Court Cases

Beginning in the summer of 2025, DOJ sent a series of escalating letters to Kentucky election officials demanding the state's complete, unredacted voter registration list. When Kentucky declined to hand over voters' most sensitive personal data, DOJ filed suit in February 2026 — one of at least 29 nearly identical cases brought against states with officials who refused to comply. Extensive public reporting and sworn court filings reveal that the requested data is not simply intended for routine election law enforcement. Rather, officials have acknowledged plans to run the data through cross-agency matching systems to identify alleged noncitizens on state voter rolls. Those efforts have already been shown to produce significant numbers of false positives, incorrectly flagging U.S. citizens as ineligible. The initiative has been shaped in part by outside "election integrity" activists who previously used similar techniques to mount mass voter challenges before the 2024 election, all of which were ultimately rejected. The League of Women Voters of Kentucky, the New Americans Initiative, and two individual Kentucky voters — both naturalized citizens who fear their registrations could be wrongly targeted — have moved to intervene as defendants to safeguard voter privacy and ensure that the voices of affected Kentucky voters are heard in court.

Between January 20th and January 29th, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Orders 14168, 14185, and 14190, which ban topics such as “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology” from federally funded K-12 education. Since then, the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA), which provides pre-kindergarten, elementary, and secondary education to approximately 67,000 dependents of military personnel around the world, has removed books, parts of curriculums, and cultural awareness celebrations from school grounds. DoDEA has placed hundreds of school library books in “quarantine,” reviewing them for permanent removal. These books include award-winning titles such as To Kill A Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, The Kite Runner, A Queer History of the United States, as well as hundreds of other books about gender, class, and race. Additionally, DoDEA educators have been instructed to alter their curriculums to remove mentions of gender, race, immigration, and various facets of developmental health. The ACLU is representing a group of DoDEA students ranging in grades from pre-kindergarten to high school whose educational opportunities have been limited by these executive orders. The lawsuit asserts that President Trump’s Executive Orders infringe on the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights and seeks the reinstatement of removed books and curricula.

The ACLU of Kentucky, along with pro bono co-counsel Covington & Burling, filed a brief on Friday January 17, 2025, appealing the lower court’s dismissal of their clients’ claims. The brief argues Kentucky’s one-year statute of limitations is too short to be consistent with the federal principles underlying Section 1983. In May 2020, the Wright family was together in their home when six Louisville Metro Police Department (“LMPD”) officers demanded they exit, ransacked their home, held them at gunpoint, and took them into custody based on a faulty search warrant. The Wrights filed suit, in a timely manner, for the physical and mental trauma resulting from this unlawful execution of the warrant under the federal remedy purposely designed to hold state actors accountable for such civil rights violations. The Wright family meanwhile attempted to uncover the names of the officers who invaded their home and amend their complaint to list them as defendants. But despite eventually doing so, the district court dismissed the Wrights’ amended complaint based on expiration of the one-year limitations period. The statute of limitations in Kentucky is tied with Tennessee and Puerto Rico for the shortest in the nation. The people of Kentucky are entitled to defend their civil rights in court, and should be afforded a reasonable amount of time to do so.

After initially refusing to provide her with care, the Department of Corrections eventually acknowledged Ms. Marcum’s diagnosis in 2016 and recognized the medical necessity of prescribing Hormone Therapy for her condition. She now brings the suit on behalf of herself and a class of current and future individuals in the Kentucky Department of Corrections’ custody because she, and sixty-six other current prisoners are being, or will soon be denied access to that gender affirming care as a result of Senate Bill 2, which passed the General Assembly in 2025.

The killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked demonstrations advocating for the elimination of racist and violent policing across all 50 states.

The ACLU of Kentucky and cooperating counsel Tom Pugh, Pugh & Roach, are representing two journalists who were arrested while covering a protest in Northern Kentucky at the Roebling Bridge.

Summary The ACLU of Kentucky and cooperating counsel Tom Pugh, Pugh & Roach, are representing two journalists who were arrested while covering a protest in Northern Kentucky at the Roebling Bridge.

A Kentuckian filed a lawsuit in Jefferson County Circuit Court challenging two of the Commonwealth’s abortion bans on behalf of herself and all pregnant Kentuckians seeking an abortion.

A Kentuckian filed a lawsuit in Jefferson County Circuit Court challenging two of the Commonwealth’s abortion bans on behalf of herself and all pregnant Kentuckians seeking an abortion.