Anthony D. Romero is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the nation’s premier defender of civil liberties. Throughout his tenure, the ACLU has pursued aggressive litigation and advocacy challenging the greatest injustices of our time, including: high-profile litigation and lobbying efforts to win the freedom to marry for same-sex couples; a nationwide campaign to reduce the prisons and jail populations by 50 percent and combat racial disparities within the criminal justice system; and an innovative legal challenge to the patents held by a private company on the human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer. Under Romero’s direction, the ACLU has filed 400 legal actions against the Trump administration and has been on the winning side of landmark decisions at the Supreme Court, such as with cases that extended anti-discrimination protections to transgender employees and blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to distort the U.S. Census by adding an unconstitutional citizenship question. Romero is the ACLU’s sixth executive director and the first Latino and openly gay man to serve in that capacity.

Photo credit: Quinn Russell Brown

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