What Can I Doooooo? with the ACLU: We Have a Plan

Cecillia Wang talks about how the ACLU plans to respond to the Trump Administration on day one.

Hi, everyone. As we head into this holiday week, I’m grateful to all of you who came to our post-election zoom hangouts. During our last one, we had a great conversation with Franchesca Ramsey and Kate Schatz. This issue of the newsletter is a sort of continuation of those post-election conversations. I hope you find the interview as helpful as I did.

Before we jump into my conversation with the ACLU’s Cecellia Wang, here’s a big update!

It’s been a hectic time around here, so it’s as good a time as any to announce my 2025 stand-up comedy tour! After a five-year break, I’m back.

Tickets are now on sale for the first leg of the tour. (The tour doesn’t stop here. I’ll announce more cities soon!)

Okay, now I can welcome you to the seventh installment of our monthly interview series, What Can I Doooooo? with the ACLU. I was lucky enough to talk with Cecillia Wang, the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, about how we can prepare for the next Trump administration. This conversation was recorded two days after the election. Cecillia Wang oversees over 200 lawyers and support staff in the national ACLU’s Legal Department, works in collaboration with hundreds more legal staff in the ACLU’s 54 state affiliates, and leads the ACLU’s work in the Supreme Court of the United States. She’s here to break down the ACLU’s plan to protect our rights during the second Trump presidency.

You can read a lightly edited transcript below, or listen to the conversation:

Meet Cecellia Wang

W. Kamau Bell: It's been over 24 hours since the news of Trump's victory. Yeah, so we all know that means we need to pay attention. I know for certain that come January after the inauguration, we need to pay attention to what's going on, what's coming out of that administration. Our rights and liberties will be put on notice and we're all going to need a plan. And we don't want to wait until inauguration day to come up with that plan. So that's what we're here to talk about today.

The best part about being associated with the ACLU, other than having good lawyers in my Rolodex, is that I can have conversations with people at moments like this when we're all trying to figure out what happens next. So today is a great day. I'm speaking with Cecillia Wang, the ACLU's National Legal Director and one of the people at the center of ground control. She oversees more than 200 lawyers and staff in the National Legal Department, supports legal staff at all 54 affiliates and directs the ACLU's work in the Supreme Court. You know, just light work as we call it. What's more, she knows how to fight the Trump administration's attacks on democracy because she's done it before. She ain't new to this. She's true to this. As you say, if you were saying things that were popular, say five years ago. As the deputy legal director, she's helped the fight against the 2017 Muslim ban, the border wall, the family separation policy, and the citizenship question on the 2020 census. In other words, she's like a Swiss army knife of civil rights. And she's from the Bay area! So we love her extra more because we love people from the Bay area extra more. Anyway, this conversation was great, and you're gonna be surprised. It's a lot more light and fun than we expected, but we need light and fun right now as we get through whatever happens next. So enjoy.

Hello Cecillia, how are you doing?

Cecillia Wang: I'm doing okay. How are you, Kamau? Tough to answer these days.

WKB: Yeah, that's a loaded question, and it's gonna be a loaded question for the foreseeable future Yeah, so I actually asked that in the very podcasting way, but then I realized no I mean that in the human way. How are you? How are you doing today in the space, in your body?

CW: I am doing well under the circumstances. I have been doing a lot of reflection about literal ancestors and ancestors in the movement in order to fortify myself for what's to come.

WKB: Yeah, I hear you on that. That's a great way to think about literal ancestors. Something occurred to me shortly after the election results came in. I thought, I got to first take care of myself. That means my physical body, my mental state, my psychological state. Shout out to my therapist, Cliff. And then I got to take care of my family. And it's my wife, my kids, my 87-year-old mom. My dad lives in Alabama, and he's mostly fine. He's included in that. And then if I can get that done, then I can look out to my friends, and then my community. And if I get to that community, then I can get to the bigger things. But I think it has to be done in steps. And I think that, especially going forward over the next era of America, like really making sure that we're taking care of ourselves, not in a selfish way, but in a way so that we're more able to take care of other people.

CW: That's right, taking care of ourselves and each other. I think that's the order of the day.

WKB: What was this election night for you? Where were you at? Where did you take it in? When the results came in, how did you experience all that?

CW: In many ways, election night was an echo of Trump's first presidency for me. I'm a subscriber with the San Francisco Opera. My mom was a huge opera fan, and I still go in memory of her and to keep something that was really special for us going. I had to change a performance to election night, and I was thinking to myself when I was changing that ticket, “My God, is it really okay for me to be sitting in the Opera House on election night?” But I decided to go ahead, and my plan was, if I need to leave during intermission, I can do that.

The reason I say it was an echo of the first Trump presidency is that on January 27th, 2017, Trump's first Friday in office, the fifth business day of his presidency, he issued his first Muslim Ban executive order. And that night, I was at the ballet in the same opera house here in San Francisco. I was on my phone, and I remember talking to our lawyers about the lawsuit we were about to bring, the first of what turned out to be 28 lawsuits against the Muslim ban alone. So here I was this past Tuesday night, sitting in the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco and checking my phone and looking at the election results and had this sense of here we go again.

WKB: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

CW: Here we go with the work that is cut out for us going forward.

WKB: I remember when the ACLU lawyers and lawyers of all sorts went to the airports to support people during the Muslim bans. I remember I did feel a sense of pride in that moment of being associated with the ACLU. 

CW: Yeah, it's a real privilege to feel that you're part of something bigger, a community, and it's actually overlapping communities that are coming together with our work in mind. What about you, Kamau? What were you doing on Tuesday night as the election results were coming in?

WKB: So our kids are all there watching the election results come in. And it's interesting because my kids have a real sense of what's going on in the world, and the election, and how different presidents will affect the country. And I was both proud of them for understanding the stakes and also sad for them that they understood the stakes. I’m thinking, I'm sure there are friends of yours who have no idea what this means, and I wish you didn't have to know, but I feel like, if I am who I am, it would be negligent for you not to understand the stakes of this election.

The Plan to Protect Trans American

WKB: I think people are gonna be curious about what the ACLU is prepared to do in response to a couple of areas that President-elect Trump’s campaign generally focused on. One area is the trans community.

CW: The ACLU is at the lead along with partner organizations in defending transgender Americans from the most vicious personal, almost physical attacks that Trump has said he will launch as president of the United States. So policy-wise, Trump says that he's going to rescind federal policies that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. These are protections that have been in place. And he is going to assert that our really core anti-discrimination laws that Congress has passed, like Title VII, don't cover anti-LGBTQ discrimination. He has said he's going to deny Medicaid funding to any hospital that provides hormone therapy to trans youth, cutting off that medical care, life-saving medical care nationwide and not just in the two dozen states that have enacted laws to ban that basic health care. He has said he's going to use federal law, laws that are meant to protect civil rights, as a way to hammer at state level pro-LGBTQ civil rights protection. So he has announced all of these ways in which he will be attacking not just transgender Americans, but other LGBT people.

Number one, we are in court already, as you probably know, defending transgender adolescents in the Supreme Court. Our colleague, Chase Strangio, is going to be up there at the lectern, the first openly transgender advocate to appear before the Supreme Court. As an oralist, he is extraordinary. He's just a brilliant lawyer and just a community champion, human rights champion. So he'll be arguing the case on December 4th in the Supreme Court. 

The issue is whether transgender people have the same rights against sex discrimination that everybody else does. Up until the 1970s, sex discrimination was OK in the United States of America. In the 1970s, thanks to the litigation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as an ACLU lawyer, among others, the Supreme Court said, OK, we recognize that when states come into court defending their laws that discriminate against women – for example, laws like women can't be bartenders, or women cannot be lawyers – the states would always come in before the 1970s saying, “This is for the good of women. We're doing this to protect women, the weaker sex.” So the Supreme Court said in the 1970s in response to ACLU litigation and litigation brought by other women's champions, okay, we recognize that this guise of benevolence, we need to deal with that. And to deal with that, what we're going to say is we are going to apply heightened scrutiny. We're going to look very carefully at laws that discriminate against people based on sex. 

That is exactly what Tennessee's SB1 law is, banning health care for trans adolescents. And we're in court trying to defend the idea that trans people have basic rights against sex discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

The Plan for the Criminal Legal System

WKB: The other thing that candidate Trump was talking about is immunity for police officers. At one point he talked about actually letting cops do what they want to do for a little bit of time without any repercussions. It’s very scary for communities that feel like they're already too often at the business end of police in unjust ways. Can you talk about policing? 

CW: You know, it's interesting. The Trump administration was mostly very harmful when it came to the criminal legal system. And there are limits naturally on what the President of the United States can do on the criminal legal system. Most of that happens at the state level. But what Trump did was, as you say, hold himself out as a champion for excessive force. There were things he said during his campaign rallies, things he did even earlier in his life, talking about the Central Park Five, siding with police, not just police in general, those spokespersons among police who are out there fighting, as you said, for immunity when it's been proved that they violated people's constitutional rights by beating them up, by killing them, by discriminating against them.

We’re also really concerned about the harm that President Trump will do in the realm of prisoners' rights and upholding the basic dignity, health, and safety of people who are incarcerated in federal prisons. The one kind of silver lining or one bright light during Trump's first term is that we worked with him. That's right. The ACLU worked with the Trump administration to get the First Step Act of 2018 passed. It was massively important in reducing mandatory minimums in federal sentencing and undoing the damage of a lot of discriminatory sentencing that happened in the 90s and early 2000s. His administration thwarted the full implementation of the statute in various ways. 

So I think the criminal legal system is an area of nuance for us where we are going to certainly hold Trump accountable. For things like trying to trumpet the police officers when they attack people, particularly people of color, we are going to be looking to working with state and local level officials to try to reduce the number of situations where there's a violent encounter between the police and someone in the community, including advocating for state and local policies that protect people from police abuse. 

So from torturous methods of execution to pressing forward with the sentencing reform that Trump administration said it was for, to protecting people from police abuse – we will be in the courts and working at the state and local level as well as with Congress to try to stop Trump from further militarizing the police, further unleashing the police in ways that would be very dangerous.

What Can I Doooooo?

WKB: What is the ACLU master plan? How can I help? How can listeners help? 

I love that you turned around to get the plan! For people listening on the podcast, Cecillia is holding up the literal plan. It's a fresh binder of plans.

CW: Here's the literal plan. It's not concepts of plans. They're actual plans. So listen, we've been getting our plan together for the possibility of a second Trump presidency for over a year. And we have done legal analysis. We've done political analysis. We have taken a hard look at the many plans or concepts of plans that Donald Trump has come up with. We are ready to go and we have lawyers who are actually working on legal papers that are meant to be ready to go when Trump takes office in January. We also have plans that we've been talking about with state and local officials around the country who are interested in joining the fight to defend and protect civil rights and civil liberties for people in their communities. So that is also part of our plan. So things are already in the works. And I know that all of our ACLU supporters and listeners here are going to be plugging into these plans as we get ready for January.

WKB: One of the things that President-elect Trump was very effective in his first go-around in the presidency was appointing judges that sort of reflected his ideological bent. As the ACLU is preparing to file lawsuits, how does that calculus work? Because you sort of know that he has politicized these appointments in a way. I know impartiality doesn't exist, but he has specifically appointed judges who have an ideological bent that matches his.

CW: So it's true. Donald Trump as president reshaped the federal judiciary in important ways, and particularly the Supreme Court, which went from a 5-4 anti-civil rights, anti-civil liberties majority to a 6-3 hostile majority. So that's just a fact that we have to deal with. But I'll say this, litigation, whether it's in federal courts or state courts, will remain a really potent weapon that we have in the fight to protect and defend and advance our civil rights and civil liberties, including in the second Trump administration. 

The first thing I would say is, do not count out Joe Biden, okay? President Biden appointed a lot of really outstanding judges, and I wanna give the Biden administration real credit. I think Biden made more inspired choices. His appointments, overall, are the most diverse group of federal judges that we've seen. He did better than President Obama. He did better than President Clinton. I'm not talking just about racial diversity or gender diversity. He appointed judges who are former ACLU lawyers. He appointed judges who are former public defenders. They are going to add to the overall picture of the federal judiciary. Biden appointed almost as many federal judges as Donald Trump did in the lower courts, in both the federal district courts and the federal courts of appeals. 

Litigators are the firefighters, right? When the president, when the governor, when any government official goes after people's rights by taking action – you can talk all you want about the political conditions or the public opinion conditions that led us to be in this situation – but the first thing you need to do is put out the fire. You need to try to stop the president from taking this illegal action that hurts people's civil rights or civil liberties. And that's what litigation is. 

Don't forget that in the first Trump administration, we had Trump-appointed judges who ruled for us. In cases we brought challenging Trump's immigration and border policies, don't count out Republican appointed judges. They are oath-bound to interpret and apply the laws passed by Congress and the US Constitution. 

So we are approaching the federal courts the same ways we always have been. But there are two things we are doing differently. One is a renewed focus on state courts and state Supreme Court strategies. As you know, Kamau, we have 54 state affiliates and lawyers at each of those affiliates are in state courts day in, day out. We have a new state Supreme Court initiative at the National ACLU with a team of lawyers who are putting together a playbook by going state by state and looking at the opportunities that are built into state constitutions, which are oftentimes more protective of civil rights and civil liberties. And what we need is to work a lawsuit or a legal strategy up through the state court system to the state Supreme Court to establish and make real the promise in those state constitutional provisions. 

So that's one thing we’re doing in response to an increasingly hostile US Supreme Court. And the other thing comes back to my point about not counting out the federal judiciary. Biden has reshaped the federal courts, and that's changing things as Trump left them. We have still been winning cases, including in the Supreme Court of the United States, so we'll keep going with the litigation. 

As a good lawyer, you're going to tailor your legal arguments to the court that you're dealing with, right? 

WKB: Yes. It's like being a stand-up comedian. You sort of get a sense of the crowd. Okay, let me move these jokes around a little bit. This crowd’s a little drunker. Let me start with the dirty stuff. 

CW: Kamau, can we hire you as a consultant? I think we need to figure out how to work more jokes into our legal arguments before courts. I'm all for this. 

WKB: I'm down. I’m at the ACLU’s service, clearly. 

So you're saying that the lawyers know the judges they're going up against and therefore know how that judge has ruled in the past, that judge's temperament. 

CW: Exactly. Trump has said that he is going to be even worse during his second presidency compared to his first presidency when it comes to things like going after the state officials that he considers to be his enemies, his political rivals. One of the things that we're getting ready for at the ACLU is that Trump could try to use this very old federal law called the Insurrection Act to try to deploy National Guard military troops to quell protests that are happening in cities around the country where citizens and American communities are rising up to literally take to the streets and oppose his policies as he rolls them out. Trump has said, I'm going to deploy the National Guard. We saw this last time around when he was president. He deployed federal law enforcement agents in Portland, Oregon. We saw federal law enforcement out there using excessive force, beating up protesters, and in some cases even journalists or street medics who were there in support of protest or to observe and report on protest. We'll be out there trying to protect the rights of people who want to speak out.

As someone who is a former public defender, who came out of immigrants’ rights work, and is a former director of the ACLU Center for Democracy, which houses our free speech work and our voting work, Donald Trump takes all of the free rein that Congress over the centuries has given to presidents and he will do whatever he can with it. There are so many situations where Trump uses some law that's sitting around like a loaded weapon. Congress, administrations of both parties, and the American people have said, “Well, of course the American president should have the power to do whatever he needs to.” I think there's a real need in the long term to not rely just on normative expectations that presidents are acting in good faith and actually set some hard legal limits on what the president can do.

WKB: So let's talk about the grassroots. That's where I come into this. Let's talk about grassroots mobilization.

CW:  This is gonna be something that's hard to say and hard to hear. One of the big lessons in reflecting on Trump's first presidency – really hard pill to swallow – is what happened to the grassroots energy that rose up in opposition to President Trump's policies. You mentioned already that it wasn't just lawyers who mobilized to US airports on the evening of January 27th, 2017, and the following two days, Saturday and Sunday, it was regular people. It was very much organized. People worked on this. There's labor involved. And hundreds of thousands of people turn out in cities around the country to protest the Muslim ban, to protest against Trump's entire platform as the newly-elected president. 

What happened after that, Kamau? Where did the people go? And this is what keeps me up at night. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the third version of Trump's Muslim ban. We forced him to water it down twice. We blocked version one in court. We blocked version two in court. And then the Supreme Court upholds version three. There were not 100,000 people in front of the Supreme Court. You know, all the people who were appalled and horrified, like their hair standing on end about how Trump separated babies from their parents when they came to the border seeking asylum. Where did the outrage go?

We've learned from that experience and have, at the ACLU, retooled our advocacy team so that we can turn those big moments – Muslim ban, airport protests, the family separation horror – and make something organic, make something that can blossom out of a moment that we are building.

What do you think? You participated in protests, I know. What are the ways we can be more successful on the grassroots mobilization piece?

WKB: I think of this as like working out. You don't do leg day at the gym every day. You have to figure out different things you do. Some people never do leg day, but there's different ways you can fight for this American experiment called democracy. And the more you vary it, the more you'll be able to maintain it.

CW: Exactly. Yup. Let's go. 

WKB: Wait, you're interviewing me! That wasn't supposed to happen. You just flipped the scrip!

People ask me all the time, how do you find humor in this? I think people who are doing this work naturally find humor in it, because how could you do the work without finding some humor, some levity in there? So thank you for that.

CW: That is exactly right. We have to find the humor and the beauty and go to, you know, I always say it's the artists who will save us, not the lawyers, not the lobbyists, not the advocates. It's the artists who will save us. 

WKB: And I say, it's the lawyers who will save the artists.

CW: We all have our job, as we said. 

WKB: Yeah, we all have our jobs. I know you have a lot of work to do, because you work at the ACLU and the streets is hot right now, but before I let you get out of here – what's the rallying cry? What can the people who are listening to this do? How can they support? What does the ACLU need from us to get the work done?

CW: I'll say two things in response to that. 

First, I'll share a little bit about why I feel obligated to do this work. My parents were immigrants. They're no longer with us. But my mom in particular was a huge champion of the ACLU. And as immigrants and as Asian Americans, they went through a lot – a lot of racism, a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment – and made a lot of sacrifices. They left a lot behind in order to come to the US. And my mom invested everything she had in me so that I could be a lawyer at the ACLU fighting for immigrants, fighting for trans folks, fighting for everyone who is in a position of having to defend their basic civil rights and freedom and humanity at the end. That's why I go to work every morning. That's why, on Wednesday morning, I was ready to go. I would say that steely resolve is what I felt Tuesday night and every day since. 

People have worked against much greater odds. Black Americans throughout the history of this country have faced down greater odds and prevailed. And as Martin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. So the rallying cry is take care of each other. To go back to what we started with, take care of each other. Take care of yourself. It is hard work bending that arc, but we are going to do it. 

And the second thing I would say is about hope and about prevailing despite the headwinds, doing the work even though you are not guaranteed victory. Going back to the Muslim ban, okay. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the third version of Trump's Muslim ban about 500 days after he issued the first version. So between January 27th of 2017 and when the Supreme Court finally upheld it, we brought 28 lawsuits. We got literally countless people, but definitely thousands and thousands of people who had valid visas to come into the United States and who were being blocked by the Trump administration's customs and border protection officials at some airport. They were blocked from coming in with their valid visa, and we got those folks in. Each one of those thousands and thousands of people was trying to rush to the deathbed of a loved one in the US, was trying to contribute to American intellectual life, to go to a job at a US university or to attend a conference, maybe on climate change. They were coming as immigrants, including our first two clients, two Iraqi men who had helped the US military during the war in Iraq and had visas to come and immigrate to the United States. Those two were blocked in addition to many more. These are the people Donald Trump was blocking. Why? Because they're from a predominantly Muslim country. Each one of those thousands of people was able to come into the United States and do what they needed to do here in America. Even though, at the end of the day, people say, “It's hopeless! All hope is lost! It's a 6-3 Supreme Court that's against us, and we lost the Muslim ban, and we lost on this, and we lost on that.” The story does not start and it does not end with a Supreme Court decision. The story starts and it ends with the power of the people who are fighting for rights, for freedom, and for our basic humanity. And I'll leave it at that.

WKB: You left it at the very best place you could. Thank you for dropping that mic like that. I think knowing that you have such good humor and such and such fierce intellect and such a strong commitment that you're carrying your family's legacy forward. I always think of it as like the Black baton that my grandparents handed to my mom and she handed to me. I want to make sure that when I hand it to my kids it's not heavier than when it was handed to me from my mom. 

I always think of the ghost of Harriet Tubman showing up being like, “Oh, Kamau. You’re having a hard time directing a documentary?” You have to give yourself some grace and also give yourself some perspective. 

Thank you, Cecillia. It's really great to talk to you.

CW: Thank you, Kamau. It's been a real pleasure.