News & Commentary written by Ari Rosmarin

Ari Rosmarin is the Senior Director of Program and Strategy in the ACLU’s Affiliate Support and Nationwide Initiatives Department (ASNI), where he leads a team focused on building program capacity and organizational power to win across the ACLU’s nationwide network of 54 affiliates.

Ari has built and managed successful campaigns from the local to nationwide levels, and has advocated on a wide range of civil rights and liberties issues, including policing, immigrants’ rights, LGBTQ+ rights, drug policy, privacy, national security and surveillance, free speech, students’ rights, mass incarceration, and voting rights.

Ari began his ACLU journey in 2004 as an organizer with the New York Civil Liberties Union, serving in escalating organizing and advocacy roles for six years there, including on campaigns to combat post-9/11 civil liberties abuses, pass immigration reform, and to challenge discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices. After law school, he joined the ACLU of New Jersey in 2013 as its first Policy Director and built the affiliate’s lobbying, organizing, and electoral programs, including launching the New Jersey United for Marijuana Reform statewide campaign to decriminalize and regulate marijuana, and Newark Communities for Accountable Policing, which successfully campaigned to establish one of the nation’s strongest civilian complaint review boards in Newark, NJ.

He joined the national office of the ACLU in 2017 as the Deputy Director of the ACLU’s nationwide Campaign for Smart Justice in its National Political Advocacy Department, where he helped lead and design the ACLU’s work across the country to cut mass incarceration, challenge racism in the criminal legal system, and invest in the leadership of people directly impacted by incarceration. In that role, he led the team that designed and executed the ACLU’s largest ever policy research effort—the 50-State Blueprints Project, publishing 52 individual state-specific reports with plans shrink the number of people in prison and jail, and drive down racial disparities in incarceration.

An expert on building impactful programs, he joined the ASNI Program and Strategy Team (PST) as Deputy Director in 2020 and became Senior Director in 2022. Under his leadership, PST has driven forward innovative organizational approaches to integrated advocacy and campaigning, organizing, communications, and legal programs, and launched dynamic multi-state civil liberties initiatives, including the Southern Voting Project within the ACLU’s Southern Collective, the Border Humanity Project, and the 2024 Presidential Battlegrounds Initiative. He also helped lead and coordinate the ACLU’s nationwide civil liberties response to the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the COVID-19 Strategic Response Team.

Ari has authored various reports, and has been quoted on civil rights and liberties issues in national and regional media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, NPR, Politico, Vanity Fair, Democracy Now!, Univision, and others.

Ari has a B.A. in History from Columbia University and a J.D. from Brooklyn Law School. He lives in Los Angeles with his Zoom-famous pup, Lil’ Penny the Dog.