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“Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s efforts to unnecessarily obstruct and delay reform in Baltimore make clear that he intends to stand as an obstacle to policing reform across the country,” said Kristen Clarke, the president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, echoed Ifill, and said the decree “may serve as a model of reform for other similarly-situated police departments across the country. Today’s decision is a victory for the people of Baltimore who have been subject to unconstitutional policing practices, including excessive force, for far too long.”

The U.S. Supreme Court is the firewall on which a democratic society depends. By this I mean that we look to the high court to protect us from any excesses that may emanate from the elected branches of government.
That’s why the Senate’s vote today to pave the way for a simple majority vote on President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the position of Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court is most unfortunate.

“This case makes clear that voting discrimination remains rampant across the state of Texas,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which is helping represent the plaintiffs. “The courts at issue render decisions that affect all Texans, but the current method of election prevents minority voters from electing candidates of their choice to these important tribunals.”

Diane Glauber, co-director for fair housing and community development at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, says that her organization has worked closely with HUD over the last decade, especially in implementing the new Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing tool. The Lawyers’ Committee is concerned with how budget cuts at HUD will affect communities of color, but also about how the U.S. Department of Justice will enforce the Fair Housing Act—and its contributions to CarsonWatch will likely fall along those vectors.
“We have lots of friends there [at HUD]. We think they’ve done some really good work,” Glauber says. “We by no means look at HUD as an adversarial relationship. We want to make sure that people are paying attention to what’s going on and how Carson and certainly the new administration might stop some of the enormous gains that we’ve seen over the last few years with fair housing and community development.”

Kristen Clarke, who leads the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which has fought for greater federal oversight of troubled police departments, said the request for a delay in the Baltimore case was deeply troubling.
“Attorney General Jeff Sessions is undermining and obstructing extensive efforts that have been made to promote policing reform in a small set of the most broken police departments in our country,” she said.

Natasha Quiroga, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, said the landmark 1982 Plyler v. Doe case entitles every child to a public education, regardless of immigration status.

“Attorney General Jeff Sessions seeks to create a police state in which local and state law enforcement are acting at the behest of the federal government to round up immigrants in communities across the country,” said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Cities seeking to comply with the constitution and protect immigrant communities should be able to do so without heavy-handed threats from the federal government.”

Anyone who witnesses or experiences harassment on the subway can report it to the city’s human rights commission by calling (718) 722-3131. Communities Against Hate, a partnership of 11 civil rights organizations, operates a hotline at 844-9-NO-HATE (844-966-4283), where people who have been harassed can get information about resources like legal services and counseling. Hollaback and other organizations offer bystander intervention training to help people learn what to do if they see someone being harassed.

But is it Trump’s fault? Things such as the president’s desired travel ban for people from certain Muslim countries, or his abandonment of earlier executive branch language protecting transgender students, contributes to “a toxic environment” that gives license to hate and harassment, says Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Right Under Law, a member group of Communities Against Hate. “We have seen xenophobia and hate truly fester.”
Merely prosecuting the infractions is not enough, Clarke says, since it doesn’t get to the root of the problem and could cause even more mutual suspicion. “We need to have a more comprehensive approach here, one that starts with community education,” she says. Education, anti-hate activists say, that needs to start at the very, very top.