The MeidasTouch Podcast - ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero on Trump Lawsuits

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on the heroic actions of the ACLU to stop Trump’s unlawful actions and Meiselas interviews the ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero on their lawsuits, their planning, and their future plans. Visit https://meidasplus.com for more! Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Lawsuits against the Trump regime for disappearing migrants. Lawsuits against the Trump regime and Elon Musk for stealing people's data. Lawsuits against the Trump regime in order to get access to information what Trump and Elon Musk and Doge are doing. Lawsuits against the Trump regime for discrimination against LGBTQ rights and the targeting of the trans community. Lawsuits against the Trump regime for attacking the Department of Education and book bans. Lawsuits against the Trump regime for revoking student visas and throwing foreign students into detention centers without due process on the front lines of it all. Holding the United States away from dictatorship is the ACLU who filed lawsuits on all of those

areas and more. I could probably spend 10 minutes listing all of the areas and topics, but I want to bring in ACLU's executive director, Anthony Romero, and of course, the big win by the ACLU in the Supreme Court, blocking the deportation of the second group of migrant victims that the Trump regime wanted to send to a concentration camp in El Salvador. And one of the points I just want to mention about that case that people don't know necessarily is how that ACLU legal team, they were calling the district court judge. They were calling the court of appeals and the Trump regime was lying. And they were saying, trust us, bro. We're not going to do anything with those migrants while they were

loading the buses with the migrants. And your team, Anthony Romero was calling the district court judge, like, don't call me ex parte communication. Your team's like, what are you talking about? This is an emergency. The Supreme Court listened. I just want to, on behalf of the millions of people who follow us here at the Midas Touch Network, and I'm speaking for everybody who loves democracy, thank you for your work at the ACLU, Anthony Romero, my pleasure. Yeah. And they turned those buses around. We got the call from the Supreme Court. I think the clerk called at 1 a.m. to tell us about the order. And that was over the Easter weekend. It's been crazy, Ben. I mean, we've had we have filed 39 lawsuits thus far and we'd be here all day if we had to talk about all of them. You've got the major points. The highlights. Perfect. Well, you know, what people don't realize is that the only reason that the district court and the Fifth Circuit ruled against the you all representing the migrants before it got to the Supreme Court was because Trump and his DOJ was saying, you don't have anything to worry about. We're going to give these migrants a hearing. They'll get their habeas corpus based on what the Supreme Court said before. But they were lying. They were lying while they were loading up. That was the issue.

Totally. And when they're saying reasonable notice, they were trying to say that reasonable notice would be as little as 12 hours to give someone notice that they're being deported out of the country into a third country. I mean, these are Venezuelans being moved to El Salvador. It's one of the worst prisons in the world. And the notice they were giving them were documents in English that they could not fully apprehend. So, I mean, that really is going to kind of, I think, stick in the craw of the Supreme Court. When they say reasonable notice, you can't say a paper that the person can't read within 12 hours and we just shuffle you out of the country into a third-party country and lock you up possibly for the rest of your life in the most dangerous prison in the Western Hemisphere.

And that's saying a lot. It's really, I don't think it's going to apply. Look, the ACLU has always met the moment, but you were particularly ready to meet the moment here with these dozens of lawsuits at a high level. Can you, a lot of people after the election, they were saying, I don't know what to do. People were down, but that's when you all were building your team. You were preparing for this. Just maybe talk at a high level about the strategy to stop. It's been about a year before the election. Right. Because, you know, I don't know what's going to the future portends. But I know I'm overly neurotic and I prepare for the worst case. And so we have been marching through organizational plans even before when even Biden was in the race.

And then when Kamala Harris got into the race, we were planning out for what we would do if Trump were to win the presidency a second time. We know his playbook from the first time around. At that time, we filed 434 legal actions against the Trump administration. But we knew the same playbook would not work in Trump 2.0. And so we needed to redouble our efforts and rethink it.

So we issued a bunch of public documents, I think seven memos all in, analyzing the Trump campaign's promises on all these different issue areas, abortion, voting rights, immigrants, free speech. But then we spent a lot of time internally kind of studying like how would we operationalize those plans? And so that's why on the first day when he signed the executive order trying to undo birthright citizenship, we can talk about, I think it's trampling on hollowed ground,

right? But we were able to file our lawsuit first of any other organization or entity within two hours of him signing that executive order because we had figured out the theories. We had figured out where we're going to file. We had identified clients, pregnant women, immigrants in the jurisdiction we wanted to file whose kids would be born after the executive order would go into effect and whose kids would be stripped of U.S. citizenship. So we had kind of gained it all out. And then, so when we saw that the executive order was coming down the pike, we were ready to hit play. And that's been our playbook all throughout. I mean, even with the Alien Enemies Act,

we had kind of mapped out a bunch of those issues. Now, some of this we're having to make up in real time because the facts are changing, the circumstances are changing, the rulings from the supreme court or the district courts require us to to to be nimble and to uh and to change our strategy as it evolves but but the the level of there were literally thousands of aclu staff hours spent on a trump strategy even before the election and then then after he became president, we had to get even

W-more ready. Preparation, preparation, preparation, and fluidity. You mentioned birthrights, the citizenship. So that case is going before the Supreme Court oral arguments on May 15th. You were the first to file. Talk to us about what you expect to happen there. Were you surprised that the Supreme Court granted certiorari on that to hear it? Did you expect it? So this one is not our case. This is a series of other cases brought by state attorneys general. And so it's more on the procedural matter around birthright citizenship about whether or not they have standing to bring this case and whether or not a federal judge should be able to grant a nationwide injunction across the whole country. So it's going to be on the more limited procedural

issues, but obviously we'll be waiting to see leaves like everybody else to see that when ultimately the full question is broached. Can Donald Trump, by executive order, revoke birthright citizenship? So let's break it down for a second because for me this is the one of the most important cases we've got, right? Birthright citizenship was put in place to fix America's original sin with chattel slavery. It's how we took the children of slaves and made them citizens. It is hollowed ground. The 14th amendment was the way in which we perfected this American experiment in democracy and equality under the law. It's also the way that we ensured that after generations

of immigrants came to our nation's shores, that we were all equal citizens under the law. If you were born here, you're an American, period, right? So this idea that we're going to kind of delve into a person's family background, if your mother or your father were not U.S. citizens, if they were not here lawfully, that we will deny you citizenship, it really is a massive power grab on some of the most critical set of issues that affect this country, like who we are as a people, the fact that we are a nation of immigrants, of all people equal under the law, the fact that we are a nation of immigrants, of all people, equal under the law, right? And so that's why, for me, this is one of the most important cases, because if he is allowed to undo birthright citizenship with an executive order,

something that's in the statute, it's been codified in statute, and it's in the Constitution, right? It's the 14th Amendment. Then we really are in much more perilous ground than I think we want to be. So that's why this first case is really about, it should have been want to but this one they've granted oral argument surprising to many i'm going to try to get down there for may 15th we want to see ultimately how they might be stacking up i think we win this one i've been betting on this one i don't usually bet because the supreme court always breaks my heart but i think this one even we get some of the kind of conservatives like the textualists like uh like justice gorsuch how could he not rule that the plain language both in the statute and in the 14th amendment governed here um but we'll have to see how the uh how the procedural arguments go on the 15th and then it will be back up at the court, I think, on the merits at some subsequent point.

The ACLU prepared a lot for what was going to happen in Trump 2.0. The fact that Elon Musk and Doge has played such a prominent role as a wrecking ball and a hostile takeover of the federal government, government cruelly firing people with a glee of stripping people's dignity while stripping away essential services. The ACLU has been on the front line of many lawsuits there and many lawsuits gathering the information which Musk and Trump want to avoid just turning over what they're even doing and what data they're gathering on people. Can you speak to the Musk factor and the ACLU's battle there? Sure, sure. And here we played a role, but frankly, there have been other groups that have really carried more of the burden and pulled the sled more than we have. Public Citizen, Democracy Forward, two of our sister groups have really played a tremendous role in challenging the elimination of workers from the

workforce out of DOGE. What we've done is the ACLU in the early days decided to kind of carpet bomb, probably the wrong metaphor, I'm sure, but to kind of drop over 40 Freedom of Information Acts on the federal agencies, telling them, tell us what information DOGE is accessing and for what purpose and on whom, right? We use FOIA, Freedom of Information Act, as democracy's x-ray. It's a way to make sure that you have sight lines into what's happening in our democracy when a government like this one is so opaque and so non-transparent. So recently, I think just yesterday, we then converted some of those actions into full-on lawsuits because they've been dragging their feet on giving us the data on veterans, on whether or not the IRS is turning over data on immigrants. And so that will

give us the material with which to file subsequent lawsuits as well. There have been a whole series of other suits that other groups have filed, like Public Cities, like I mentioned, and Democracy Forward, on the rights of federal government employees. Obviously, AFG, the Government Workers Union for Federal Workers, has been deeply involved with it. And one of the things that I will say, Ben, on your podcast is that this is such a moment

that the level of coordination among different organizations has been nothing like I've seen in my 24 years as head of the ACLU. It is brilliant. They say they're shocked and awing us. I am shocked and awed at the level of coordination, of goodwill, of sharing of resources, of passing the baton so that we can all run this relay. And so this is not just an ACLU battle. This is really a whole ecosystem of nonprofit organizations, of lawyers who are going to hold the government's feet to the fire. Anthony, do you have hope?

Where do we go from here? Well, we've got to take it every day. You don't give up an inch. Everything they try to accomplish, we must make them fight for, right? Every step of the way. That's why the capitulation of these law firms and of some of these universities was so disheartening to me. Those were moments where I just said, damn, I mean, you cannot give that up without a fight. You've got to make sure if they're going to grab more ground, every inch

they have to battle us for. And that's why I am really proud on our lawyers on the Alien Enemies Act case. This is the case on behalf of the Venezuelans who they want to kind of move out of the country. Some of them they moved, some of them they were not able to, and say that they have invoked the 1798 statute, the Alien Enemies Act statute, to say that they have the ability to deny people due process and remove them to third-party countries. I mean, it is incredible to me. We've had the lawyers pull all-nighters. You know, when the Supreme Court said, well, now you have to file habeas petitions in each of the different jurisdictions, most of the people would have said, we got up and did it, right? So we started filing habeas after habeas in every single one of these district courts. We will do that. And then they're saying, oh no, now we need to kind of have a more

better knowledge around the due process or the notice requirements, we are tracking it then. And part of what we need to do collectively is not surrender an inch without a pitched battle. Make them fight for every little success, because that is what we're here for. And when they try to intimidate us, which they're trying to do now, there's all these rumors around executive orders are going to come down. They're going to come down on environmental groups or immigrants groups or democracy groups. We don't know. We'll have to wait and see. We are already so well organized to make sure that we do not see an inch without giving it everything we've got collectively. So when there's another group of migrants that the Trump regime wants to send to concentration camps, no matter where they are, 50 state strategy,

thousand city strategy, district courts everywhere, the ACLU is there, they've got lawyers general or litigating, like the birthright citizenship case that's not our case that's the cases of the attorneys general from the blue states i love it i love it i mean it's just like we have to divide and conquer there's way too much going on and so you know the case in maryland not my case someone else is of abrigo garcia um they're handling a they're doing a beautiful job on that case and we're talking talking with them. We're sharing notes. We're comparing. We're sharing information. But I think this is one of those moments when you really have to kind of divide up the work. And especially if the executive orders that are anticipated are coming down, it will be targeting kind of the weaker parts of the nonprofit ecosystem.

Then we all have a responsibility to kind of show up and stand up in solidarity and do everything we can. Let me ask you this as well. You know, in addition to all the things that you've said there, what happens, though, if the Trump regime does not follow these orders? I mean, I think you've been asked that before. What if, you know, you're doing all the work, you get the orders? I mean, right now there's a nine that before. What if, you know, you're doing all the work, you get the orders. I mean, right now there's a nine to zero Supreme Court order that says facilitate the return of a brago in the Maryland case. I know a different group handling that. But what happens if they just say, you know what, we're not following these orders? What do we do? We've got to build the public momentum and support for this.

So that means the time and the narrative is on our side, right? So you have to then continue to use all the legal procedures to put the screws tighter into them, right? So civil sanctions, right? And just if they kind of defy openly a court order, then we can ask the judges to start imposing civil sanctions on those government officials who are openly defying the order. There'll be a whole process by which to determine and adjudicate culpability, like who's actually thumbing their nose in the courts. We take that. That's a good process for us, Ben, because we're not going to be able to kind of turn people out on a dime like this one. We've got to bring people along in the narrative, show them the impunity with which this government is operating and thumbing its nose at the rule of law. We're going to have to grab the right of center with us.

We have to bring corporations with us. A government that openly defies rule of law and decides to disregard judicial orders is a government that will not be good for corporate interests. It will completely crater the ability for corporations. If you gut the ability for the judicial system to adjudicate right and wrong and hold people accountable, that's going to be very bad for business. We're going to have to drag those groups with us, bring them along, convert people as we go. And that's why I think ultimately when the government says, oh, I'm not going to listen to the Supreme Court on the Venezuelan case. I'm going to ship them out without due process, without giving them the notice of requirement, without giving them documents that are required. At the final end stage, that's got to be a political solution

where people say, no, no, that's not the country we live in. The federal government and one president does not have the ability to openly disregard the law. and the Alien Enemies Act case, has continued to probe the issue about whether or not they are in violation and had proceeded with criminal contempt in his matters. I think that's great because it slowly builds the narrative where people say, whoa, this is going way too far. And then people ultimately will have to vote with their own feet and with their own political power. We've got to let them know that this will not be accepted by large numbers of people.

It can't be for lawyers. This can't be a crisis for people like me. It's got to be a crisis for people all across this country, ordinary folk. Anthony, if people who are watching this want to help or they want to learn more about the cases and what ACLU is up to, where do they go? What can they do? On our website, we have everything on our website. It's constantly updated. We also have an organizing platform, People Power, where people can sign up, be trained. We'll give them materials. We'll give them information. I want to make sure that they sign up for multiple groups. I mean, there are other groups that are also doing really important

work. This is not one stop shopping, right? There's no way to save our democracy with one click of the button. So you got to sign up with Democracy Forward. You got to sign up with Public Citizen. There's a whole bunch of other groups. Planned Parenthood, especially as they find themselves in the crosshairs of being defunded. Critically important. We defend that institution.

This is a time for people to really engage the organizations and the causes that matter most. If he goes after the environmental groups, oh my God, we've got a swarm, right? There's a whole discussion about whether or not they're going to go after the environmental groups because of their advocacy around climate justice. And, you know, I think this is one of the things that the American people, I saw this in Trump 1.0. You know, we had filed this lawsuit on family separation. Great lawsuit. We won in court. Where we really won was in the court of public opinion.

When people said, oh, no, you can't take kids away from their mothers as a way to kind of deter them from coming to this country. That's cruel. That's torture and when people finally from celebrities and artists and ordinary people laura bush right former first lady you know not known for her activism especially on social media when they finally all came out that's when they realized we've got it backtracked and that's exactly what we've got to build for here anthony romero executive director of the aclu for joining us. And we hope you come back to share updates on everything the ACLU is doing. Thank you, Ben. I love listening to you. So keep going. Thank you, everybody. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 5 million subscribers.

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