ACLU has got a ‘whole game plan’ to pressure local officials into blocking Trump’s agenda

"Tell me about how you at the ACLU are thinking about your plans to try to defend American civil liberties in this term versus the first term?" Maddow asked. The ACLU has spent the past several years bringing lawsuits against states that ban child sex changes, claiming that to do so is discriminatory based on sex. They have also worked hard to make sure that men who claim to be women can gain access to women's prisons.

"Well, we've been planning for almost a year," Romero said. "We were anticipating the possibility that he would win this election. So we've spent thousands of staff hours studying Project 2025, tracking the campaign promises, going back and playing back what happened in Trump 1.0 to see what might happen with Trump 2.0 and so we've been trying to get ready for this whole period of time."

Romero admitted that they "can't run the same playbook" that they did during the first Trump term. In fact, the "resistance" hasn't materialized. As soon as Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Democrats and leftists began actively opposing Trump with everything they could come up with, from false claims of Russia collusion to wearing pink knitted hats and marching on Washington. The plan was not to "resist" anything specific, but to "resist" Trump himself, everything he stood for everything he tried to do. This time, Trump has a high approval rating before taking office and a mandate to create policy based on his campaign promises.

"Litigation is going to be key," Romero said, noting that Trump's team is "more aggressive, smarter," and "faster off the block" than they were during the first term. "The courts still are a place we would have to turn to. We have to be wide-eyed that the courts are also increasingly conservative, and he will appoint new judges into the courts," he said.

Maddow asked about the ACLU's plans as regards aiding local governments in violating or circumventing federal laws. Romero said that the ACLU has been in discussions with "local governments, the state attorneys general, the governor, the mayors. We have this whole plan around a firewall for freedom," he said. "We call it the idea that these local officials can really play an important role in stopping the worst of the government abuse."

Trump's incoming border czar Tom Homan has said that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement would need to work with local authorities to conduct the mass deportation plans Trump has promised after the Biden administration circumvented border laws themselves to admit over 2 million illegal immigrants per year, by conservative estimates. Romero is telling local leaders not to comply with federal directives.

"For instance," Romero said, "when they're going to try to detain, deport all these hundreds of thousands, up to a million people, that's an operation that they have the legal power to do, to do the raids, but the logistics—and they're going to need mayors and governors or city councils to either give them access to police officers—or not, jails. Where are you gonna house all these folks?"

Romero said that the ACLU was working on executive orders "and organizing our folks to put pressures on elected officials so they don't roll over. They should sever these relationships they have with the federal government on immigration enforcement. They should make sure that our prisons and our jails are off-limits. They should begin to think about what actions they could take to pardon immigrants who have a criminal record because they drove with a suspended license. Well, let's take them out of harm's way."

Maddow was on board, "they could do that now," she said.

"There's a whole game plan for this," Romero said.