Black voters in Mississippi deserve full and fair opportunities for representation at the highest level. And the next generation of Black lawyers and civic leaders deserve full and fair opportunities to serve at the highest level. That must include the opportunity to become a justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court. It’s far past time that the Supreme Court districts that Mississippi uses to elect its Supreme Court reflect the diversity of the state’s population, rather than diminishing the voice of Black voters. That’s why the ACLU and ACLU of Mississippi, along with our co-counsel, have filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Black civic leaders challenging Mississippi’s Supreme Court districts.

Mississippi’s population is almost 40 percent Black — a greater proportion than any other state in the nation. Yet in the entire history of Mississippi, there have been a total of only four Black justices on the state’s nine-member Supreme Court. In fact, there has never been more than one Black justice on that court at any given time. The last time a Black justice was elected to the Mississippi Supreme Court in a contested election was in 2004, nearly 20 years ago. The reason for this gross inequality is that Mississippi employs Supreme Court district boundaries that dilute the voting strength of Black Mississippians in state Supreme Court elections. The challenged districts violate the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution. Mississippi must do better.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act makes it illegal for states to draw district lines that water down the voting strength of voters from minority racial groups. That is exactly what Mississippi’s Supreme Court election district lines do. Black voters comprise a majority of the population in certain regions of the state, such as the Mississippi Delta and the state capital of Jackson, but Black voters do not comprise a majority in any of the three Supreme Court districts as currently drawn.

Moreover, voting is heavily polarized on the basis of race across Mississippi. That high degree of polarization means that candidates chosen by Black voters are typically defeated by white bloc voting in the current Supreme Court districts. By splitting Black voters across the three Supreme Court districts in a way that doesn’t allow them to be the majority in any of those districts, the challenged scheme provides Black voters with little opportunity (and certainly not an equal opportunity) to elect candidates of choice to the state Supreme Court. That is classic vote dilution.

Additionally, Mississippi’s Supreme Court districts are unconstitutional. These districts have not been changed since 1987 — before some of the plaintiffs in our case were even born. Indeed, they are not very different from districts used by Mississippi in the 1930s and 1940s during the era of Jim Crow. Also, Mississippi does not appear to have ever precleared the districts (that is, obtained approval from the Department of Justice or a federal court) as it was required to do under the Voting Rights Act. It passed them even though Black lawmakers strongly objected. The state and its policymakers cannot help but see the discriminatory, vote dilutive effects of those districts. These and other unusual circumstances show that racial discrimination was and is a motivating factor in the state’s persistent maintenance of these vote dilutive districts. Such improper motivations violate the Constitution.

Thankfully, the remedy to these violations of law is simple: Draw new district lines for the first time since 1987. In fact, only modest changes to the district lines for the state’s Supreme Court districts would be sufficient to make Supreme Court District 1 majority-Black and to provide Black voters with the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. This change would also keep the state’s overall districting scheme for Supreme Court elections intact, while also ensuring that those elections comply with federal law and allow Black Mississippians an opportunity to elect candidates of choice.

Black Mississippians should not have to participate in critical elections on a grossly uneven playing field. That is wrong and erodes the trust so many people have in our democracy and our public institutions. In contrast, fair representation and multi-racial democracy shore up the integrity of our institutions and benefit all Mississippians.

This case is about Mississippi’s future — about whether the next generation of Black lawyers and civic leaders in Mississippi will have fully equal opportunities to obtain representation and to serve at the highest level, including as a justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court. Mississippi should redraw its Supreme Court district lines now. Federal law requires nothing less.

This week the Supreme Court will hear a case that could entrench the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which forces people seeking asylum to await their court dates in dangerous conditions in Mexico. The Remain in Mexico Policy, misleadingly dubbed the “Migrant Protection Protocols” created a humanitarian disaster at the border and has been the subject of ACLU lawsuits since it was first implemented in 2019.

President Biden made a campaign promise to end Remain in Mexico, recognizing the grave harm it subjects people seeking asylum to. Biden followed through on his promise and terminated the policy. But Texas and Missouri sued, and a federal Texas district court judge ordered the federal government to restart the program.

The Biden administration has tried multiple times to end the policy, including by asking the U.S. Supreme Court to block the order on an emergency basis – a move the ACLU supported in an amicus brief – but the Court declined to do so. The Biden administration has been forced to resume the policy while litigation continues.

Biden v. Trump has now made its way up to the Supreme Court to be heard on the merits. Here is what’s at stake.

The lower court decision under review by the Supreme Court would effectively keep the Trump administration’s shameful Remain in Mexico policy in place indefinitely, even though the policy did not exist under multiple administrations (including the Trump Administration before 2019).

This decision is contrary to a fundamental principle of a democracy: A new administration, selected by the people, should be empowered to reject its predecessor’s policies and adopt those it believes are in the public interest. The government is, of course, constrained by statutes, including the requirement to provide reasoning for its policy decisions. But by upending the normal rules that govern agency decisions and unjustifiably locking in Trump’s policy, the lower court overstepped its role as a neutral enforcer of the rules.

The anti-democratic implications of that holding are deeply troubling, and the Supreme Court must reject it.

In ordering the Biden administration to resume the Remain in Mexico policy, the lower courts held that immigration law limits the federal government to only two options when people seek asylum at the border: detain them or forcibly return them to Mexico before their hearing. Since the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lacks capacity to detain all people seeking asylum, the judge reasoned that the only choice would be to send them to Mexico while their cases proceed.

This is a patently false choice. Congress has stipulated that DHS has broad power to avoid unnecessarily detaining people and to release people to their networks of care while their immigration cases proceed. In fact, all presidential administrations have exercised broad discretion to release people rather than restricting DHS to two binary choices – including the Trump administration itself.

Most importantly, at stake is whether the U.S. will continue to be a country that allows people fleeing persecution to seek safety inside its borders. Remain in Mexico, and other related policies, like Title 42, which has shut down access to asylum at the southern border for over two years under the guise of public health, are attempts to dismantle longstanding U.S. asylum policy that uphold our commitment to international human rights norms.

During the two years the policy was in effect under Trump, Human Rights First documented over 1,540 reported cases of kidnappings, murder, torture, rape, and other forms of violence against asylum seekers returned to Mexico. U.S. and Mexican authorities have failed to establish adequate housing options or to provide access to medical care and work, leaving people vulnerable to transnational cartels who prey on migrants. Black and LGBTQ+ asylum seekers returned to Mexico have faced particularly severe risks.

If the Supreme Court prevents the Biden administration from ending Remain in Mexico, it will enshrine a new legacy for the United States – a legacy of turning its back on international commitments and sending people directly into harm’s way.

On-duty public-school staff may not pray with students. Period. That’s been the law under the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause for more than half a century. Even the Trump administration—hardly a bastion of church-state separation—agreed, proclaiming in its school-prayer guidance that “school employees are prohibited by the First Amendment from encouraging or discouraging prayer, and from actively participating in such activity with students.” But that could soon change if the Supreme Court rules in favor of a public-school football coach who demanded the right to lead his players in prayer at the 50-yard-line at the end of each game.

This morning, the court is hearing oral arguments in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, in which Joseph Kennedy, a former high school football coach, claims that school officials in Bremerton, Washington violated his religious-exercise and free-speech rights by placing him on administrative leave for repeatedly leading on-field prayers with his team at the close of each football game.

The coach portrays the case as involving his right to personal, silent prayer. But as a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judge pointed out in ruling against the coach, Kennedy and his attorneys have repeatedly misrepresented the facts of the case, spinning a “false” and “deceitful narrative.” In truth, the school offered — and Kennedy rejected — several religious accommodations that would have allowed him to engage in private, post-game prayer. Instead, he insisted on continuing his unconstitutional practice of praying with students.

The Supreme Court has long recognized that the separation of religion and government is especially important in our public schools, which must equally serve students of all faiths, and those of none. When public-school officials demonstrably favor some faiths over others or promote religious doctrine, it sends a message of exclusion to students who don’t follow the preferred faith. And students are especially vulnerable to coercion, both subtle and overt, when subjected to school-sponsored prayer or other official religious exercise.

A football coach at a Bremerton School District public high school leads student athletes in a prayer following a football game. A red arrow is juxtaposed on the image pointing to the coach.

A football coach at a Bremerton School District public high school leads student athletes in a prayer following a football game. A red arrow is juxtaposed on the image pointing to the coach.

Indeed, several of Coach Kennedy’s players participated in his prayers only because they felt pressured to do so. As one amicus brief — filed on behalf of former professional football players and former college athletes — explains, coaches wield great power and influence over their athletes. Many players are naturally inclined to view their coaches as authority figures and to obey their explicit and implicit commands. Athletes understandably seek the approval of their coaches, who control nearly all aspects of their participation and playing time. For some high school students, coaches may be instrumental in their ability to obtain collegiate athletic scholarships. Under the gaze of their coaches, fellow team members, the audience, and the media who gathered to cover Kennedy’s highly publicized prayer, few students would feel comfortable opting out of the post-game prayer huddle.

The ACLU strongly supports the free exercise of religion and free speech. Earlier this year, for example, we filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, arguing that the City of Boston unconstitutionally denied a Christian group’s request to fly, for a single hour, a flag featuring a cross on a city flagpole. The city denied the request even though it had intentionally opened up the flagpole as a public forum and consistently allowed dozens of other groups to temporarily raise their flags. The flag in that case, we explained, was private speech and would be understood as such by the community, and therefore had to be accommodated.

Not so in Bremerton. Kennedy conceded that he delivered his prayers while he was on the job, explaining to the press that the prayers were, in his view, “helping these kids be better people.” Even if the school disclaims any endorsement, a student who witnesses the coach lead his team in prayer would still perceive it as bearing the school’s stamp of approval. And anyone familiar with the coach-athlete relationship would immediately understand just how coercive that practice is. In barring him from praying with students in this setting, while offering him many ways to pray privately, school officials did only what was required of them by the First Amendment: They protected students’ religious freedom by shielding them from school-sponsored religious exercise. Now, it’s the Supreme Court’s turn to do the same.