April 5 protests were a rebellion against fear

Will courage now be contagious?

Today’s political climate is full of fear, in a way that seemed unimaginable just a few short months ago.

Federal workers and foreign students have been punished for speaking out against the government. Law firms and universities are submitting to extortion. Immigrants are being abducted off the streets, some despite their legal status, and some being sent to a foreign torture prison without due process.

Even average Americans are suddenly wary of somehow ending up on the wrong side of a government that now routinely exacts personal retribution on its perceived enemies.

Steven Levitsky, the Harvard scholar and coauthor of “How Democracies Die,” last week described how wrong this is to Erica Chenoweth, another Harvard scholar who studies mass protests.

“In a democracy, it should not be costly or risky for an individual to publish an article criticizing the government [or] join a protest against the government -- providing it’s a legal, peaceful protest,” Levitsky said.

By contrast, “In an authoritarian regime, opposition is invariably costly, and risky.” He explained:

If you're a law firm that worked with either the Democratic party or civil society organizations that have opposed Trump, will you be blackballed and possibly driven into bankruptcy? If you're a university that is considered to be left of center or politically tilted towards the opposition, will you be targeted by massive funding cuts?... If you're a Republican lawmaker, will you face death threats if you get in the crosshairs of President Trump? The answer to all of those questions today, just 10 weeks into the Trump presidency, is: Yeah, quite plausibly.

And that is why April 5 was so important.

In Washington, D.C, more than 100,000 people stood side by side and engaged in an act of public courage. So did tens of thousands more in New York and Boston and Los Angeles and Chicago and Atlanta and Raleigh. All in all, organizers say that more than a million people protested in over 1,300 different locations in what was by far the largest one-day, nationwide display of public resistance in the second Trump term.

The question now is: Will that courage be contagious? Will it spread to include even more people – perhaps at May 1 events currently in the planning stages?

Will it embolden our elected leaders, and the leaders of civil society, to stand up to Trump’s lawlessness, chaos, and destruction, rather than bend the knee?

Author Jill Filipovic writes in Slate that “even if nothing changes right away—and nothing will change right away – we must get out and do it again and again. Because the point is not an immediate result from the White House on down. It’s to galvanize from the ground up—to put pressure on the powerful, and to forge a pathway for the public to collectively say ‘no’ to this devastating regime.” She continues:

Whatever dam of despair that kept so many Americans quiet or despondent has now broken. People flooded the streets with a popular and reasonable demand: Stop destroying the country. Trump is unlikely to listen. But the many powerful people who have folded or stayed silent or supported him? They might. Trump stands in the Oval Office only because so many are propping him up. This weekend’s protests were the first big strikes at that scaffolding.

From the stage at the Washington rally, Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman predicted that the day’s mass mobilization “will change the trajectory of Trump’s second term, overcoming fear and isolation among the public, defeating the notion of Trump’s inevitability, strengthening Democratic opposition and inspiring an ever larger movement to oppose Trump’s authoritarianism, corruption and handouts to billionaires and corporations.”

“It was big. It was beautiful. And it just might be the turning point for this country,” MoveOn wrote in a fundraising appeal. “We at MoveOn are planning to go even bigger. That’s what this moment and these unprecedented times demand. It’s going to take doubling the kinds of numbers we had on April 5 and then doubling them again, several times over, along with training people and equipping them with the tools to help organize their own communities, to build a movement powerful enough to stop Trump’s tyranny.”

If you haven’t already, you should read the coverage of the April 5 protests by the Guardian and the Associated Press. And spend a few minutes enjoying their wonderful photographs.

The New York Times and the Washington Post were among the national news organizations that buried their stories inside the paper – something media critics Parker Molloy and Margaret Sullivan appropriately bemoaned. But as this post from the Media and Democracy Project illustrates, it was big news in a lot of local markets – as it should have been.

Did you attend an April 5 protest? How did it go? And did you feel brave, or just angry? Leave a comment below.

‘Kill the Cuts’ Rallies on Tuesday

Omnibus rallies like April 5 draw the largest crowds, but you can’t hold them every week. So it’s the constant stream of issue-specific rallies that keep the momentum going in between

Case in point, thousands of university-affiliated protesters turned out on Tuesday for “Kill the Cuts” rallies around the country.

Organized by labor and higher education organizations, “Kill the Cuts” took aim specifically at the billions of dollars in federal research funding the Trump regime is cutting, much of it involving medical research.

“By cutting funds to lifesaving research and medical care, the Trump administration is abandoning families who are suffering and costing taxpayers billions of dollars,” organizers said. “These cuts are dangerous to our health, and dangerous to our economy.”

Hundreds of students, researchers and workers turned out at University of California campuses including UCLA, UCSF, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Riverside, Irvine, and Davis.

Protesters at the University of Washington staged a die-in.

In Washington, D.C., protesters gathered near the Capitol.

There were also rallies in Knoxville, Tenn., Philadelphia, Raleigh, and Newark.

The Stories That Focus Our Attention

The plight of individuals who immigration officials had no business abducting has become a flashpoint of concern and protest.

• Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father of three, was deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador last month without due process and on account of what the government now admits was an “administrative error.” An immigration judge had previously granted Abrego Garcia protection from deportation due to potential “serious harm” from gang members if he returned to El Salvador. The government has alleged, with no evidence, that Garcia Abrego was a ranking member of the MS-13 gang, but he has never been charged with a crime. A federal judge said Abrego Garcia’s deportation was “wholly lawless” and “shocks the conscience” -- and ordered him returned. But the Trump administration is refusing to comply and the Supreme Court on Monday paused the lower court’s deadline. Supporters have urged the government to “Bring Kilmar Home,”

• Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who helped lead student protests at Columbia University, faces deportation after being abducted in New York a month ago and taken to an ICE facility in Louisiana, where he remains. Khalil is a green-card holder married to a U.S. citizen, and has not been charged with any crime. Federal officials claim he led activities “aligned to Hamas”, ostensibly making him a threat to U.S. foreign policy. The ACLU has sued for his release. Among other protests, a group of Jewish students chained themselves to the gates at Columbia in support of Khalil last week

• Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and doctoral student at Tufts University, was abducted by masked homeland security agents on March 25. Officials have provided no explanation for why her student visa was terminated. Supporters suspect her only offense was writing an op-ed in the school’s newspaper a year ago criticizing Tufts’s response to the conflict in Gaza. A federal judge has blocked Ozturk from being deported, but she remains in custody in Louisiana. Multiple rallies have been held in her support.

• And then there is the somewhat heartening story of an unnamed family in the small community of Sackets Harbor, N.Y. – the hometown of border czar Tom Homan – who were abducted by ICE agents but then released after residents protested. A mother and her three school-age children were swept up in an immigration raid at a dairy farm that was targeting another immigrant. Nearly 1,000 people rallied to demand their release -- in a town that has a year-round population of about 1,400. The family was taken to a detention facility in Texas, but are now headed home.

In related news, 10 national unions and dozens of locals representing more than 3 million members have issued a joint statement demanding the release of immigrants including Abrego Garcia, Khalil, and Ozturk, as well as longtime farmworker organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez and green-card holder Lewelyn Dixon.

Resistance… From Republicans in Congress?

Several Republicans in Congress are discussing how and whether to curb Trump’s tariffs. Sens. Chuck Grassley and Mitch McConnell are among those supporting a bipartisan bill that would require Trump to notify Congress of any new tariffs within 48 hours and provide analysis and reason for their purpose. It would also end any tariff that Congress doesn’t approve within 60 days.

Similarly, a handful of House Republicans have co-sponsored a bipartisan bill that would restore collective bargaining for federal employees after a Trump executive order that seeks to cancel union contracts across a large number of agencies

The Week in Lawsuits

The Supreme Court gave the Trump regime two tentative wins this week, both based on technicalities. One ruling allowed Trump to continue to deport immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 under certain conditions -- because the case was filed in the wrong venue. (The ACLU on Wednesday refiled the case in Texas.) The other ruling paused a trial judge’s order requiring the administration to reinstate fired probationary workers -- because the plaintiffs lacked standing.

Meanwhile, lower courts keep handing Trump defeats on the merits.

• A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked Trump’s move to cut $11 billion in public health funding after 23 states and the District of Columbia sued to keep the funding intact.

• A federal judge on Friday ordered a permanent injunction blocking a Trump administration policy that would slash billions in research overhead payments to universities, academic medical centers, and other grant-receiving institutions.

• A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the White House to restore the Associated Press’s full access to cover presidential events, affirming that the First Amendment does not allow the government to punish the news organization for the content of its speech.

• And the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday reinstated two members of independent federal agencies who were wrongfully dismissed.

New Resources

• Some Black church leaders are leading the resistance, as I noted last month. But where are the rest of the faith leaders? Protect Democracy now has a toolkit for faith leaders, encouraging them to join the fight. “As an authoritarian president consolidates power in the United States, now is the time for religious leaders and communities in the United States to organize and mobilize,” the group says.

• PEN America, the free expression group, is keeping track of all the words being scrubbed from government websites and documents. The list now includes more than 250 words and phrases, many of them related to diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as climate change and vaccines. PEN’s list is in part compiled from lists reported by the New York Times, Reuters, the Washington Post, Propublica, Science, Gizmodo, 404 Media, and Popular Information.

• Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) is holding a series of “resistance labs” intended to “educate people about how democracies fall” and about “the most effective non-violent resistance tactics, frameworks and principles.” The next one is on Zoom on Sunday. Resistance Lab: Virtual Organizing Training 101 will “help people turn anger, fear and frustration into action, and to help ensure we are strike-ready and street-ready,” Jayapal says. More than 15,000 people have signed up already.