5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
October, 20 2021, 02:14pm EDT
Contact:
Lacy Crawford, lcrawford@lawyerscommittee.org
Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Hosts 21th Annual Gala to Spotlight Continued Fight for Racial Justice
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law will host its
WASHINGTON
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law will host its 21st annual A. Leon Higginbotham Leadership Awards Gala on Wednesday, October 20, 2021 at 5 pm ET. This event highlights the multifaceted work of the Lawyers' Committee to advance racial justice while celebrating the individuals in the community who fight for equality, justice and the dignity of all people.
The prestigious Higginbotham Gala was established in 2000 in honor of its namesake, the late Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.--a pioneering civil rights advocate, author, and federal appeals court judge. Past honorees at the Gala include scholar and author Nikole Hannah Jones, civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and former Attorney General Eric Holder.
This year's Gala theme, "Making The Promises of Democracy Real," reflects the Lawyers' Committee's efforts in the past year to advance opportunity, prosperity, and justice by advocating for fair housing and economic security amid the global pandemic, leading the fight for meaningful police accountability, and protecting voting rights by challenging a wave of voter suppression bills, misinformation, and violent attacks following record voter turnout in the 2020 election .
"Our mission at the Lawyers' Committee is to help ensure that Black people and other communities of color have the voice, opportunity, and power to make the promises of our democracy real," said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "Our gala, named after Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, a giant in the civil rights community upon whose shoulders we stand, proudly recognizes exceptional leaders who work tirelessly to advance racial justice, moving our country to a fuller, fairer and freer version of democracy."
The Lawyers' Committee will honor five individuals whose actions have helped make our country a fairer place over the past year. The honorees include:
Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett, will receive the Distinguished Civil Rights Advocate Award for her extraordinary work advocating for legislation promoting rural development in infrastructure, and community and economic development for underserved communities in the Virgin Islands. Congresswoman Plaskett, represents the U.S. Virgin Islands, and is the first member of Congress representing a U.S. Territory to serve on the exclusive House Committee on Ways and Means, and only the fourth African American woman to do so.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, will receive the Legacy of Justice Award for his commitment to and legacy of advancing racial justice and civil rights on behalf of underserved communities. Attorney General Ellison is the first African-American and Muslim representative of Minnesota and served as a Member of Congress for over a decade. After taking over the prosecution of Derek Chauvin, Attorney General Ellison and his team successfully secured a rare conviction of a police officer.
Big Ten Conference Commissioner Kevin Warren will receive the Racial Justice Trailblazer Award. He is the first African American to lead the Big Ten Conference. Commissioner Warren created the Big Ten Conference Anti-Hate and Anti-Racism Coalition after the killing of George Floyd, which unites student-athletes, coaches, and staff to combat racism and hate around the world. Under Commissioner Warren's visionary leadership, the Big Ten Conference also partnered with the Lawyers Committee to launch a voter registration initiative to encourage student-athletes to participate in the electoral process.
Renee Montgomery, a two-time WNBA champion and Vice President and part-owner of the Atlanta Dream, will receive the Beacon of Justice Award. Renee has worked tirelessly to promote racial justice, advocate for police reform and accountability, and champion voting rights for communities of color and the disenfranchised.
Brian Moynihan, Chairman of the Board and CEO of Bank of America, will receive the 2021 A. Leon Higginbotham Leadership Award for his dedication to creating opportunity for all, both inside the company and throughout the communities it serves. Brian has led Bank of America's Global Diversity and Inclusion Council for more than a decade and, during his tenure as CEO, Bank of America has built a more diverse and inclusive workplace at every level of the company. Bank of America recently accelerated its longstanding work to drive racial equality and economic opportunity in its communities with a $1.25 billion, 5-year commitment. To date, Bank of America has funded more than $400 million of this commitment, with a focus on jobs and reskilling, support for small businesses, health and healthcare and affordable housing.
Register and support the movement for racial justice at www.lawyerscommittee.org/gala.
The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, was formed in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy to activate lawyers in the fight against racial discrimination. Now in its 58th year, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law maintains one of the most comprehensive racial justice programs of any organization in the country. The principal mission of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law is to secure, through the rule of law, equal justice for all, particularly in the areas of voting rights, criminal justice, fair housing and community development, economic justice, educational opportunities, and hate crimes.
The Lawyers' Committee is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, formed in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy to enlist the private bar's leadership and resources in combating racial discrimination and the resulting inequality of opportunity - work that continues to be vital today.
(202) 662-8600LATEST NEWS
Trump Deportees 'Sent to a Black Hole' of Forced Disappearance in El Salvador
“The desperation of families to find disappeared loved ones evokes the darkest days of dictatorships in Latin America,” said one human rights campaigner.
Mar 16, 2026
The administration of right-wing Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele is arbitrarily detaining and forcibly disappearing Salvadorans deported from the United States, a leading rights group said Monday.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump's mass deportation of Salvadorans, Venezuelans, and others that, of the 9,000 Salvadorans expelled from the US since the beginning of last year, "only 10.5% had a conviction in the United States for a violent or potentially violent crime."
Yet according to HRW, these deportees—most of whom were illegally expelled without the requisite due process—were "immediately detained in El Salvador" upon arrival and "have not been allowed to communicate with their relatives or lawyers."
"None of the relatives or lawyers have had any indication from the authorities that the men have been brought before a judge since their arrival," HRW said. "Some have not been informed of where their loved ones are held, or why. In five cases, relatives learned about deportees’ whereabouts only though litigation at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR)."
HRW Americas director Juanita Goebertus said that "whatever the criminal history of these Salvadoran men, they have a right to due process, to be taken before a judge, and their relatives are entitled to know where they are being held and why."
"Deportation cannot mean enforced disappearance," Goebertus added.
Many of the deportees have been sent to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in Tecoluca in central El Salvador. HRW and others have documented a range of serious human rights abuses committed by staff at the megaprison, including torture, sexual violence, and brutal beatings.
The Salvadoran investigative journalism outlet El Faro—which, along with its staff, has been the target of sweeping government persecution—last year published a report on CECOT, citing one former prisoner who said that inmates are "committing suicide out of desperation."
While the Trump administration has alleged that many of those expelled are members of MS-13, a street gang founded in the 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles, neither US nor Salvadoran authorities have provided much evidence to substantiate claims regarding many of the deportees.
At least one deported Salvadoran—longtime Maryland resident Kilmar Ábrego García—was wrongfully expelled due to what the Trump administration called an "administrative error." Abrego García said he was tortured at CECOT before a US federal judge ordered his release last December.
For its new report, HRW interviewed relatives of many of the Salvadoran deportees, one of whose sisters said she "kept calling the migrant shelter in El Salvador, but they never gave me any information."
"So I filed a complaint with the [Salvadoran] Human Rights Ombudsperson’s Office,” she said. “An official told me that my brother was deported on March 15 [but] because of the state of emergency they would not provide any information.”
The mother of another Salvadoran deportee told HRW that she struggled to find legal representation for her son.
“I started looking for lawyers in El Salvador, but several told me they could not take those cases because they feared government reprisals,” she said.
“I called several institutions, the attorney general’s office, the Ombudsperson’s Office, a migrant shelter, and government ministries in El Salvador, but they gave me no information," the woman added. "At the Ombudsperson’s Office, they told me that due to the state of emergency, they were not obligated to provide me with information. I feel abandoned.”
HRW Americas Program deputy director Juan Pappier told The Washington Post Sunday that “these people have been sent to a black hole, a court system with no due process."
Goebertus echoed Pappier's language, saying Monday: “The desperation of families to find disappeared loved ones evokes the darkest days of dictatorships in Latin America. The United States should stop casting people into the black hole of El Salvador’s prison system.”
While credited for dramatically reducing crime in what was not too long ago the world's murder capital, the state of emergency—officially the State of Exception—declared by Bukele in 2022 has been denounced by human rights defenders. It purportedly targets criminals, but others—including journalists, lawyers, human rights advocates, environmental activists, nonprofit workers, political critics, clergy, labor organizers, and community leaders—have been persecuted under the decree.
Originally authorized for 30 days, Bukele has repeatedly extended the State of Exception, fueling accusations of authoritarianism.
HRW noted Monday that Bukele's government has used the emergency decree "to suspend, among others, the rights to be informed promptly of the grounds for arrest, to remain silent, to legal representation, and the requirement to present any detainee before a judge within 72 hours of arrest."
In addition to Salvadorans, hundreds of Venezuelans were sent to CECOT under an agreement between the Trump and Bukele administrations. The US paid millions of dollars to El Salvador to accept the deportees, who Trump claimed—often without evidence—were members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
However, only about 3% of the deported Venezuelans had been convicted of violent criminal offenses in the United States—and the Trump administration knew it, according to Department of Homeland Security records.
Last July, El Salvador released 252 Venezuelans imprisoned at CECOT and sent them to Venezuela in a prisoner swap that saw the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro free 10 US citizens and permanent residents jailed in the South American nation.
Following their repatriation, many of the Venezuelans said they endured torture, sexual assault, severe beatings, and other abuse at CECOT.
Last December, Judge James Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Trump administration broke the law by deporting the Venezuelans without due process.
Last week, the International Group of Experts for the Investigation of Human Rights Violations Under the State of Exception in El Salvador (GIPES)—an independent panel of jurists established in 2024—published a report which found that "the serious human rights violations committed by the government of El Salvador during the state of emergency may indeed constitute crimes against humanity because of the widespread and systematic nature of the attacks, their commission against the civilian population, and their commission as part of a state policy or plan."
International Commission of Jurists general secretary Santiago Canton—a member of the panel—said that “the Bukele model is sustained by the dismantling of the rule of law to systematically violate human rights without institutional restraints."
"In the very short term, it may appear to improve security, but it inevitably weakens the very security it claims to protect," Canton added. "The danger is that this approach is increasingly being promoted across Latin America by authoritarian and unscrupulous political leaders as a solution to crime."
Keep Reading
Show Less
'100% Completely Unsustainable': Billionaire Wealth Manager Issues New Warning About US Inequality
"Nearly 50% of all consumer spending now comes from the top 10% of earners. The bottom 80%? Their share keeps falling."
Mar 16, 2026
Wealth inequality in the US has grown unsustainably large, according to one billionaire wealth manager.
In a Monday social media post, Peter Mallouk, the CEO of wealth management firm Creative Planning, shared a graph from the Financial Times showing that the top 10% of earners in the US now account for nearly half of all consumer spending.
"This is 100% completely unsustainable as a society," Mallouk commented. "Nearly 50% of all consumer spending now comes from the top 10% of earners. The bottom 80%? Their share keeps falling."
Mallouk added that this disparity is "why the economy can look strong in the data while millions of people feel like they're falling behind."
Mallouk's observations about the highest earners accounting for a disproportionate share of consumer spending are in line with what economists have been describing as a "K-shaped" economy in which wealth continues growing for the very wealthiest while the vast majority of the population gets left behind.
A February report from TD Economics economist Ksenia Bushmeneva noted that "the economic divide between America’s households at the top of the income spectrum and everyone else continued to widen last year," as "upper-income households benefited from the still-robust wage growth, strong gains in equity markets, and better access to consumer credit."
Bushmeneva also projected that this divide would only grow in the coming year given that the tax cuts passed by Republicans in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in 2025 are expected to provide outsized benefits to the wealthiest Americans, even as "a reduction in funding to various government programs" such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program "will weigh on low-income households."
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, told Axios in a January interview that the data on US consumer spending patterns shows that "the economy is narrowly perched on the backs of the well-to-do," which he noted leaves it in a vulnerable position should the ultrawealthy pull back on their spending at any time.
Zandi's view of the instability of such an economy was echoed in a February column by Carol Ryan of The Wall Street Journal, who warned about the dangers of relying on the wealthiest to drive economic growth.
Given that the wealth of these Americans is tied up in the stock market, Ryan argued, this "could mean the entire economy pays a steep price in the next market correction," as consumer spending would then likely turn negative.
While the richest Americans continue getting wealthier, the US labor market has entered a downturn, as the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the American economy lost 92,000 jobs, and overall the economy has posted a net loss of 19,000 jobs since May 2025.
Keep Reading
Show Less
'Bone-Chilling': Gamblers ‘Vowing to Kill’ Journalist Unless He Changes Iran War Report to Help Them Win Polymarket Bet
“After you make us lose $900,000, we will invest no less than that to finish you.”
Mar 16, 2026
An Israeli journalist said he's received death threats from gamblers demanding he change an accurate report about an Iranian missile strike in order to help them win a bet on the prediction app Polymarket.
On Monday, Emanuel Fabian, a military correspondent for The Times of Israel, wrote that he was confused when he suddenly received several requests to correct a report on March 10 that an Iranian missile had struck Israeli territory.
Fabian said he'd based his report on information from "rescue services" as well as "footage that emerged showing the massive explosion caused by the missile’s warhead." No injuries were reported from the impact, as the missile struck an empty area outside the city of Beit Shemesh, near Jerusalem.
"What I thought was a seemingly minor incident during the war has turned into days of harassment and death threats against me," Fabian said.
Hours after posting the report to the paper's live blog, Fabian said he received an email, from a user identifying as Aviv, claiming that what had hit the ground was not a missile, but an interceptor fragment.
Fabian contended military sources had confirmed it was a missile and that the impact was far too large to have been from only an interceptor.
He then received another email from a user named Daniel with the exact same gripe. Daniel described having an "urgent request" for the report to be changed and told Fabian that by changing it, "you would be helping me, many others, and, of course, the state of Israel."
Daniel sent Fabian several more emails over the next couple of days demanding a correction, and the tone continued to grow more urgent.
"I ask again, if you could handle this as soon as possible, it would help us a lot," Daniel said on Thursday. "It’s really important, if possible, still this morning."
Other users messaged him with the same complaint over email and the messaging app Discord. It was only when Fabian received more angry replies from two more users on X that he realized what was going on.
"Checking those X accounts, both appeared to be involved in gambling on the Polymarket betting site," he explained. "As far as I now understand, the emails I received were intended to confirm whether or not a missile had hit Israel on March 10 in order to resolve a prediction on Polymarket."
Polymarket is a cryptocurrency-based prediction market where users buy and sell shares tied to real‑world events, enabling them to bet on the likelihood of future events, including those in wartime.
Fabian found that the people clamoring for his attention had put money on whether Iran would strike Israel on March 10. "This market will resolve to ‘Yes’ if Iran initiates a drone, missile, or air strike on Israel’s soil on the listed date in Israel Time (GMT+2). Otherwise, this market will resolve to ‘No’,” the website explained. However, it stipulates that intercepted missiles would not receive a "yes" verdict.
As of March 16, gamblers had wagered more than $14 million on the event.
Over the next several days, requests continued to roll in from people demanding a correction to the story.
One user presented a fabricated email, purportedly from Fabian to Daniel, stating that the Israel Defense Forces had confirmed the missiles were intercepted and that he planned to correct the story.
Fabian was later approached by a colleague at another publication, who said his friend had asked him to reach out for the story to be changed. After being confronted, the friend admitted that he had money on the wager too, and offered some of his winnings to Fabian's colleague if he could persuade the journalist to change the story.
By the weekend, the messages had become violent. Fabian said a user identified as Haim accosted him with several threatening messages in Hebrew over WhatsApp:
"You have exactly half an hour to correct your attempt at influence,” Haim wrote. "Despite the fact that you received countless inquiries—you insist on leaving it that way.”
“If you do not correct this by 01:00 Israel time today, March 15, you are bringing upon yourself damage you have never imagined you would suffer,” he threatened, in a very lengthy message.
Haim also attempted to call me via WhatsApp multiple times during the night, before sending me more messages.
“You have no idea how much you’ve put yourself at risk. Today is the most significant day of your career. You have two choices: either believe that we have the capabilities, and after you make us lose $900,000 we will invest no less than that to finish you."
Haim also threatened Fabian by referring "with specific details" to his home address, his parents, and family.
After receiving several more threats and being contacted by someone purporting to be a "lawyer," Fabian went to the police, who he said are now investigating the situation.
The threats continued into Monday, after Fabian ran into a bomb shelter amid another Iranian missile attack.
"The attempt by these gamblers to pressure me to change my reporting so that they would win their bet did not and will not succeed," Fabian said. "But I do worry that other journalists may not be as ethical if they are promised some of the winnings."
He said that journalists are in a unique position to "exploit their knowledge for insider trading on the platform."
Polymarket and other similar "prediction market" apps like Kalshi have come under similar scrutiny in the United States for allowing users to place suspiciously timed bets on military actions taken by the Trump administration.
Earlier this month, the watchdog group Public Citizen sent a letter to the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), which regulates prediction markets, outlining a series of "highly suspicious" bets made just before President Donald Trump launched strikes against Iran on February 28. Among the big winners were what the Wall Street Journal described as "six suspected insiders,” whose immaculately timed wagers netted them a $1.2 million profit.
In January, another trader made more than $436,000 after betting that Veneuzelan President Nicolás Maduro would be removed from power just hours before Trump launched an operation to remove him.
In the face of state regulations, the Trump administration has sought to ease restrictions on betting apps. The Trump family's media company offers access to prediction markets on its Truth Social platform via Crypto.com. Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi.
US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who has emerged as a leading critic of prediction markets, described Fabian's account as a "bone-chilling story."
The senator said: "We need to end prediction markets for government action. NOW."
Keep Reading
Show Less
Most Popular