It can happen here. In fact, it is happening here.
Forced disappearances. People seized and deported for political speech or imprisoned abroad without due process. Mass firings of federal workers. The gutting of federal agencies and safety-net programs that have been in place for generations. A judge in Milwaukee arrested and paraded in handcuffs for not cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The speed and sheer lawlessness of the Trump Administration’s campaign of destruction is head-spinning.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed, and that’s the point. If people feel terrified and powerless, they won’t resist—perfect conditions for an aspiring dictator.
I recently spoke to some attorneys in my home state of Wisconsin who have thrust aside despair and are working to combat Donald Trump’s assault on civil liberties and the rule of law. By doing what they can where they are, they are making a difference. Their example shines a light for all of us. Instead of retreating from the avalanche of bad news, “We can do something,” as Grant Sovern, an immigration attorney in Madison, tells me.
Sovern leads the Community Immigration Law Center (CILC), one of about thirty-five organizations around the country set up to defend immigrants facing the threat of deportation. He and the attorneys with whom he works are frantically raising money to provide legal help to immigrants in Dane County, and hope to eventually expand services to the entire state.
At CILC, Sovern and his colleagues have been working on cases since the first Trump Administration, defending people against deportation. The group’s mission is to ensure that everyone in Dane County who needs an immigration attorney gets one. It’s a significant step toward upholding the rule of law generally.
“Not everyone is actually deportable who ICE thinks is deportable,” Sovern says. “Maybe ICE has it wrong . . . . People don’t know. You need an advocate who knows the rules.”
Sovern points to an evaluation of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, the nation’s first public defender service for immigrants facing deportation. The project provides lawyers to all low-income immigrants facing deportation proceedings in New York City. Before the project, only 4 percent of those challenging deportation were successful. Once they were provided with attorneys, the rate of success rose to 48 percent.
“So half of the people who were being deported shouldn’t be,” Sovern says. “It’s not like these lawyers were getting around the law. They were applying the rules.”
Even under the current administration, applying the rules makes a difference. At this moment, “when everyone feels so hopeless,” Sovern says, CILC is demonstrating that “we can do something.”
Some of the nonprofit law firm’s clients have been going through immigration court proceedings for years. Others are new clients who are challenging deportation orders and winning.
The U.S. Supreme Court has responded cautiously to the Trump Administration’s overreach as it deports people without due process. So far, it has temporarily applied the brakes on Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act in a middle-of-the-night emergency order on April 19 and by insisting that deportees’ cases be heard in the courts where they are located.
For people Trump is targeting with the novel use of that obscure 1798 wartime law, “the only due process you have is this habeas corpus petition,” Sovern explains—a petition demanding that the government bring people it has detained before a court and justify their detention.
Sovern knows one of the lawyers who wrote the habeas petition for Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University graduate student who was snatched off the street in Somerville by masked federal agents and spirited away to a Louisiana detention center. Öztürk’s lawyers filed a petition on her behalf in Massachusetts within five hours, Sovern says, but it was too late. Neither her attorneys nor her friends and family knew where she was, and she was unable to speak to her lawyers until after she was flown out of state.
In Vermont, a state Öztürk traveled through as government agents were taking her to Louisiana, U.S. District Judge William Sessions ruled that she must be returned to New England no later than May 1 to determine whether she was illegally detained for co-writing an op-ed piece in her student newspaper supporting Palestinian victims of the war in Gaza. Then, on May 9, Sessions ordered her release after she had spent six weeks in ICE detention.
“It is really dramatic how much it takes,” Sovern says of the struggle against Trump’s war on immigrants, due process, and civil liberties. But he and his colleagues are rising to the challenge.
CILC’s goal is to be prepared for anything. “As long as we have some process, we are going to make that available,” Sovern says. “It’s going to cost a lot, and we’ll need expert lawyers to do it. But we’re going to find a way. If the Supreme Court and the court system give people any type of due process at all, we have to be ready.”
Another Wisconsin lawyer who is challenging authoritarianism is Jeff Mandell, co-founder of Law Forward, a law firm focused on voting rights that brought the first case against the Republican fake electors who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“I don’t think any of us fully anticipated how heavy, broad, fast, and extreme the onslaught was going to be,” Mandell concedes, referring to Trump’s efforts to seize unprecedented power, weaponize the federal government against his political enemies, defy court orders, and throw the entire global economy into chaos.
“Some of what we are seeing and hearing is so contrary to our most fundamental understanding of what we believe about our government, I have to believe this is temporary and that people won’t stand for it,” Mandell says.
Since its founding in October 2020, Law Forward has pursued high-profile lawsuits that have helped claw back democracy in Wisconsin. The firm challenged the state’s now defunct gerrymandered voting maps and uncovered the details of the fake electors scheme that originated here—forcing the Republican officials who cast fraudulent Electoral College ballots for Trump in 2020 to admit they were trying to subvert the will of the voters. On the public website Law Forward created to display the details of this scheme, which it obtained as a condition of a settlement, the organization states that it wants to show “how close our democracy came to toppling and how the freedom to vote must continue to be protected, not taken for granted.”
As a Wisconsin-based organization, Law Forward looks for opportunities to pursue cases that are of particular importance to the state and that shine a light on threats to democracy.
“The rest of the time we don’t sit in paralysis because of the news,” Mandell says. Whatever fresh hell is erupting across the country, the attorneys at Law Forward “continue to work here so people see an alternative.”
The ten-point margin in the recent state supreme court election, in which progressive-backed candidate Susan Crawford defeated Brad Schimel, who was supported by Trump and benefited from millions of dollars from billionaire Elon Musk, “reinforces my conviction that the majority of Wisconsinites really do believe in democracy,” Mandell says.
A few weeks after MAGA lost its bid to disempower the progressive female majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Trump Administration sent federal agents to arrest Judge Hannah Dugan at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Dugan is accused of helping a defendant in her courtroom evade ICE officers who came to arrest him there. Trump’s attorney general and the man he chose to lead the FBI gleefully posted pictures of Dugan’s “perp walk” in handcuffs, crowing about this unprecedented assault on the dignity and authority of a judge and the sovereignty of local courts. The charges against Dugan are extremely thin. On April 25, she was charged with a misdemeanor and a felony, the latter only having been used in two other instances in more than a half century. The man she ushered through a side door in her courtroom emerged into a public hallway where federal agents saw him, followed him outside and arrested him. The ongoing case is an important test of Trump’s ability to upend the rule of law by intimidating judges.
Mobilizing citizens on the state level matters in the national struggle. And protecting independent, democratic institutions on the state and local level can serve as a model for the rest of the country, reminding people what civil society looks like. As Mandell sees it, “building a stronger, more resilient democracy in Wisconsin is its own form of resistance.”
“There is no one silver bullet,” Mandell says. “But the goal is to continue to tend the lamp here in Wisconsin, to shine a light that illuminates the path to balance, order, and democracy.”