At the ACLU of Wisconsin, our focus recently turned to two electoral cycles: the gubernatorial election in November 2022, and the April 2023 state supreme court election. I’m proud to say that there were many lessons learned, capacity built, and positive outcomes that we are happy to share with our teammates in the ACLU universe.

The outcomes of this work include a crucial veto for defending against assaults on our rights and a pivotal turn towards a court that will protect abortion access and democracy.

The collapse of abortion rights in Wisconsin was devastatingly painful — almost too painful to comprehend fully — but it also reminded me that the ACLU exists for moments like these. Even in the most harrowing times, I know that my team will show up and fight alongside our allies. And we have. It is our shared strength, knowledge, resilience, and enduring commitment to operate in service to our communities that drives us forward.

State supreme courts can act as the last defense for our rights, and Wisconsin’s high court is poised, in the coming years, to make monumental decisions affecting voting rights, gerrymandering, the criminal legal system, abortion, and more. The stakes of Wisconsin’s spring supreme court race were clear, and we knew that educating voters was the crucial next step. With that clarity of vision, we — the ACLU and ACLU of Wisconsin — deployed a whole-of-organization approach to ensure every eligible voter had the tools, knowledge, and resources they needed to cast an informed vote.

ACLU of Wisconsin

ACLU of Wisconsin and the ACLU Join Forces To Empower Voters In State Supreme Court Election

The ACLU of Wisconsin and the ACLU launched a joint campaign to engage Wisconsin voters ahead of the state supreme court general election.

Our campaign focused on highlighting the candidates’ positions on abortion and worked to reach voters through radio advertisements on this issue, direct mail, door-to-door canvassing, community outreach, and social media. The ads reached 570,000 listeners over 10 times each. Abortion was the defining issue of this election, and these ads helped people across the state get to know each candidate’s views in their own words.

To educate even more voters, our team sent three flights of mail breaking down the candidates’ perspectives on abortion as well as voting rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and more, while we made calls, knocked on doors, talked one on one with voters, and recruited volunteers. In total, we engaged well over 100,000 additional people through these tactics, and those numbers grow even larger when factoring in other communication channels like social media, web traffic, and mass email communications.

After months of non-stop work, our ACLU staff joined with the rest of the country to await the outcome in Wisconsin on Election Day. From our office we watched the numbers climb to record-breaking turnout for a Wisconsin spring election that didn’t coincide with a presidential primary, and incredibly high engagement from young voters, women, and voters of color. This turnout was an emphatic declaration that Wisconsinites won’t tolerate attacks on our reproductive freedom.

I feel immense gratitude for all the people who poured themselves into the fight for a just future, resisting the worst impulses of our state, and showing up to support communities — especially those who have been historically excluded, advocating from the margins. Their passion and endless pursuit continue to give me strength. Together, we made sure that the peoples’ voice was heard in this vital election.

I hope that the countless hours Wisconsinites invested in getting out the vote will lead to a state supreme court that is steadfastly committed to defending our civil rights and civil liberties. In our enduring commitment to defending democracy, I’m inspired by the tireless effort, dedication, and determined spirit exhibited by so many people across Wisconsin during this critical race.

We celebrate Pride this year in defiance of the almost 500 anti-LGBTQ bills pending or passed in state legislatures around the country. Unsurprisingly, these attacks are turning to the criminal legal system to enforce homophobia and transphobia:

• Bills that would criminalize health care providers and families of trans children for providing necessary and life-saving gender affirming care.
• Bills that would criminalize drag performances.

Queer people have always been over-criminalized and over-incarcerated. This is especially true for Black trans women and other trans women of color. According to the Sentencing Project, LGBTQ adults are incarcerated at three times the rate of the general population. Among trans people, 1 in 6 report being incarcerated at any point in their lives — and nearly half of those are Black trans people.

LGBTQ people live in a social reality that makes their lives much more precarious. For example, LGBTQ people are more likely to experience discrimination in housing and employment, meaning they are more likely to experience poverty and homelessness. Because our nation criminalizes people for poverty, LGBTQ people are more likely to be arrested and get trapped in the criminal legal system.

Governments criminalize queer people’s mere existence — and Black trans women and trans women of color are especially vulnerable. Police use laws criminalizing sex work to target trans women of color for “walking while trans.” For example, The New York Times reported in 2016, police used the extremely broad “anti-loitering” law to profile trans women of color as sex workers, including based on their appearance: they were “arrested while wearing short dresses or high heels or tight pants and, in one bizarre instance, that well-known symbol of sexual seduction: a black pea coat.” The law was repealed in 2021.

A relic of the moral panic around the AIDS epidemic, the majority of states still criminalize people living with HIV. These laws are based on discrimination, pure and simple, not on any valid public health rationale.

Ending mass incarceration and over criminalization must be, and has always been, a central part of the movement for LGBTQ liberation. Indeed, what we celebrate at Pride is an uprising against police violence and harassment, where queer and trans people asserted their right to live freely.

Credit: Eric O. Ledermann / Shutterstock

Because the criminal legal system is a tool for oppressing and controlling Black people, people of color, low-income people of all races, and queer and trans people — our shared freedom lies in significantly reducing the footprint of mass incarceration while investing in the resources our communities need to thrive and to be safe.

At the front end, that must mean supporting bail reform and pretrial release. On any given day in the United States, 427,000 people are incarcerated in our more than 3,000 jails despite not having been convicted of a crime. Many of these people are inside because they can’t afford their freedom. And, as a number of our lawsuits have shown, wealth-based pretrial detention is not only contrary to safety and justice, it is unconstitutional.

Even a few days in pretrial detention can have devastating impacts on a person, depriving them of their safety and stability. People in pretrial detention often lose their jobs, housing, or custody of their kids. They are separated from their families and community support networks — who scramble to figure out childcare and come up with the money to bail out their loved one. And conditions in jails are almost universally abysmal.

For LGBTQ people, pretrial detention carries additional risks. LGBTQ people often are held in solitary confinement to separate them from the general population “for their safety” — even though solitary confinement, even for short periods of time, has profound and irreversible psychological and physical effects.

Trans people generally do not have a choice about whether they’d feel safer in a men’s or women’s jail, do not receive access to gender-affirming health care or clothing, and face greater risk of violence, including sexual violence, from other people in the jail and jail staff.

The tragic and preventable death of Layleen Polanco is a case in point. Ms. Polanco was an Afro-Latina trans woman who could not afford $500 in bail. She died in solitary confinement at Rikers Island Jail in May 2019.

A report from the city agency with oversight of the jail found the Department of Corrections’ policy not to house transgender women with cisgender women contributed to the decision to put Ms. Polanco in solitary — even though she had epilepsy, a serious medical condition that should have exempted her from isolation. Her death was determined to be the result of medical complications due to epilepsy.

Bail funds like the LGBTQ Freedom Fund and SONG’s Black Mamas Bail Out Action center the intersectional experience of low-income, Black LGBTQ people and bail them out.

Jurisdictions that have adopted bail reform — whether through legislation or because of legal action — have seen significant positive impacts on safety and justice. A recent study of 11 jurisdictions with bail reform found eliminating cash bail had significant positive impacts for individuals, families and communities, in terms of relieving the financial burden and keeping families and communities intact. Those studies found crime and bail reform are not strongly linked — despite baseless fearmongering to the contrary.

The enormous efforts hostile state legislators and elected officials are taking to harm queer and trans people and pursue failed punitive policies only offer us fear and a lack of imagination, love, or empathy. If we want justice and safety for all of us, we need to reject punishment — and reject those who offer us punishment and call it safety.

Instead, we can demand investments in communities of abundance, where everyone has what they need to thrive: affordable housing, economic opportunity, health care access, well-resourced and affirming schools, and freedom from incarceration and violence.

Queer and trans communities offer us an expansive vision of love, safety, and justice. It is one where the streets are safe for all of us, no matter who we are or what we look like. It is one where we take care of each other. That is the world we want to live in, and that world is within reach.

The shared revenue bill just signed into law in Wisconsin follows a scary trend of state governments undermining the authority and independence of local governments across the country. Not only does this stripping of power silence the voices of the politicians and leaders closest to the communities most impacted by local government, but these attacks have also almost exclusively targeted cities with high populations of communities of color and queer people.

2023 Wisconsin Act 12 would remove many decision-making powers from Milwaukee’s decision-makers. After the majority white state legislature debated stripping Milwaukee’s leaders of their authority over the past few months, it’s important to note that for the first time in state history, four of the most influential decision-makers in Milwaukee’s City and County government come from Black and Brown communities. More importantly, this bill will force local governments to hand over their power to politicians in Madison, allowing them to impose their will on Milwaukee and override the discretion of elected officials at the city level. All throughout the negotiations, leaders in the state legislature demonstrated that they were trying to hold Milwaukee hostage. They would only give Milwaukee the resources it needed to survive if the city handed power over to them. 

Restrictions on local governments across the country

What’s happening in Milwaukee isn’t unique. Houston, St. Louis, Jackson, and other cities this year have either had their local authority stripped or attacked by their state legislature in 2023. The Texas legislature recently passed a bill preventing cities and counties from passing or enforcing any local policy that exceeds the minimum requirements set by state laws. Previously under Texas Law, the  “Home Rule Amendment: gave large, diverse cities like Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio the power to self-govern as long as their local laws didn’t conflict with state law. The new bill will undermine the previous local control of Texas’s most diverse cities. More blatantly racist, The Texas Education Agency will also take control of the Houston Independent School District, undemocratically ousting the elected Black, Latinx, and women leaders of the district with a population of nearly 90 percent students of color.

St. Louis, like Houston, had its local control attacked this year when the primarily white Missouri State Legislature attempted to place the St. Louis Police Department under state control. This would’ve removed local communities and elected officials' power to hold their local police department accountable and maintain control of it. 

A similar situation happened in Jackson, Mississippi, the state’s capital city, where Black people make up more than 82% of the population. The Mississippi State Legislature passed a bill to establish a separate court system for parts of Jackson, with judges appointed by the state chief justice and the area under the system’s jurisdiction patrolled by a state-run police force. These attacks on local criminal justice system control are highly undemocratic and racist. Purposefully or not, removing the power of communities and their elected officials in cities that are disproportionately Black and other communities of color is racist. 

Attacks on Milwaukee

State lawmakers from across the state should not have the power to impose their policy views on cities made up of communities of Black and Brown people. Allowing state lawmakers and voters from other districts across the state to influence the local matters of a city they do not live in strips the power of the communities inside the city to govern themselves. 

Why should lawmakers who never set foot in Milwaukee have more influence than local leaders who live, work, raise a family and serve the city daily? Limiting a city’s ability to govern itself suppresses residents' voices and makes political representation at the local level less meaningful. In cities like Milwaukee, this results in silencing Black and Brown residents, whose concerns are often overlooked. Milwaukee is the economic engine of the state of Wisconsin, and it is in everyone’s best interest to protect the stability, autonomy, and growth of the city. Part of that is allowing the communities that know and live in Milwaukee to lead it.