Four months into President Donald Trump’s second term, he has aggressively pursued efforts to strip entire communities of their rights and circumvent the rule of law.

While many voters expected Trump to ramp up deportations, they did not foresee the hurricane of horrors he has unleashed. The president has attempted to assert war-time authorities to disappear people to foreign prisons without due process based on their tattoos and clothing. He has arbitrarily punished students who are non-citizens, jailing some and forcing others to flee the country. He put U.S. citizen children on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation flights, including those receiving cancer treatment. Trump’s ICE chief has said he wants to create a deportation system like “Amazon Prime for human beings” in a brutal and dehumanizing drive to deport as many people as quickly as possible, no matter the cost. Trump is now poised to turn the military, plus thousands of federal, state and local law enforcement agents, on entire communities in a hunt for our immigrant neighbors that will put all of our civil liberties in danger.

As we prepare for the fight ahead, here are three key areas to watch:

The Trump administration has unlawfully used the Alien Enemies Act --- a wartime authority that had only been invoked three times in over 200 years and only during a declared war—to disappear people to CECOT, a brutal prison in El Salvador, without due process. The administration has shipped immigrants to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Trump is also attempting to swiftly deport people to dangerous countries to which they have no connection, like South Sudan, which is on the brink of civil war; and Libya, which is known for electrocuting and sexually assaulting migrants imprisoned in militia-run detention facilities. Some of those already deported to CECOT had protected status or pending asylum cases, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father the government admits it sent erroneously, but now refuses any ability or responsibility to return to his family. The ACLU has filed more than 10 habeas corpus, arguing that the government must have a just cause for detaining or imprisoning someone, to stop these illegal deportations without due process.

Trump is reportedly seeking to use National Guard troops for immigration enforcement, opening a very dangerous chapter where troops would be patrolling our neighborhoods looking for families, children, and others who they think are undocumented. We have never experienced a moment like this in our lifetimes, when our troops are being turned against our communities, acting in the service of a military police state.

Within weeks of taking control, the Trump administration initiated a new, nationwide registration system requiring that kids as young as 14 and adults who are non-citizens register. Now, millions of our neighbors and family members face a dangerous Catch-22: If they show up to “register” with ICE, they may be taken into custody and swiftly deported from their homes and families. If they don’t, they face criminal prosecution for failing to register. Any encounter with law enforcement – including when people report a crime or seek protection – could lead to police questioning a person about their immigration and registration status.

At the same time, the Trump administration is also seeking 20,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officers and at least 21,000 National Guard troops to join its deportation force. It is re-assigning thousands of federal law enforcement agents from serious crime investigation duties to immigration enforcement. This is straight out a dystopian novel: The president is amassing a massive internal police force under his command, with a mandate to execute a massive round-up of people in our country, who are cast as “criminals” because they have violated a law that makes failing to turn themselves into the government a crime.

Already, we have seen immigrants deported at airports for criticizing President Trump, and students have their visas revoked for expressing their views. We now know that the State Department is asserting that students and others, like ACLU client Mahmoud Khalil, can be expelled purely for their opinions. The administration is also threatening anyone who helps immigrants to defend their rights, including legal services groups, entire cities and states, and even members of Congress. These attacks are transparently about consolidating power, bringing critics to heel, and eliminating the space to fight back.

Still, there are stories of communities working to support their neighbors and loved ones. Communities are standing up for their neighbors and questioning ICE, and Congress, about abusive arrests and the lack of due process. Law enforcement leaders are declining to take part in the Trump deportation drive, knowing it will not make their communities. Elected officials at all levels are creating a firewall for freedom, enacting protections for their community members that counteract the Trump deportation agenda.

Members of Congress are also listening – and knocking on the doors of private prison operators in New Jersey, Louisiana and Colorado, to name a few. These visits, even when members of Congress are denied entry, are powerful rebukes to an administration claiming power to disappear people into prisons and lock the door behind them.

Courts are rejecting Trump’s authoritarian overreach and affirming that immigrants have rights and deserve due process. It’s no coincidence that some of the more outrageous proposals from this administration—suspending habeas corpus, sending U.S. citizens to CECOT—come when the administration is losing in court.

At the ACLU, working with community partners, through the courts, and through lobbying, our work to protect our communities from Trump’s dangerous deportation drive continues.

On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage was unconstitutional. I was outside the Supreme Court that day, celebrating the advocacy achievement that seemed impossible a decade prior when bans on marriage for same-sex couples passed by wide margins in state after state. Couples, families, and advocates gathered on the steps outside the court, singing, crying, and embracing. I thought about my younger self who could not have imagined a life and future as a queer adult, and about the generations of LGBTQ people who came before me and faced so many more obstacles to realizing their own queer adulthoods.

Though the fight for legal recognition of marriage for same-sex couples spanned decades, the final stages of progress seemed lightning fast for many people outside of the LGBTQ legal movement.

In June of 2013, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Windsor that the federal law defining marriage as between one man and one woman violated the Constitution's equal protection and due process guarantees. That decision opened the door to immediate constitutional challenges to the remaining state-level bans on marriage for same-sex couples. Two years later, in 2015, the Supreme Court held in Obergefell v. Hodges that excluding same-sex couples from marriage violated the Constitution.

The Obergefell ruling was a defining moment in our country’s legal history that came after decades of hard work and setbacks. Today, my child’s generation cannot even fathom that same-sex couples could not marry in many states when they were born. That transformation in law and culture has been met with fierce backlash from opponents of LGBTQ equality.

Immediately following the court’s decision in Obergefell, the aggressive movement to prevent marriage equality trained its financial resources and advocacy efforts on curtailing legal equality for LGBTQ people under local, state and federal civil rights statutes. In November 2015, a ballot campaign in Houston, Texas became the testing ground for new anti-LGBT messaging. Houston voters were voting on a repeal of a municipal non-discrimination ordinance, HERO, that would have extended local civil rights protections to fifteen classes of people, including veterans, people of color, disabled people, women and LGBTQ people.

The campaign in favor of repealing the ordinance focused its messaging entirely on the false claim that passing the ordinance would allow men to enter women’s bathrooms and harm women and girls. Campaign ads depicted shadowy figures looming over young girls and the refrain “no men in women’s restrooms” became the tagline that ultimately drove voters to repeal the ordinance at the ballot that November. Hoping to redirect voters towards the many groups the ordinance would protect, the pro-HERO campaign did not engage with the opposition’s messaging directly. The strategy failed. Whether we wanted to or not, LGBTQ advocates needed to face our opposition’s messaging head-on, particularly when, in the months that followed, dozens of bills were introduced across the country to ban transgender people from using restrooms that aligned with their gender identity. We did not pick a fight over bathrooms, the fact that we exist and go to the bathroom became the focal point of efforts to undermine legal gains for all LGBTQ people.

Between 2016 and 2019, efforts to enact anti-trans legislation largely stalled. Ballot measures seeking to roll back trans-inclusive laws or codify anti-trans ones also failed. It was not until the introduction of the Equality Act in Congress, a bill that would add explicit protections for LGBT people into federal civil rights statutes, that a new anti-trans strategy gained momentum. As with previous efforts to stall local non-discrimination ordinances in 2015 and 2016, efforts to kill the Equality Act claimed that protecting transgender people would threaten others. This time, our opponents focused on sports. Once again, transgender people did not pick the fight, we just existed and became the focal point of efforts to stop civil rights legislation.

Just as equality opponents were building momentum coalescing around sports, in June 2020 the Supreme Court issued a decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, confirming that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act applied to LGBTQ people. In a 6-3 opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court found three LGBTQ workers fired because they were either gay or transgender – including American Civil Liberties Union client and transgender woman Aimee Stephens – were discriminated against on the basis of their sex in violation of the law. The court concluded that it is inherently a form of sex discrimination to discriminate against someone because of their sexual orientation or transgender status. This confirmed that LGBTQ workers were federally protected under our nation’s civil rights statutes.

Like Obergefell, Bostock sparked a fierce backlash from anti-equality advocates. Limiting the decision’s scope immediately became a top priority for anti-LGBTQ legislators. Between 2021 and 2023, lawmakers introduced hundreds of bills targeting LGBTQ people, the majority of which sought to limit rights for transgender adolescents.

At first, these bills focused on the very small number of transgender students participating in school sports, but soon lawmakers escalated their attacks and began to introduce bills targeting medical care. When the first categorical ban on medical care for transgender adolescents passed in Arkansas in 2021, then-Governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed the bill concerned that it allowed for vast government overreach into the private and vulnerable decisions of adolescents, their parents and their doctors.

That measured resistance to usurping the careful and aligned judgment of youth, their parents and their doctors quickly gave way to copycat legislation across the country that sought to categorically ban evidence-based medical care for transgender adolescents. In February 2022, Texas even threatened to investigate families for child abuse for simply following the advice of medical providers to treat their adolescent transgender children with gender affirming medical care. All of a sudden, families began to fear that they could lose custody of their children by following best practice medicine.

While transgender youth and their families desperately sought refuge from fights that kept arriving at their doorstep, the ACLU and other LGBTQ legal groups immediately went to court to try to stop the escalating harms of the health bans. Our timing was critical; each day these bans were allowed to be enforced was another day transgender youth were going without needed care. Thankfully, we were largely successful at first and, until July 2023, stopped every law from going into effect. District court judges ruled that, because these bans discriminated against transgender people on the basis of their sex and transgender status, as well as infringed upon the rights of parents to direct the medical care of their minor children, they were likely unconstitutional. These district court orders protected vulnerable adolescents from losing the medical care that had allowed them to thrive.

This protection changed when the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals allowed Tennessee’s ban to go into effect. That decision set off a chain reaction in the appellate courts and soon nearly every medical care ban went into effect, forcing families to uproot their lives to try to preserve care for their adolescent children. Compelled by the severity of harms facing our clients and transgender adolescents across the country, the ACLU and Lambda Legal asked the Supreme Court to review the Sixth Circuit’s harmful decision in November 2023. Not only did the appellate court’s decision upend the state of health care for transgender youth, it also began to undermine critical constitutional protections for everyone. For those of us who have dedicated our lives to fighting for our community, it was clear that the stakes were only getting higher and bringing our fight to the Supreme Court was a necessary step to slow catastrophic erosion of medical care and legal rights.

Ultimately, the LGBTQ movement did not pick a fight over restrooms or sports or health care for minors. Rather, opponents of LGBTQ equality strategically positioned transgender people as a threat to others as part of their decades-long goal to undermine LGBTQ equality movements overall.

For the people who now tell transgender people that instead of fighting these bills targeting our health care, our education, our history, we should have waited for a more opportune time to defend our rights and survival, the question is: what should we have done? Just accepted our wholesale exclusion from public life? Who would that have helped? Certainly not cisgender women in sports, or LGB people seeking to learn about their histories, or people hoping to form families with IVF.

We did not pick this fight, we simply existed. But not fighting to exist was never an option.

This week at the ACLU of Maine: Anti-abortion bills are officially defeated in Augusta, we continue defending our client against unlawful deportation orders, and we're joining the community to rally for our rights.

Maine House and Senate Reject Anti-Abortion Bills

This week, the Maine House of Representatives and Senate rejected eight anti-abortion bills, ensuring our state continues to protect the right to access abortion care. These victories send an important message to our lawmakers, and they didn’t happen by chance. We are so grateful to the people who emailed and called their legislators, gave testimony at the State House, spread the word, and more. Thank you for defending reproductive freedom and helping keep Maine a place where all people can make their own decisions about their own bodies.

Federal Court Allows Maine Man to Pursue Full Immigration Appeal

This week, a federal judge postponed the habeas hearing of Eyidi Ambila, ensuring that he will not be deported while pursuing his case in immigration court. Mr. Ambila has lived in the U.S. since age seven and has no current connection to his birth country, the Democratic Republic of Congo. The court agreed that there were still “many unanswered questions” about Mr. Ambila's case and whether the government has the ability to deport him. Mr. Ambila remains in ICE custody while he pursues is case with the Board of Immigration Appeals, arguing for protection under the Convention Against Torture. 

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Join us Friday at the No Kings! Nationwide Day of Defiance

Find the ACLU of Maine this Saturday at the No Kings! rally in Portland! We’ll be joining Indivisible Greater Portland, Indivisible Cumberland County, and Indivisible Southern Maine this Saturday, June 14, from 12 to 1:30 p.m. at Lincoln Park in Portland. This rally is part of a national mobilization to reject authoritarian power grabs and defend democracy. We’ll be there to stand in solidarity, hand out resources, and connect with our community.

Event details here