Civil Rights Archives

November 13, 2025 In Cases

Deep Dive: Trump’s Ten Search Terms to Cancel American Farmers

In 2025, USDA abandoned farmers by recklessly terminating millions of dollars in grants, all to fall in line with the Trump administration’s crusade against DEI, environmental justice, and climate action. We suspected that the “process” for finding grants the administration found worthy of termination was hardly more than a...

June 5, 2025 In Cases

Stopping Illegal Grant Terminations (Urban Sustainability Directors Network v. USDA)

Trump’s USDA illegally terminated hundreds of grants to organizations across the country that counted on these funds to advance sustainability and support farmers building a fair food system. We’re suing to restore this funding. ...

April 29, 2024 In Cases

Bathroom Breaks for Delivery Drivers (Cross v. Amazon)

Amazon is one of the richest and most powerful companies in the world—yet its policies deprive its delivery drivers of basic labor rights, including the right to bathroom breaks. Under Amazon’s brutal work quotas and elaborate surveillance systems, many drivers resort to urinating in bottles...

January 17, 2023 In Cases

Essential Services for Colorado’s Farmworkers

Everyone should be able to work with dignity and access resources that better their working conditions and lives. However, agribusiness interests have threatened Colorado farmworkers’ right to access essential services where they work. Agricultural workers tend to be isolated and work long hours. Many live in...

August 24, 2021 In Cases

Debt Relief for Farmers of Color

The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of 2021 promised $4 billion in debt relief for farmers and ranchers of color to mitigate the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on a population previously excluded from government resources and support. In response to this attempt to address the...

July 8, 2020 In Cases

Food Chain Workers Alliance v. Tyson Foods Title VI Complaint

A nationwide coalition of organizations that advocate for meat processing workers and allied groups filed an administrative civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Agriculture alleging that in addition to being disastrous for the wellbeing of workers and for public health, two major meat...

November 20, 2019 In Cases

Iowa Ag-Gag II (ALDF v. Reynolds)

Iowa’s second effort to prevent journalists or activists from entering livestock facilities under false pretenses to report on animal abuse was passed and signed into law just two months after U.S. District Judge James Gritzner ruled that Iowa’s law passed in 2012 violated the First...

November 19, 2019 In Cases

Iowa Ag-Gag I (ALDF v. Reynolds)

FarmSTAND, formerly the Food Project at Public Justice, serves as co-counsel in a challenge to Iowa’s first Ag-Gag law, which criminalizes undercover investigations at factory farms and slaughterhouses. This statute made it a crime to gain access to, or employment at, such a facility under...

May 30, 2019 In Cases

Indiana Right to Farm

Like many other states, Indiana has a “Right-to-Farm” statute, meant to codify the coming to the nuisance doctrine—so city-dwellers cannot move to rural lands and demand farms change their operations. Corporate agribusiness has, however, been pushing efforts to expand the scope of these laws to...

May 29, 2019 In Cases

Idaho Ag-Gag

In recent years, more and more state legislatures have – at the urging of lobbyists representing factory farm operations and industrial food producers – taken up “Ag Gag” laws that shroud mega-farms in secrecy and make holding them accountable for pollution, unsafe working conditions and...

Cases