In the spring of 2017, Michael Barfield received a courtesy heads up: As the vice president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida board, he was invited to attend the March 11 launch of national organization's new People Power project in Miami.

The invite came with less than a day's notice, he said. He scrambled to get to South Florida from his home in Sarasota, on the state's Gulf coast.

Jeanne Baker, another state ACLU board member and a leader with its Miami chapter, was likewise caught off guard by this launch taking place "literally in our back yard," she said.

The national ACLU was clear about its intentions — People Power would be its "grassroots army" and an integral part of the "Resistance" to Donald Trump, who had been inaugurated as president just weeks earlier and was seen by People Power's leaders as a threat.

Barfield and Baker were concerned, not just by the snub, but by the direction they saw the ACLU heading. Both had been involved with the organization for decades, drawn to its mission to create a more perfect union beyond one person, party, or side.

To Barfield, the ACLU at its best defended free speech and civil liberties for all, "in a nonpartisan manner, without regard to political ideology," he said.

Barfield, Baker, and other state leaders feared that People Power's leaders and its legion of activists were intent on moving the organization in the exact opposite direction.

Their fears, they said, were confirmed over the following weeks and months. People Power activists involved themselves in local politics, passing themselves off as official ACLU representatives in Florida. They openly promoted and endorsed Democratic politicians, called for Trump's impeachment, and wrote online that it was "HAMMER TIME" for Republicans.

More concerning, Barfield and Baker said, ACLU of Florida staffers also engaged in political and partisan activity — working to elect local Democrats, and promoting issues such as student-debt relief and climate change with no clear civil-liberties connection.

Barfield, Baker, and other ACLU of Florida board members pushed back, butting heads with national leaders and local staffers. They say those attempts to maintain the ACLU's traditional position as a non-partisan advocate for free speech and civil liberties were the reason the national organization removed them from their board this year.

In a lawsuit filed in state court in mid August, the seven ousted board members say the national ACLU had no right to remove them from their seats. While the ACLU of Florida is an affiliate of the national organization, it is also a separate corporate entity with its own bylaws and policies. And its policies state that the only way to remove a board member is by a majority vote of the state board, according to the lawsuit.

The national ACLU doesn't own the ACLU of Florida, Morgan Bentley, a lawyer representing the ousted board members, told National Review, "and they don't have a right anywhere —anywhere — to do what they did."

"If I had a magic wand, I'd say, 'Look, everyone go back to where you were, get back into the right chairs, and have this philosophical and policy fight, and may the best man win,'" he said. "What you can't do is unilaterally oust a separate elected board because you don't agree with them. That would sure make life easy, wouldn't it."

The national ACLU did not respond to phone calls or emailed questions about the lawsuit or the ousted board members' claims about politics and partisanship creeping into the ACLU.

Gaby Guadalupe, a spokeswoman for the ACLU of Florida, declined to answer specific questions from National Review, but instead provided a general statement. The national ACLU office, she said, began investigating the Florida board members after receiving complaints that they had created a hostile work environment and were consumed with dysfunction.

"The ACLU of Florida is an affiliate of the national organization and subject to its policies and national bylaws," Guadalupe wrote. The national office's investigations, she said, "identified conduct by some members of the board of the ACLU of Florida that amounted to a serious violation of national administrative policies, and which threatened substantial, ongoing and irreparable harm to the ACLU affiliate."

She did not provide details of the alleged conduct that threatened harm to the organization.

Barfield and Baker said the national ACLU's investigation process was not fair, and the investigative reports were heavily redacted and filled with inconsistencies and mistakes. The ACLU's process for removing them from the board was akin to a "kangaroo court," they said.

They filed objections with hundreds of pages of exhibits, Baker said. "And yet, when we had our hearing, basically none of our arguments were really given any value at all," she said.

"The star chamber has nothing on how the ACLU national operated," Barfield said.

Enamored of ACLU Values

Barfield, a legal consultant and political independent, said he first got involved with the ACLU of Florida at the chapter level in the early 1990s. He said he started serving on the state board in 2006 in various positions, including as vice president and later as president.

He recalled an early case he worked on as a volunteer in 1990, supporting the right of the Ku Klux Klan to march in Palm Beach — the town had denied their parade permit. Barfield said he was reluctant at first to support the racist group's First Amendment rights, but a state ACLU leader explained the organization's principles to him. "I said, you're right, absolutely," he recalled, agreeing to "fight for their right, in my view, to make fools of themselves as they wore white sheets and marched down Worth Avenue. And we won."

About 30 KKK members and neo-Nazis marched. The crowd jeered. There was no violence.

"It was a great day for the First Amendment," Barfield said. The lesson resonated with him.

Baker said she has been involved with the ACLU in some capacity since the mid 1970s. After serving in the Peace Corps and going to law school, she was looking for a path to help society.

"I became completely enamored of the core values of the ACLU," she said.

She served on state and local ACLU boards and held leadership positions in the Northeast before moving to Florida in 1990 and becoming active with the organization's Miami chapter.

The ACLU, she said, has "been a very major part of my life."

Politically, Baker described herself as a "lifelong, dyed in the wool Democrat" who nevertheless has friends on the right, including colleagues who have supported Trump and his allies.

Baker said she has always compartmentalized her Democratic politics and her ACLU work.

"I have fiercely maintained a separation in my own mind of my partisan allegiance and my civil-liberties allegiance," she said. "I thought that was one of the huge strengths of the ACLU that it kept those matters separate."

People Power Let Loose

Barfield and Baker said they started noticing radical changes within the ACLU after Trump's surprise win in 2016. The ACLU was flooded with money and activist volunteers intent on resisting the new president. Internally, they called it the "Trump bump," Barfield said.

He said the overflowing coffers were likely a "corrupting influence" on the ACLU.

After the Trump's win, the old lines between support for civil liberties for all and partisan warfare began to blur within the ACLU.

The People Power project launch in March 2017 seemed to scream of partisanship. The project was led by Faiz Shakir, a prominent adviser to high-profile Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and an informal adviser to Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign. Shakir staffed People Power with left-wing activists and organizers who had worked with the Sanders campaign. Announcing the project, he vowed to "help organize the mass resistance to President Trump's bankrupt policies." Activists would receive "Resistance Training."

In Florida, the People Power activists started causing headaches for the state board still committed to the ACLU of Florida's traditional non-partisan free-speech and civil-liberties work.

ACLU People Power Facebook post calling for Trump’s impeachment.

A People Power chapter in the St. Petersburg area included Facebook posts urging people to "vote in 2018 to flip the House of Reps to Dem control, so we can IMPEACH!"; calling for Fox News to fire Bill O'Reilly for making a "blatantly racist joke"; organizing a protest against a Republican candidate for office; and chastising five local Republicans for supporting a state crackdown on sanctuary cities. The post accused the Republican lawmakers of "goose-stepping behind Trump and his prosecution of undocumented workers."

"What are we going to do about them?" the ACLU People Power–Pinellas County Facebook post read. "We either change their minds or make damn sure they lose their next election. Which BTW, in November 2018 for all of them. It's HAMMER TIME!"

ACLU People Power Facebook post accusing Florida Republicans of “goose stepping behind Trump.”

A People Power group in Palm Beach publicly opined on how to "STOP Trump & Repubs" in their efforts to roll back the Affordable Care Act. People Power groups in Florida openly raised money for progressive groups and promoted causes not related to civil liberties.

Barfield said at one point, members of a People Power group showed up at the Sarasota sheriff's office saying they were from the ACLU. They wanted the sheriff to back their preferred immigration policy, which wasn't an official policy of the ACLU of Florida. The sheriff called Barfield.

"I walked in. I knew none of these people. And they didn't know me," he said. "They said, 'Who are you?' And I said, 'I'm the vice president of the ACLU of Florida.'"

"These people were being financed, armed, supported, and they were bypassing the chapters completely" Barfield said of the People Power activists.

Baker said that in Miami, People Power activists claiming to represent the local ACLU were meeting with law-enforcement leaders, compromising the local chapter's work.

"They were primed by national, and let loose to do their thing," Baker said. "I had to make a lot of phone calls explaining, 'Well, it's not my chapter. It's a project that national has initiated.'"

The ACLU of Florida board held meetings with national leaders about the partisanship and an effort to merge the People Power groups into the local chapters. They agreed to limit People Power's messaging to ensure it was consistent with the state board's priorities.

But according to the lawsuit, in the following months and years "ACLU National thereafter violated the terms of the [agreement] on multiple occasions," including claiming that the ACLU of Florida had joined a coalition it had not, and touting issues such as broadband access, housing equity, student-debt relief, and climate change as civil liberties and ACLU issues.

As a Democrat, Baker said many of the ideas they were promoting were attractive to her.

"But not as part of the ACLU," she said.

An Intentional Partisan Shift?

While they were struggling to contain the People Power activists, board members were also noticing that ACLU of Florida staffers were increasingly engaging in partisan political activity in violation of the state organization's policies, according to the lawsuit.

Barfield said that trend was even more disturbing than the People Power partisanship.

Some state staffers had joined the People Power groups on Facebook, according to documents obtained by National Review. Some staffers were promoting socioeconomic issues advanced by Democrats that weren't directly aligned with the state organization's mission.

Barfield said that in 2020, some ACLU of Florida staffers pushed the board to engage in electoral advocacy at a candidate level. "Some of us were quite uncomfortable with it," he said. The board was told the point was to gauge where candidates stood on various civil-liberties issues, not to endorse candidates, he said.

But Barfield said a post-mortem of the effort showed that it often was used to increase the name recognition of Democratic candidates and to promote their campaigns. Polling conducted by EMC Research for a state attorney race in Pinellas and Pasco counties, for example, recommended that, if the ACLU of Florida chose to engage in the race, that it do "immediate work" to increase the Democratic candidate's name ID "and awareness of her alignment with civil-liberty aligned values to solidify support among Democratic-leaning voters."

"They were conducting a poll with messaging, and in very explicit words saying if we message this way, it will increase the chances of the Democratic candidate winning the election," Barfield said. "And I was livid at that."

Barfield also took issue with a recent "ACLU Southern Collective" memo that called for building up its Southern state affiliates, empowering activists, and leveraging new opportunities to "remake the political landscape" and to "power the progressive future of the South."

Barfield believes the ACLU's shift from being a non-partisan — in theory at least — supporter of free speech and civil liberties for all into being a partisan, left-wing-advocacy group has been driven by Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU national organization.

"It was all Anthony Romero, and in my view it was intentional," he said.

Grave Concerns

The tension between the ACLU of Florida board and its staff increased after the January 2022 resignation of the organization's executive director, according to the lawsuit.

Barfield, whose term as board president was coming to an end that March, stayed on as the chair of the search committee looking for a new leader. In the meantime, a staffer, Amy Turkel, was named interim executive director. In retrospect, that was a mistake, Barfield said, because it led to staffers feeling insulated and not accountable.

As part of the search for a new executive director, Barfield and the search committee offered ACLU of Florida staff an opportunity to interview the finalists and to provide feedback. But, he said, there were ground rules: the ultimate selection would be made by the board, and ACLU of Florida staff were not to tell the committee which candidate they preferred.

Barfield said the staff all signed off.

The search committee, he said, ultimately homed in on two finalists: a "charming" candidate with "great potential" and experience in Florida, but no management experience, who happened to be black, and a candidate from Colorado with a long record of managerial experience, who was white. Both finalists were women.

The committee agreed on the Colorado candidate, Tiffani Lennon. Barfield said the staff liaison on the committee, Kirk Bailey, signed off on the recommendation. But days later, in August 2022, Bailey sent Barfield an email: there was a "strong feeling of disappointment among the staff, particularly our staff of color and directly-impacted individuals," he wrote.

According to Bailey's email, staffers were concerned about Lennon's lack of knowledge about Florida and her vision. Worst yet, Lennon had talked about living in an immigrant community and adopting brown children, which led to "grave concerns" among staff that "she exhibited a 'savior complex,'" Bailey's email to Barfield said.

"Overall, the report is giving the impression that the Board will pass over a qualified African-American candidate with Florida background in favor of a candidate who does not understand Florida, have roots here and has not expressed a clear vision for civil rights and civil liberties work in Florida," Bailey wrote. "Many of our staff (particularly our staff of color) expressed sentiments about not feeling valued, validated, heard, or respected in that the staff's preferred candidate has been rejected."

"It was just terrible," Barfield said of Bailey's email and the staff's response to the selection. The recommendation had been made and signed off on, and the time for staff input had closed.

"I reminded him," Barfield said, "that we do not make hiring decision based on race."

Barfield said it was suggested to him by a staff leader that maybe Turkel could continue managing the ACLU of Florida behind the scenes and the black candidate could be hired as external face of the organization. Barfield called it an offensive suggestion.

"This is something that every black female who gets into a position of being considered for a managerial position rails against, that they're a token appointment," he said.

Barfield said it was about two weeks later that the ACLU of Florida staff filed a complaint with the national office claiming the board was dysfunctional and micromanaged their work.

He said the complaint was "rather vague." The board members asked the state staff for details. They asked the national office to encourage the state staff to provide details.

"We got crickets," Barfield said, "radio silence, from both."

As of Friday, the ACLU of Florida’s website no longer lists Lennon as its executive director.

An ACLU Family Reckoning

The national office's ultimate report on the board was "so heavily redacted that it was unintelligible, other than the conclusory statements of we're bad people, we were dysfunctional, and a throw-in at the last minute, that we discriminated against people, women of color," Barfield said.

In her statement to National Review, Guadalupe, the ACLU of Florida spokeswoman, cited one external investigation report that found the board's culture "ranged from unhealthy, to systemically dysfunctional with deep seeded problems, corrosive, hostile and toxic, making it virtually impossible for the existing group to move forward effectively."

She said that during the investigations the board members never complained about the ACLU's political program and never raised concerns about partisan activity.

"The ACLU of Florida and its national office remain committed to upholding the organization's core values and commitments to the nonpartisan defense of civil liberties and free speech," Guadalupe's statement said. "Accordingly, we categorically dispute the veracity of any claims to the contrary and believe these allegations are an effort to mislead the public about the underlying facts within the complaint."

Barfield called the statement "complete and utter bullshit."

In March, the ACLU national office enacted a resolution temporarily removing the seven ACLU of Florida board members. A second resolution in May made their ouster permanent.

The lawsuit by the seven ousted board members seeks to have them restored to their positions.

For Baker, being removed from her position after nearly 50 years of work with various ACLU affiliates was disillusioning and a "tremendous psychological blow," she said.

"I was very disheartened," she said. "I don't know if depressed is the right word, but I was very emotionally deflated, emotionally felt at a loss to understand how this had happened to me."

Barfield said he and his fellow plaintiffs were concerned about airing the ACLU of Florida's dirty laundry, but ultimately they decided that fighting for principle was worth the blowback.

"There needs to be a reckoning within the ACLU family of what we stand for," he said. "Are we going to just slowly merge into becoming another progressive left organization, or are we going to stick to our core issues?"

"I'm willing to fight for that," he added, "and I know that my colleagues are as well."