbers to new heights.
So what has the ACLU done with all that money? And with branches across the country and an endless string of lawsuits and campaigns, how does this gigantic machine operate?
A storied organization with a modern vision
The ACLU was founded in January of 1920, but existed under other names before then: the American Union Against Militarism and its offshoot, the National Civil Liberties Bureau. In its early years, the group was less interested in the Constitution and its guarantees and more interested in using court cases to show the inherent bias of the legal system against labor and pacifists in the midst of World War I. As the country evolved, so did the ACLU, shifting its focus to the defense of the first amendment and eventually civil rights, gay rights, immigration, criminal justice and other key liberties.
The organization today is led by Anthony Romero, who has served as executive director since 2001. The September 11, 2001 attacks came only a week after he took the job, launching the ACLU into one of its most crucial periods—when the organization battled the Bush Administration over torture, the Patriot Act, and other violations during the War on Terror. In his early years, Romero also began planning for strategic expansion at the organization, particularly for the ACLU’s numerous state-level affiliates. Under Romero’s leadership, the ACLU established its first central office for supporting and coordinating with state branches; those affiliates have grown and gained influence in part thanks to the national organization’s help.
While the ACLU has rapidly expanded in recent years into more active lobbying, organizing, and in the case of some state branches, even investigative reporting, the group’s main focus is still litigation. The ACLU’s legal department is run by David Cole, a longtime civil rights and civil liberties attorney and law professor. In 2016, Cole took the reins of the ACLU’s legal team, which includes 100 attorneys in the New York headquarters alone. Four years later, and the ACLU has sued the Trump administration more than 400 times. (In the interests of disclosure: The author of this article once worked as an intern at the ACLU of Michigan; his partner is currently an intern with the ACLU's Voting Rights Project).
In those same years, the ACLU has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and grown its membership from some 400,000 to more than 1.8 million (according to Cole, who spoke with Blue Tent in October, that expansion didn’t take four years—it took about six months).
Two national groups and dozens of affiliates
The ACLU’s strength comes in part thanks to its organizational structure, which is broken into three pieces. The first is the ACLU, which is responsible for the organization’s litigation practice. Second is the separate but connected ACLU Foundation, which is responsible for the vast majority of the group’s lobbying work. Third are the state and local affiliates, which are separate and autonomous nonprofit entities, though they work closely with the national group on political campaigns and litigation as often as possible, according to Cole.
There are currently ACLU affiliates in every state, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. California has three affiliates of its own: one for Southern California, one for Northern California and one for San Diego and Imperial Counties.
“We used to have affiliates with no lawyers, or one lawyer,” Cole told Blue Tent. “And we’ve really expanded them out so that the affiliates can really be a significant presence on the ground in local settings where so many of these civil liberties issues start and often get resolved.”
In 2018, the ACLU of Southern California alone had more than $10 million in revenue. Other major affiliates include the other two California offices, Florida, Texas, New York, Michigan and Washington, D.C.
More money, more options
Until recently, the ACLU has been an organization focused almost entirely on the law. In the Trump years, the organization's legal load was bigger than ever, with hundreds of lawsuits against the administration. Two of those cases made it to the Supreme Court: a challenge to the Muslim ban, which lost 5-4, and a challenge to the Commerce Department’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, which the ACLU won 5-4.
Like many other advocacy organizations, the ACLU has evolved to pursue PR campaigns, lobbying and protest in addition to litigation. But it wasn’t until the last few years that they have had the bandwidth (or the donor pressure) to push in all of these directions. Thanks to a surge of donations and new members, in 2018 alone, the ACLU spent some $10 million advocating ballot initiatives. This was a big step for a group previously known primarily for its first amendment court cases.
“People did not give to the ACLU for us to put that money into a bank account,” Romero told the New York Times in 2018, referring to the group’s uptick in political spending. “If at the end of this year what I have to show to all of these people rushing to become members of the organization is a better balance sheet, I’d get properly skewered. Shame on us if we don’t find a way to put that money to use.”
Romero explained that previously, the ACLU would participate in the exact same types of political work; it just so happened that now, they can have a much bigger impact.
Expect more collaboration, but still plenty of litigation, in the Biden years
Despite being a liberal organization, the ACLU’s lawyers are no strangers to fighting with Democratic administrations. The ACLU has sued every President since its founding, and the group was one of the leading voices against the Obama Administration’s drone strike policies and mass surveillance. They’re planning to continue to fight with the Biden Administration if and when it’s necessary; that being said, ACLU leadership is expecting a slightly less hostile relationship with the White House and federal agencies compared to the last four years.
“You can work with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, I would expect under a Biden administration, whereas under the Trump administration, they don’t even want to hear from us,” Cole said.
Areas where the ACLU is hoping to see serious action in the next four years, according to Cole, are racial justice and police; rolling back Trump immigration, LGBTQ and abortion policies; and pushing for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment and the restoration of the Voting Rights Act.
One big question is what capacity the ACLU will have to pursue these goals after four years of playing defense. In those years, funding exploded, but with an economic downturn and no big bad guy to rile up small donors, progressive groups need to be ready to tighten their belts.
“We recognize that some of those [new] members, we’re not going to be able to hold onto,” Cole said, noting that the group’s previous high of 500,000 members during the Bush years dipped to 400,000, but that it took all eight years of the Obama presidency.
“We’re hoping to hold onto as many members and supporters as possible,” Cole said. “And that people will recognize that in order to have a robust democracy with civil rights and civil liberties protections, organizations like ours need to exist for the long term.”
