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Each issue, The Progressive poses one question to a panel of expert voices—writers, thinkers, politicians, artists, and others who help shape the national conversation. For our February/March 2025 issue, we asked: What laws and guardrails exist to restrain President Donald Trump?
Marjorie Cohn
Professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and dean of the People’s Academy of International Law
States, counties, and cities are crafting legal and political strategies to protect immigrants from Donald Trump’s mass deportations. Trump cannot rely solely on the federal government to carry out widespread immigration raids. He needs cooperation from state and local authorities.
Thirteen states and dozens of cities and counties are sanctuary jurisdictions. They have laws, ordinances, regulations, policies, and resolutions to shield immigrants from the clutches of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). These measures require refusing or prohibiting agencies from complying with ICE detainers—notices to local law enforcement agencies that ICE intends to take custody of an undocumented immigrant. They impose unreasonable conditions on the acceptance of detainers and prohibit ICE from interviewing incarcerated immigrants. And they prevent communication or information exchange between state or local law enforcement personnel and ICE agents.
More than 240 political leaders in sanctuary municipalities have received letters from Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, threatening them with criminal prosecution and twenty years in prison if they interfere with mass deportations. These threats are likely designed for intimidation. Similar threats were made during the first Trump Administration, which resulted in no prosecution.
During Trump’s first term, lawsuits halted many illegal administration policies, and legal organizations are preparing to fight back again. Congress members can obstruct anti-immigrant actions by convening oversight hearings, issuing subpoenas, and refusing to appropriate funding. Legislatures and city councils can erect firewalls between state and local resources and ICE. Schools can refrain from collecting data on their students that could be used to deport them and their families. And community organizations can conduct “Know Your Rights” workshops to help immigrants make plans in the event family members are detained or deported, and facilitate their access to legal representation.
Bill Blum
Attorney and former California administrative law judge, columnist with Truthdig, and a regular contributor to The Progressive
There are no impregnable legal guardrails left in the United States to prevent Donald Trump and Elon Musk from completing their neofascist takeover of the country. Our institutions have been hollowed out. Congress has been neutered. The GOP has joined the cult of the leader. The Democrats remain divided between their progressive and neoliberal wings. Federalism has been weakened as an antidote to Trumpism and the “unitary executive.” And with the exception of an occasional ruling against Trump, the U.S. Supreme Court has become an agent and enabler of MAGA and our emerging one-party state. What we still have is ourselves and our determination to resist Trumpism and oligarchy. As Timothy Snyder and other scholars of authoritarianism advise, the key is not to surrender in advance.