News & Commentary

On a December morning, Border Patrol agents confronted a 15-year-old high school student named Jahveel Ocampo at a rest stop in California while she and her friends were on their way to the mountains to see the winter’s first snow. Jahveel was a young child when she came to the United States from Mexico with her parents, and she grew up undocumented in southern California. She was a mother to a 2-year-old child, who was a U.S. citizen.

The ACLU of Arizona teamed up with Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) and other organizations to bail moms out of jail so they could celebrate the holiday with their loved ones.

Following the tragic school shooting in Parkland, Florida, students across the nation have come together to fight for gun reform. They have decided they can no longer sit still while reform efforts fail and school shootings become increasingly normal.

In partnership with the Demand to Learn campaign, Rising Youth Theatre created The 100th Day, an original theatre production. This collaboration highlights the injustice and discrimination within Arizona’s education system and allows audience members to learn through young people’s eyes.

Arizona denies 221,000 people the right to vote. These are a few of their stories.

Arizona does not need more mandatory minimum sentences. We need a system that values treatment and prevention, as well as flexibility for judges to determine individualized sentences when incarceration is unavoidable.

Racial bias plagues our criminal justice system. That is why yesterday, with the Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice, we filed a brief with the Arizona Supreme Court in a case about racially discriminatory jury selection, Urrea v. Arizona.

When a child is born in Arizona, their vital records should reflect--and respect--the reality of the family they are born into. Right now, that's not the case. We hear far too often from LGBTQ parents who are frustrated and upset that their child's birth certificate does not match their family.

When the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools cancelled its monthly meeting “due to no requests for Board consideration,” education advocates and parents like me decided to hold our own public meeting and highlight the issues the board refuses to acknowledge.