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“Trump is making clear that if he can do that to the world’s richest man, he could certainly do it to you,” said Ian Bassin, co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy. “It’s important, if we believe in the rule of law, that we believe in it whether it is being weaponized against someone that we have sympathy for or someone that we have lost sympathy for.”
“Every week we’re seeing new examples of this administration demanding or sharing sensitive government data for unprecedented uses,” said Nicole Schneidman, who heads the technology and data governance team at Protect Democracy, a nonprofit legal center that describes its mission as “defeating the authoritarian threat.” Schneidman said Americans should understand “the data that they have entrusted to state governments right now is truly a target.”
“Once this kind of data is in the wrong hands and in particular is aggregated, it can be used for an incredibly broad ranging set of purposes,” Schneidman of Protect Democracy said. “It is critical for every American to understand there is no ‘undo’ button here.”
“The military shouldn’t be in the business of domestic law enforcement. That’s not what they’re trained to do,” said Beau Tremitiere, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, an advocacy group supporting the suit.
“If Americans weren’t aware of the risks posed by politicized domestic deployments by the military before the events in Los Angeles, they certainly are now. Healthy and respectful civil-military relations are yet another bulwark of US democracy that the president is trying to erode. We’re all on notice.”
The ABA’s success would protect its thousands of members across the country, a collective benefit that could transform the strategic calculus and shield lawyers from the administration’s threats.
Orion Danjuma, counsel with Protect Democracy, said in a statement that the ruling was “disappointing but not final.”
“We remain confident in the strength of our claims and will continue to pursue every legal avenue to protect academic freedom and the rule of law,” Danjuma added.
Kenneth Parreno, a Protect Democracy attorney arguing for the plaintiffs in that case Monday, maintained the Administrative Procedure Act requires the NIH to make decisions on grants in a reasoned away, while the “record shows a slap-dash decision making process,” including a series of emails in which NIH leadership took “just minutes” to make a decision on grants affecting “hundreds of researchers and millions of lives.”
“The directives themselves are explicitly spelling out a process where HHS is directing and identifying these terminations, that NIH officials are, in turn, just rubber stamping them, not providing any review,” Parreno said. “What this is is a slap-dash, harried effort to rubber stamp an ideological purge.”
“We are really gratified that we have a judge who has taken a fair look at the record and come to the very clear conclusion that NIH and the defendants have acted unlawfully in terminating these grants based on ideological grounds and not based on science,” said Shalini Goel Agarwal, special counsel at Protect Democracy, an advocacy group representing the plaintiffs in one of the cases.
By terminating the grants, the Trump administration was effectively declaring that certain groups of Americans are not worthy of having their health studied, Agarwal said. It is part of “a pretty ugly history that the judge is rightly calling out as wrong and fundamentally unlawful.”
Resources are also needed to protect people and organizations who have been unfairly attacked and any organizations who are unfairly named, vilified and targeted, said Ian Bassin, cofounder and executive director of Protect Democracy, a national nonprofit founded in 2016 to defeat the threat of authoritarianism, “so that every attack on an organization working in the public interest backfires by resulting in an immediate surge of support.”
Trump used the military to disperse racial justice protesters in D.C. in 2020, with helicopters hovering over protesters’ heads. Another legal expert says what’s happening in Los Angeles is an escalation even from that.
“I think it’s one of the scariest things that a president can do,” said Ariela Rosenberg, a national security expert with Protect Democracy. “Do they use this extremely blank check they gave themselves to deploy the National Guard in the smallest of circumstances?”
“He is not going to view himself as constrained,” said Kristy Parker, special counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that fights authoritarianism. “Emergency powers are like manna from heaven for someone like him. He can just wave a wand in the form of an executive order and absolve himself, as he sees it, from the need to answer to Congress.”
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