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Trump's Second Term

Activist groups prepare for legal battles during Trump 2.0

Kimberly Adams Jan 17, 2025
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A view of the U.S. Capitol, where Donald Trump's second inauguration will take place. The ACLU and other organizations are readying legal strategies to oppose policies they consider harmful. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Trump's Second Term

Activist groups prepare for legal battles during Trump 2.0

Kimberly Adams Jan 17, 2025
Heard on:
A view of the U.S. Capitol, where Donald Trump's second inauguration will take place. The ACLU and other organizations are readying legal strategies to oppose policies they consider harmful. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
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Many organizations that opposed Donald Trump’s policies in his first term as president were a bit blindsided by his 2016 win. They had to scramble to respond to his agenda and norm-breaking approach to leading an administration. 

“We saw kinds of things that we had really never seen before in American government,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. CREW supported some of the failed legal efforts to block Trump from running for office again and filed briefs alleging a range of misconduct during Trump’s first term.

This time around, Bookbinder said more people were prepared for Trump to win and understood what kind of resources might be necessary to challenge his policies. 

“So we had been planning for this. We had a sense of what staffing needs could be,” he said. “We’ve had job postings before the election. We’ve had more after the election. We are doing some hiring.”

Bookbinder said many civil society groups are updating their strategies in light of what they learned during the first Trump term and its aftermath.

“A lot of people tried a lot of things in the first Trump administration,” he said. “Some things worked well in pushing back against abuses and corruption, and some things worked less well. And maybe it’s a time to be a little bit more strategic.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, will focus a lot more on local engagement, according to the group’s national legal director, Cecilia Wang. During Trump’s first term, the ACLU successfully challenged some of the current president-elect’s initiatives around immigration and funding for a border wall.

“One of the big differences between what President Trump did in his first term and what he is promising to do in a second term is that, in the area of immigration enforcement, he has said that he is going to launch the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history,” Wang said. 

Wang oversees about 200 lawyers and support people, who make up about 30% of the ACLU’s staff. Many, Wang said, are or will be deployed to the towns, cities, farms and factories where immigration raids might happen.

“And so I think that what we’re going to be doing is fighting back in communities around the country, and ultimately that has to reach Washington, D.C.,” said Wang. “And the goal is to make for longer-range change in terms of federal policy. But that starts in communities all around our country, and it starts at the local and state level.”

To help with these plans, we’re likely to eventually see lawyers from the outgoing Joe Biden administration in court or working behind the scenes to oppose Trump administration efforts to unwind their work.

Deb Connor is with the law firm Morrison Foerster but spent decades in the Justice Department. She said it’s common for lawyers in appointed roles to decamp for the private sector after their administration’s term is up. 

Among career agency lawyers, “with a change in administration there’s always a change in priorities, and those changes in priorities may expand or reduce the work, the kind of work that you’re doing,” Connor said. 

The pay tends to be a bit better in the private sector, and if there’s a big swing in policy — for example, on environmental regulation — lawyers may not see much of a future for themselves in the new administration. 

“Many career lawyers are mission driven. They have a particular area of expertise that they feel strongly about, whether it’s environmental or antitrust or, you know, whatever it might be,” said Connor. “So if they see that that’s going to kind of come to a standstill where they are, then they’re going to look for other opportunities.”

Connor said having lawyers on both sides of a negotiating table who have experience with a particular agency can be a plus when it’s time to work through difficult issues.  

“They’ve been there, they understand how these matters work. That’s very helpful,” she said. “The same when you get to the government side. So I think the revolving door, as it were, is actually helpful to both sides of this market.”

And while that may not make the coming litigation any less contentious, it might at least smooth the logistical side of things.

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