Protecting Immigrant Communities: The Role of the Courts and Civil Society

Through three presidential election cycles, President Donald Trump has repeatedly made his xenophobic and racist intentions clear. When announcing his presidential bid in June 2015 he referred to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and drug dealers, only allowing that “some…are good people.” During a campaign rally in December 2023, he accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.” During another campaign stop in April 2024, Trump defended his use of the word “animals” to describe migrants. “No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals,” he said. More recently, Trump has called Somali immigrants “garbage.”

During his second term, Trump has sought to transform his dehumanizing rhetoric into policy, launching what he has described as the “largest deportation operation in American history.” As explained elsewhere in this report, this campaign has been met with stiff resistance in the court of law. The judiciary has consistently ruled that the administration’s deportation policies violate basic constitutional rights. In addition, Trump’s attempt to strip babies of birthright citizenship via executive order—a measure aimed directly at immigrant communities—has been stymied so far, with the courts finding that the president’s fiat violates the U.S. Constitution. (The Supreme Court is set to rule on this issue in June or July 2026).

This essay highlights additional ways the pro-democracy coalition, including Democracy Defenders Fund (DDF), has successfully challenged Trump’s anti-immigrant policies in the courts. Specifically, the pro-democracy coalition helped force the administration to withdraw the National Guard from America’s cities. The president sought to rely on the National Guard to buttress his mass deportation efforts. But the state governments of California and Illinois, with support from dozens of cities and states including Los Angeles and Chicago, ultimately thwarted the administration’s attempt to federalize the National Guard.

This essay also briefly details the role that civil society—including union leaders and politicians—has played in opposing the administration’s mass deportation operation. They have put their lives and livelihoods on the line to stand up for Latino and immigrant communities. These examples are not intended to suggest that the threat has entirely receded. Far from it: people are still being deprived of their rights and even their lives.

The Threat to America’s Cities

With Congress’s help, the administration has secured the funds to create a “deportation industrial complex,” which it plans to use to deport upwards of 1 million immigrants per year. This program has already been deadly for the people swept up in its wide net. More people died in ICE custody in 2025 than any year since 2004, tied for the worst year ever. Last year was even more deadly for ICE detainees than 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic.

At the end of 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was holding a record high number of people. Experts estimate that the administration has subjected thousands of people—including pregnant mothers, seniors, students, and families with young children—to conditions that could constitute violations of human rights under various United Nations treaties and conventions. In one of the most egregious cases, the administration, in violation of a federal court order and without proper notice, violated the due process rights of hundreds of migrants by detaining and transferring them to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador. Detainees were given no opportunity to contact family or legal counsel and were abruptly removed from tracking systems, leaving heartbroken relatives without answers. One father, whose teenage son was believed to be imprisoned at CECOT, said, “I feel like my son was kidnapped. I’ve spent countless hours searching for him…no one has given me any information or provided a single document about his case.” Despite being freed from CECOT and sent to their home country via a “prisoner swap,” Venezuelan migrants have not yet had the opportunity to challenge their detention and deportation.

In November 2025, Trump called for ICE to be even more aggressive. And indeed it has been in the months since. Earlier this month, for instance, an ICE Agent shot and killed Renee Good—a mother of three driving a Honda Pilot that included her children’s stuffed animals—in Minneapolis. Good immediately became a symbol of the administration’s depravity. Trump’s administration did not value Good’s life. Nor does it value the lives of the many migrants it seeks to detain and deport. The administration is determined to deport millions of immigrants in this country.

For that reason, the pro-democracy coalition’s efforts to stop the administration from escalating its unconstitutional campaign even further are crucial for defending America’s democracy.

Getting the National Guard Out of Our Cities

The democracy ecosystem, from state and local governments to civil society groups and grassroots organizers, responded to attacks on human dignity and family integrity by pursuing actions at different levels, against different actors, at key choke points in the legal system—precisely the points the administration sought to mobilize to carry out its attack on immigrants and Latinos.

One crucial choke point quickly emerged: Trump’s attempt to deploy the military throughout the country by commandeering states’ National Guards. While immigration, customs, and certain related laws fall within the federal government’s sphere, the administration realized that its program of mass deportation demands an immense expenditure of federal resources—far more than were available in the ordinary course of executive business. This drove the administration to use tools beyond the executive’s lawful authority in order to execute that campaign, including by mobilizing the military domestically.

The pro-democracy coalition, including Democracy Defenders Fund, focused its legal opposition to these measures by representing and working with cities and states to resist federal encroachment on state and local sovereignty. When Trump mobilized the federal government’s military to patrol the streets of American cities, the democracy ecosystem worked—successfully, in many cases—to eject them through the courts.

For example, when the administration deployed the National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles, the state of California filed suit to enforce the state’s and the city's sovereignty, as well as to prevent the administration from intentionally inflaming protests against its anti-immigration regime. The state, supported by Democracy Defenders Fund on behalf of our client, the city of Los Angeles, ultimately won in court. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, of the Northern District of California, found that the administration’s argument was “profoundly un-American,” arguing that the logic it used to justify sending federal troops to quell nonviolent protests would “run headfirst into the First Amendment.”

Trump subsequently called up the Oregon National Guard and attempted to commandeer California's National Guard for deployment to Portland in response to nonviolent protests against an ICE facility—protests that included people in blow-up costumes. The states, supported by a coalition of state and local governments, as well as civil society organizations, filed suit and won an important injunction. After a long fight, the coalition secured a crucial victory when a Trump-appointed federal judge permanently enjoined the deployment in a 105-page ruling after a three-day bench trial. Finally, on Jan. 6, 2026, the last 100 Oregon National Guards troops, who were called up but never deployed, were allowed to return home.

The administration then attempted to send the military to Chicago, ostensibly to protect ICE agents. Illinois and Chicago, supported by a coalition of other states and cities, filed suit. And when that lawsuit made it to the Supreme Court, the justices rejected the administration’s request to stay its loss in the lower court, dealing Trump his biggest loss yet in his attempt to exercise federal control over the country's law enforcement apparatus in service of his anti-immigrant policies.

As a result, on New Year's Eve, Trump unceremoniously announced that the National Guard was being withdrawn from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland. These cities and states worked together in solidarity to protect each other, their citizens, residents, and communities—and won. This sent a powerful statement that despite the administration's claims, executive authority remains limited and these states and cities will fight to protect their most vulnerable and targeted communities.

These lawsuits were far more than legal fights over questions of police power and federalism; they were about standing up to the apparatus of federal power that the administration would need to deploy to wage its full campaign against immigrant and Latino communities. The administration’s actions were meant to strike fear, to condition Americans to accept troops patrolling their streets. Every time such an overreach is normalized, with servicemembers carrying weapons of war into American cities, the line between democracy and authoritarianism fades—until one day, as the military appears in every city and every community, it disappears.

That is why the pro-democracy coalition’s success in this regard has been so crucially important.

Individual Stories of Resistance to the Administration’s Inhumane Policies

The First Amendment is a key tool for opposing Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, including the administration’s mass deportations. The more the government witnesses public dissent, and people express their fear and anger nonviolently, the more difficult it becomes to sustain popular support for its policies. Mass nonviolent protests, a critical form of dissent, are often shaped by individual acts of public protest, as people put themselves on the line to support their communities. While there were far too many campaigners to mention here, it is worth highlighting two American leaders who put their lives and livelihoods at risk for their friends and neighbors.

David Huerta, president of SEIU California and SEIU-USWW, was arrested and taken into federal custody while protesting nonviolently for immigrant rights in Los Angeles in June 2025. As a union leader and worker advocate, Huerta was among the loudest advocates in a protest outside of a garment store raided by ICE. Agents targeted him in the crowd—arresting him, and only him—for his leadership during the protest. Allies in the pro-democracy ecosystem represent him in court and have already gotten his charges reduced to a misdemeanor.

Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) was arrested when she was unlawfully prohibited from making an oversight visit to Delaney Hall, a facility being used as an immigrant detention center in her district, which includes parts of Newark, New Jersey. When Rep. McIver tried to enter the detention center to help the mayor of Newark, who was being aggressively arrested, Trump’s former U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, Alina Habba, charged her with forcibly interfering with their work. The video shows Rep. McIver trying to help while agents ramped things up. While her allies and lawyers helped get two of those charges immediately dismissed, and Democracy Defenders Fund helped to successfully remove Habba from office, Rep. McIver still faces prosecution.

The Path Ahead

The fight for immigrant rights against deportation is complex, in part because there are so many different avenues that the administration can pursue in its campaign of terror. America’s laws, much like other nations’ legal systems, make it hard to address a widespread pattern of conduct orchestrated and carried out by many actors within a government. Stopping the administration from deploying the military into our cities and protecting people's individual right to protest are prerequisites to any successful challenge. But they are just that: prerequisites. Far more battles in the court of law and public opinion remain ahead.

Importantly, the attack against immigrants and Americans born of immigrants remains in its nascency. Even the legal battles that the pro-deemocracy coalition has won so far are not finished. Trump may invoke the Insurrection Act in an attempt to override state sovereignty and redeploy the military to terrorize immigrant communities. Rep. McIver and Mr. Huerta still face the possibility of unjust incarceration. As discussed elsewhere in this report, the administration has already telegraphed its willingness to reject and skirt court orders in immigration-related cases. All of these threats make the pro-democracy coalition’s work in defense of constitutional and statutory rights paramount.

That is why Democracy Defenders Fund is working so closely with every part of the pro-democracy movement. Protecting protesters and advocates is a crucial task. So is filing major lawsuits on behalf of affected communities. These are critical and complementary missions. Neither is sufficient alone, which is why the democracy ecosystem works on both fronts.