(Illustration by Mike McQuade)
Eight years ago, early in Donald Trump’s first term as president, I worked with Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), on a story about the organization’s Strategic Affiliate Initiative, the ACLU’s multiyear program to bolster a select group of its state affiliates to advance civil liberties and defend voter rights against a multitude of threats in post-9/11 America. The initiative, launched in 2002, enabled the ACLU to respond quickly to the crackdowns on immigrants Trump executed in the first 24 hours after being sworn into office.
Trump is now back in the White House for a second term, with far greater executive power than he enjoyed in his first stint. Unopposed by Congress, enabled by a loyalist Cabinet, and buoyed by a Supreme Court that declared him immune to criminal prosecution for his actions, he has deployed National Guard troops to major US cities, along with a vastly expanded Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to further his plans for mass deportation. He has unilaterally gutted federal agencies without congressional approval and threatened legal action against foundations and nonprofits whose activities, though perfectly legal, he perceives as extreme. He has attempted to exert control over universities by freezing billions of dollars in research grants appropriated by Congress and threatening other penalties. He envisions, according to a September 30, 2025, speech he gave to a mass gathering of top officers of the armed forces at Quantico, Virginia, deploying active-duty military to “Democrat-run cities” as training grounds to fight a war against “the enemy within.”
That day, I had scheduled a time to speak to Romero to get an update on the ACLU’s response to Trump’s authoritarian gambit. He was joined by two senior leaders, A.J. Hikes and Aletheia Henry. The following transcript has been edited.—David V. Johnson
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Johnson: Let me start by going back to 2017, the early days of President Trump’s first term. Anthony cowrote a cover story for us, titled “A Revamped ACLU Takes on Today’s Fights,” that addressed “the unconstitutional agenda that President Trump was initiating to undo many of the civil liberties gains of the past quarter century, from immigrants’ rights to reproductive freedom to LGBT rights.”
Around that time, Trump issued an executive order that banned the immigration of citizens from seven different Muslim countries. I remember how people flocked to airports at the time to protest.
Those days now seem quaint in comparison. We have masked agents arresting people off the streets without giving them access to a lawyer or to contacts, without giving them due process, and deporting them to third-party countries.
Where are we today, and how did we get here?
Anthony Romero: This is the most challenging time for civil liberties and civil rights in my tenure as the ACLU’s national executive director. In a conversation I was having with Aryeh Neier, who was my predecessor and the head of the ACLU during Vietnam and Watergate, he said that this is the most challenging time for civil liberties and civil rights that he has ever seen for the organization since its founding. What hang in the balance are nothing less than the basic rights and liberties that define how people live in free democracy and the functioning system of checks and balances that have come to define the United States as a nation committed to fairness and justice and rule of law.
Clearly, the ability for the Trump administration to enact an agenda that is so hostile to civil liberties and civil rights entails the assistance of Congress. This is not just the agenda of a president run amok; it’s really a much broader challenge to the functioning of our system of government than just one person getting elected.
A.J. Hikes: As a 105-year-old organization, we were not created for Trump, but we are built for this moment, and we certainly know how to play the long game. When you think back to that 2017 article and that time during Trump 1.0, we filed more than 400 legal actions against the administration, including against the Muslim ban that you mentioned, family separation policies, his proposed change to the US Census. We have really hit the ground running during this time: We have over 180 legal actions that we have filed so far this term, so we are certainly on track to surpass that 400 number from the first term.
Johnson: With so many different challenges, how do you figure out what to prioritize?
Hikes: We knew that the administration’s strategy would be to flood the zone, and certainly they’ve done that. They’ve been throwing nearly everything they can at the wall in an attempt to overwhelm the public. Very early on, Anthony encouraged us to exercise extraordinary discipline in our responses. So we had to think about the idea that we are not going to swing at every pitch that’s coming at us. What is in our strike zone as the ACLU? And so we think about urgency—the urgency of this moment, the urgency of this issue. Can we act quickly? We think about impact. We think about how we engage our audiences around this. Can we drive action on a set of issues?
And we think primarily about our lane. What is in our scope of expertise? And where are our partners? Is this core to civil liberties? That’s where you see us front and center on birthright citizenship and freedom of speech—the bread and butter of the ACLU. And then we also think about where our partners are leading. So, where do we lead and drive, and where do we support?
Johnson: How did you prepare for this moment?
Aletheia Henry: During this election, we took both candidates at their word. And just before the Republican convention and just before the Democratic convention, we publicly released Trump and Harris memos. We deeply read all of Project 2025, we looked at all of the promises that Trump was making on the campaign trail, and we took him at his word. Then we analyzed those policy positions through a lens of the Constitution and civil rights and civil liberties, and talked about the way we would defend against those attacks.
Once we were clear on the election outcome, we took those public-facing memos and turned them into 100-day action plans, and it allowed us to get a temperature check from the experts across the organization about which executive actions they believed would come first, and we leaned into that. We began lining up clients and preparing briefing materials and ensuring that we were ready to go, and we certainly were. We filed our first case in 90 minutes, on the first day that Trump was signing executive orders. That was the birthright citizenship case—that’s still ongoing.
My colleagues were fairly prescient. I don’t think that anyone could have quite predicted the speed or ferocity with which this administration has moved, but we took them at their word.
We’re in the process of going back to each of those issue teams and spelling out a longer-term, two-to-three-year strategy so that we can stay one step ahead continuously. In the immigration space, the Trump administration has done a lot of the things that were on our 100-day checklist that we predicted, and we want to make sure that we’re preparing for exactly what’s next.
(Illustration by Mike McQuade)
Johnson: What issues would you say are priorities for you, other than birthright citizenship, which you mentioned?
Henry: I would say immigration across the board. It’s not just the birthright citizenship case. It’s the raids and deportation response, the Alien Enemies Act, all the violations of due process in the Fourth Amendment that we’re seeing over and over again in those cases.
There’s a cross-section there with freedom of speech, which has obviously come to the forefront, and we’ve been in the lead on a lot of those attacks on freedom of speech for individuals who are here on visas or some other [immigration] status within the country. But we see the President branching out in his attacks on freedom of speech, so that is at the forefront. And voting rights continue to be at the forefront of our thinking, almost always.
Romero: The one I would add is that we bucket the current challenges to civil liberties into three large categories. Those are the key priorities or the challenges we’re confronting in this political moment.
In the first bucket, we identify the attacks on individuals and institutions who are ideologically opposed to the Trump agenda. These are the attacks on universities, on law firms, on activists like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, who are our clients. It’s like a modern-day McCarthy—if you don’t agree with the government, you’re in the government’s crosshairs, and it’s playing out in real time, whether it’s in the attacks on [former FBI Director] Jim Comey or the investigations of the Open Society Foundations. And that’s a place of enormous concern and energy for us as an organization that is fundamentally dedicated to the rights of individuals to speak their minds and associate freely. When the government attacks individuals who disagree with it, that raises it to the highest level of priority for us.
The second bucket has to do with the attacks on vulnerable individuals and communities as a way to score cheap political points with the MAGA base. And here, you can look at the attacks on immigrants, the deportations, the raids. You can also look at the attacks on transgender communities. It’s another way to rile up and throw red meat to the Trump supporter base.
In the third bucket would be the attacks on the rules, the norms, and the system of checks and balances that undergird our democracy. And here again, it’s the attacks on a free and open media, the lawsuits against the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, the squeezing of ABC News because of Jimmy Kimmel through the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] licensing process, or the attacks that some members of the Trump administration will levy against judges who rule against them. It’s about the attacks on the structures that are a bulwark against government overreach and government abuse.
Those are the three big areas of work, and within it, we do work on immigrants, we work on voting—voting is one of the systems of our government that you have to defend, especially if they try to subvert the outcome of the election during the midterms.
When it’s other topics, like the firing of federal government employees, the shrinking of the federal workforce, and others that are not civil liberties issues, per se, other organizations carry the ball. Groups like Democracy Forward, Democracy Defenders Fund, Public Citizen, and others have done an amazing job leading on many of the challenges to our country that are not core civil liberties or civil rights issues. So, it’s really important that we have discipline to focus on the issues that are in our lane and allow other groups to lead on issues that are outside our remit.
Johnson: You mentioned Congress and its lack of action in defending civil liberties, but there are also the courts, and you’ve mentioned the many lawsuits that you’ve filed. And it seems the dynamic we’re seeing is that lower courts rule in your favor and maybe issue an injunction against certain conduct by the federal government. And then, in many cases, the Supreme Court has on appeal, via shadow docket, removed the injunction and overruled judges at the district level. What do you make of the role of the judiciary and the Supreme Court in this, and the dynamic you’re seeing right now in many of these cases?
Romero: I think we need to parse it more carefully than just characterize the role of the courts with broad sweeps.
Most cases never get up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court decides only 60 to 80 cases in a year, so if there are hundreds of cases filed in a particular year, there’s only a small number of them that will end up before the Supreme Court and on review. And so that’s why we think it’s essential to continue to use the federal courts. There are over 1,100 judges who handle over 300,000 cases in the district courts. Over 300 judges handle 50,000 cases in the courts of appeal. And nine Supreme Court justices handle fewer than 100 cases each year. There are 400-plus cases filed against the Trump administration, so the bulk of these cases will be decided at the district court level, the courts of appeals, and that’s it.
All you have to do with the Supreme Court is count to five. And I actually think in the birthright citizenship case, you might get to seven.
I think it’s also important to parse out how the court has decided some of the matters on the shadow docket. To be clear, there have been great disappointments. The Supreme Court’s decision in our case coming from the ACLU affiliate in Los Angeles on racial profiling, where we had obtained a stay at the lower court level, was lifted by the Supreme Court, with unfortunate language from Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh. But we live to fight another day. We will be able to develop the record, look at the facts, and ultimately, when the case ends up back in front of either the court of appeals or the Supreme Court on the merits, we’re hopeful that with a more fulsome record we’ll be able to strike down the government’s targeting of individuals based on what it perceives to be the characteristics of an undocumented person.
I don’t write off the Supreme Court on most of the major issues just yet. I think with birthright citizenship, which is now pending before the Supreme Court, almost assuredly we win, even with this court. All you have to do with the Supreme Court is count to five. So we’ve got three. Can you get two more? And I actually think in the birthright citizenship case, you might get to seven.
On the Alien Enemies Act litigation, we’ve had to file multiple cases in different jurisdictions, also based on a decision from the Supreme Court requiring us to file in different jurisdictions and making sure that you couldn’t bring just one case. The fact that we won in the Fifth Circuit, a very conservative jurisdiction, makes me feel that when we ultimately get before the Supreme Court on the merits of the Alien Enemies Act case—whether this 1798 statute is properly invoked in this alleged war against the drug cartels and against gangs—ultimately we will succeed at convincing the Supreme Court on the merits.
We’ve been also tracking our own batting average on the shadow docket thus far. Aletheia, do you want to talk through how our report card stacks up?
Henry: What’s important to know is that in 80 percent of the cases where we’ve requested emergency relief, we’ve received it. And of the cases that we have directly brought to the Supreme Court in the past year, 80 percent of them have been decided either in our favor or with a mixed ruling. Rulings aren’t always a clean win-loss, but we’re doing pretty well.
We’re also adapting really quickly. When the Supreme Court issued its ruling striking down nationwide injunctions, we were ready to file a class-action lawsuit. That means that to this day, not one US-born child has been denied their citizenship under Trump’s executive order.
We walked into this understanding that litigation was going to be one tool for the ACLU in this fight. We will see you in court, for sure. But we’re also going to see you in the state house, we’re going to see you in Congress, we’re going to see you in the streets, because it’s going to take all of those mechanisms to defeat this administration and what it’s attempting.
Johnson: In terms of strategy, one thing that I’ve read is your initiative Firewall for Freedom. Can you tell me more about that and how it’s going so far?
Hikes: What’s exciting about Firewall for Freedom is that it’s proactive. Our affiliates are really on the front lines of this. Our goal with Firewall for Freedom is to let local and state government officials know that they can say no to Trump’s extremist policies.
The planning and preparation for Firewall for Freedom started well over a year ago. Over the summer, we worked with our state affiliates to develop a strategy playbook for disrupting this radical agenda that we knew was going to be coming in the second term. The playbook outlines tools across our issues, such as immigration, reproductive rights, free speech, so that these municipalities can uphold rights in their cities.
Here’s where we are now: The campaign is in 43 states. In those states, you see some legislative, some executive, and some advocacy campaigns. We have 15 state legislatures who have already passed 30 different laws protecting our rights. We have 24 pieces of guidance that have been issued by a dozen state officials that tell state agencies how they can safeguard our information, our data, our families. We have three governors who’ve already issued executive orders, and five municipalities who’ve taken action.
Just last week, Delaware Gov. [Matt] Meyer signed HS 119 and SB80 into law—two powerful laws protecting our rights to learn and to dissent. In August, we had Gov. [Maura] Healey in Massachusetts acting to protect and enshrine gender-affirming care and abortion rights into state law. And earlier this year, Washington Gov. [Bob] Ferguson signed a bill that restricted out-of-state armed forces from entering Washington. We have been seeing this escalation of federal troops on the ground in American cities, and we know that’s a cornerstone to Trump’s abuse of power agenda. This law makes it clear that almost any mobilization of the National Guard into the state requires the governor’s permission, and it also has to align with Washington’s core values to protect immigrant communities.
So, those are just a few examples of the ways that Firewall for Freedom is proactively protecting our local communities. It’s been powerful, and we’ve been very lucky to have many state and city officials be our partners in this work.
Romero: The theory of change behind Firewall for Freedom is to use our federalist system as a way to deploy both a sword and a shield against the Trump administration’s policies on civil liberties and civil rights. If you can convince governors, attorneys general, mayors, and city councils to enact policies that stand in the way of government overreach, then that provides some meaningful protection against the worst abuses.
Johnson: You mentioned Trump’s threats to crack down on foundations like the Open Society Foundations (OSF), on universities, and law firms. At SSIR, we represent the social sector and the people who work at such organizations. What do you make of how the organizations, philanthropies, nonprofits, and universities are responding?
Hikes: We should start by saying that the attack on OSF is baseless and a challenge to the values that make this country great. And Anthony mentioned this modern-day McCarthy moment that we’re in. That is exactly what this feels like, turning the whole weight of the DOJ [Department of Justice] against organizations that are speaking out against this administration’s un-American agenda.
We have to remind folks that the President can’t rewrite the Constitution via a memo. And I think we’ve seen real strength in numbers.
Just last week, we saw a presidential memorandum authorizing the government to investigate nonprofits, activists, and donors; and using this overbroad label of terrorism and conspiracy against rights; and targeting individuals, institutions, and communities to score political points, disrupting checks and balances, and consolidating power. It’s all a part of a larger strategy and agenda, and it’s shameful and dangerous.
We have to remind folks that the President can’t rewrite the Constitution via a memo. And I think we’ve seen real strength in numbers. We see coalitions in the philanthropic sector coming together. We see the same thing with our nonprofit communities. We see it as well with corporations and law firms coming together, standing up, and saying that we will not stand for this. We know that this administration is sending up test balloons to see what will actually fly. It’s really imperative in this moment that we are coming together and building those kind of coalitions to push back and draw the line.
On a personal point, when it comes to the ACLU, we are well aware that we may be targeted by this administration. We’ve been preparing for that moment. And we have plans internally and externally. But our priority today is to stay focused on executing our mission to defend civil rights and civil liberties in this moment, no matter what may come.
Romero: There is a sense of real solidarity in the nonprofit sector. Unlike what you saw with some of the nation’s largest law firms just capitulating to Trump’s extortionist policies, or the universities, some of which settled claims against them, the nonprofit sector has been much more unified in its response, and I think we’ve learned from the mistakes of the universities and the law firms that didn’t stick together. There’s been a real effort to make sure that nonprofits across areas and across the political spectrum stay together as one. [Former Associate Attorney General] Vanita Gupta has organized a NATO for nonprofits, and the sector has really come together.
We recently organized a conference call with Public Citizen and Democracy Defenders Fund for nonprofits in the wake of the executive orders that were signed by the President allowing them to investigate domestic terrorist groups. We had 7,000 nonprofits show up on that call. I am proud of the way in which the nonprofit sector has understood that we are in this together. There are lines of communication that I have not seen in 24 years as CEO of a major nonprofit. I have never seen this level of alignment of sharing of information, of referring donors, of dividing work, of providing support and assistance and advice, and that’s because the nonprofit sector realizes what we’re up against is going to require a much more coordinated response. Collective solidarity is key to our individual success.
Johnson: I am also curious about public sentiment. Back in 2017, after Trump was first elected, the ACLU netted a huge windfall of donations from a public worried about civil liberties. Do you feel like the public is again energized? What are you seeing from your supporters and from people at large?
Romero: In 2017, I think there was a response from the public that was largely driven by surprise and shock. Folks rushed to the airports on the Muslim ban weekend. We saw these large spikes of contributions to our website around the Muslim ban and family separation. With Trump’s reelection, we don’t see those crescendo points like we did the first time around. We see a more steady increase of concern, building off where we were at the end of the Biden administration.
I also think some people are turned off by politics in this moment, and tired of the acrimony and divisiveness. Some people just want to put their heads in the sand. Some folks are feeling that it’s not a surprise that Donald Trump is president. Trump represents larger portions of public sentiment. And at the same time, there are many more people who are trying to figure out how to make a difference in this time. You may not see the large women’s marches that you saw in 2017, but there’s much more activism happening at the state and local levels. There are people who are taking action, going to local rallies, signing up to be monthly contributors, because they understand that there’s not one flashpoint and there’s not one silver bullet. They realize that you have to stay on this like water on stone. There’s real, growing activism that we ought not to overlook or downplay.
Henry: What we have seen is people being willing to give more of their time to this effort. So, we’ve had tens of thousands of people attend our Know Your Rights trainings. We have hundreds of thousands of active volunteers. These aren’t people sitting on an email list; they’re the folks working beside us to pass those Firewall measures that AJ was talking about. They’re hosting education events in their communities so that folks understand the impact. They’re engaging with their members at town halls and other events locally. And I think that that’s really important.
Erica Chenoweth and the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard University have measured an increase in crowds showing up to demonstrate in comparison to the last Trump administration. It just doesn’t look like the Women’s March. There are more events across more places, and so it’s more of this local activism. The No Kings rallies back in June are a great example of this: Five million people rallied at over 2,000 events across the country. And so that’s 100,000 people in Philadelphia, and 200,000 in New York, and 500,000 in Boston, but it’s also 400 people in Pentwater, Michigan, where the population size is 800. So you get half the town showing up to condemn President Trump’s escalating abuses of power.
We’re taking to the streets again on October 18 with our partners across the country in a similar show of condemnation of this president’s ongoing abuses.
Romero: Sometimes people ask me, “Are we in a constitutional crisis? Is everything lost?” And my answer is, we are in a constitutional crisis if we accept it, and we’re not in a constitutional crisis if we resist it. We need to give people a sense of agency, turn them into protagonists, rather than spectators. That’s critical for groups like ours, and that’s why we work really hard to find meaningful ways for folks to make a difference. If you tell them, “Call your member of Congress” or, “Write a letter to your member of Congress,” people’s eyes immediately roll. They don’t think that Congress is terribly functional or relevant at the moment. But if you tell them, “Let’s stiffen the spine of your local attorney general or your governor, let’s make sure that we eliminate the programs that allow local officials to work with federal immigration enforcement, let’s get the city council to enact laws that protect immigrants and that make the local prisons and jails off-limits to federal immigration enforcement,” then you give them something meaningful to do that they feel is worth their time, energy, and sweat equity.
This momentum is building as people increasingly realize just how far the Trump administration is pushing its agenda. On the issue of immigration, the public opinion was much more with President Trump at the beginning of his first year than it is now. He promised to deport the criminals, the drug dealers, the cartels. Now they see that he’s deporting good folk, people who are the members of our local communities, not the criminal aliens that he promised. And I think that’s creating a backlash to some of the very policies that they are beginning to scale up. Public response and engagement will scale up in response.
Having a strong, local infrastructure among our state affiliates is critical to fighting off the worst of the abuses of the Trump administration.
Johnson: You mentioned your affiliate network—the ACLU has affiliates in all 50 states, in Puerto Rico, and in DC. The cover story you cowrote, Anthony, back in 2017, talked about the ACLU’s Strategic Affiliate Initiative (SAI), where you devoted financial support to select states in an overall strategy to protect civil liberties. Could you update us on the initiative?
Romero: Thank God we launched the Strategic Affiliate Initiative. To do organizational development, you have to do it over the long term. When we first launched our initiative, we realized—and we realize even more so now—that the locus of activity for the battle for civil liberties and civil rights plays out in local communities. The deportations happen in local communities. The abridgment of freedom of speech happens in local communities. The deployment of the National Guard or federal forces happens in cities like Portland [Ore.]; Chicago; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Memphis [Tenn.]. And so having strong, local infrastructure among our state affiliates is critical to fighting off the worst of the abuses of the Trump administration, because that’s where the rubber’s hitting the road.
Over the past several years, we have consciously focused on growing our Southern affiliates. That is the most recent iteration of our Strategic Affiliate Initiative. Increasingly, you see these issues play out in Texas—for instance, the redistricting battle to try to redraw the maps of Texas’ congressional districts to put their thumb on the scale in the midterm elections. It’s critically important that we be strong in a place like Texas. In Florida, we’re holding off the worst of the abuses. The head of our Florida office, Bacardi Jackson, says that the nation’s going in the same direction that Florida’s been heading in for years. And so it’s really important for us to be able to fight off some of those challenges in Florida. Alligator Alcatraz, for instance: Our legal challenge to the creation of that prison camp for immigrants has met with success. If we didn’t have the boots on the ground to be able to challenge that in real time, we’d be struggling to do it from afar in New York City or Washington. The Strategic Affiliate Initiative was exactly the right investment so that we could not just enact policy reforms like Firewall for Freedom but also fend off the worst of the civil liberties violations in really difficult states, like Florida or Texas or Alabama.
What was it that you told me the other day, Aletheia, about the Census on the South?
Henry: I read reporting recently that the 2030 Census is going to demonstrate a population shift to the South. States like New York and California are losing population relative to the South, and we will be redistricting accordingly, so it’s good that we have these strong, sustainable affiliate organizations built there for the future fights.
I think it’s really interesting that the Southern Collective, the third iteration of our SAI, was born from the affiliates themselves. In 2019, these 12 affiliates came together and lifted up the challenges that they were having and asked for national investment. What started as a $15 million investment in the Southern Collective has now become a $51 million, five-year investment in the South. And because voting rights is a generational struggle in the South, a lot of our work has focused on voting rights. We were able to partner with our Alabama affiliate on our Allen v. Milligan case that made it up to the Supreme Court—a redistricting case under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
Across the South now, we have these data dashboards that have demographic voting and turnout patterns for our southern states. In Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia, we’re monitoring voter-roll purges so that we can see when they’re trying to force people off the rolls and get them back on quickly. And in Florida, we’ve built on those demographic dashboards to track inclement weather that may affect polling locations, to track social media reports of violent groups that may be attempting to target those locations, so we can do that rapid-response voter-protection work when the time comes.
Romero: In order to be ready for a moment like the one we’re in, it takes years of planning and preparation, of anticipating where you think the challenges will go. We have 2,200 staff nationwide at the ACLU, and 1,600-plus of them are in the state offices. That reflects a conscious decision that the only way you can be effective is to be proximate to the problems. And so you have local lawyers, local activists, local organizers, people who are embedded in these communities, helping solve the problems that manifest in their communities.
Johnson: One last question about the midterms next year: How worried are you about free and fair elections in our country? And what do you have planned for the midterms?
Henry: I don’t think we ever stop thinking about how to protect the people’s voice, and certainly, given Trump’s voting executive order, this midcycle redistricting, his targeting of mail-in voting, and other efforts of the Trump administration, we’re monitoring and responding to all of that. We’ve had success in blocking many of these attempts in the past. We have a playbook, and we have been involved in election protection in many states for years now, and I mentioned a lot of our work in the South. Our first call with our affiliates on having a plan to safeguard the election is tomorrow [October 1, 2025]. So we are preparing for the fights ahead. We certainly will be involved in the 2025 cycle, even though it’s a lighter election year, just to make sure that voting is as free and fair as possible, but we are ramping up all those efforts for 2026 and 2028. And it’s not just us: We have a whole network of groups that we work very closely with.
Romero: And our work to secure the right to vote and to defend the franchise is not animated by a desire to help one party or one candidate get elected. We are agnostic about the outcomes. Our sole goal is to ensure that people cast an informed vote. We will inform them about the records and the history and the backgrounds of candidates. But we never tell people who to vote for. We want voters to be informed, and if they wish to cast a vote, our job is to make sure it is meaningfully counted.
In one of the voting rights challenges we had during the first Trump administration, they were trying to shut down drive-through polling booths in Harris County, Texas. Our lead plaintiff was a Republican. Shutting down drive-through voting affects Democrats as much as Republicans, and our goal was to make sure that voters were able to cast their votes. It’s the same thing with mail-in ballots. A lot of elderly people vote by mail. And they vote Republican, and they vote Democrat, and it doesn’t matter which party they vote for—they should just be able to cast their vote. That is the animating principle for us: making sure that government officials don’t cynically try to shave off certain types of voters who they don’t believe vote for their party or their candidates. We believe that the voters should pick our elected officials, not that the elected officials should pick the voters.
Read more stories by Anthony D. Romero, A.J. Hikes, Aletheia Henry & David V. Johnson.