Read more about the episode here.
Maria: Every day it feels like yet another unprecedented attack on everyone’s civil liberties and rights.That’s ever since Donald Trump returned to the White House in january.
From the suggestion to strip naturalized citizens of their status…
News clip: “A memo out this week outlines how the administration plans to denaturalize some citizens and remove them from the country…”
Maria: To undoing more than 150 years of a constitutional right to U.S. citizenship if you are born in this country…
Trump: “…Thanks to this decision we can now properly file to proceed with these numerous policies and those that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis including birthright citizenship…
Maria: To deporting immigrants without due process…
News clip: “ …President trump and his border czar Tom Homan said the mass deportation of migrants in this country illegally would begin with dangerous criminals, “the worst of the worst” they said. But CBS News has learned among hundreds of alleged gang members deported this past week to El Salvador, was a Venezuelan migrant with a job and no criminal record in the process of seeking asylum…”
Maria: Including to countries they are not from…
News clip: “…Trump administration has deported eight migrants to South Sudan. They were held at a military base in Djibouti for weeks…”
Maria: These and other unparalleld acts have led to more than 300 lawsuits against the Trump administration so far. Several of those cases have been filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The union, commonly referred to, of course, as the ACLU, is the largest non-profit organization in the U.S. dedicated to providing legal assistance in the protection of everyone’s civil rights.
Today im in conversation with its leader, Anthony Romero.
Anthony: They’ll fight us tooth and nail and we’ll succeed. Because we know how to do this. We’ve been doing this for 105 years.
Maria: Romero is a Puerto Rican civil rights attorney and has been the Executive Director of the ACLU since 2001, the longest tenure ever for a leader of the organization. Romero is also the first Latino and the first openly gay man to head the ACLU.
From his position at the helm of a number of historic legal battles in this country for a quarter of a century, Romero is going to offer us his unique perspective about what we’re facing, what we can expect, and why he’s urging every single one of us to do something.
From Futuro Media, it’s Latino USA. I’m Maria Hinojosa. Today…a conversation with Anthony Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU, on some of the most pressing civil rights issues we’re facing as a country today under Donald Trump’s second term.
Maria: Anthony Romero, you know, I often call you Tony. I feel like I know you enough that I can do that. Welcome back to Latino USA.
Anthony: Great to be back, Maria, so happy to be back with you.
Maria: For more than a hundred years, the ACLU has literally been at the center of protecting civil liberties. Having participated in more Supreme Court cases than any other private organization in the country.
Of course, many people don’t know that it is a gay Puerto Rican man who’s been at the helm for almost 25 years.So that means that you’ve had a front seat to some of the most critical legal battles of our lifetime.
You have led the ACLU through four presidents. You’ve challenged policies from every president in court. So today, Anthony, how would you describe where we stand in terms of our civil rights?
Anthony: It’s often hard to keep track of the full assault on civil liberties, civil rights, on our democracy. So I’ve come up with three big buckets of what keep me up at night and what is really concerning.
In bucket number one, you have the targeting of individuals and institutions that are the political nemesis of Trump’s MAGA ideology, right? These are the law firms that he’s going after because they were engaged in a lawful DEI. This is the targeting of Harvard and Columbia because they felt that they were seed beds of the “woke” ideology.
This is where you would put some of the students who they’re endeavoring to deport because they don’t agree with their political ideologies, especially around Palestine and Israel. This is like our client, Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk, who the government has picked up – incognito agents picking them up and then trying to deport them.
Bucket number two, is the targeting of politically weak groups to score cheap political points. And here you’ve got to put in the attack on immigrants. The Stephen Miller crusade against Latinos against. Immigrants of all walks of life. The kind of anti-immigrant agenda feels like it’s a way for them to curry favor with the MAGA constituents and the MAGA supporters. I would add in here the transgender community. The political process cannot defend their rights and liberties unless groups like ours and the courts stand up for them.
And the third bucket is the targeting of the norms and institutions that comprise our democratic process and that are the undergirding of our system of checks and balances. The effort to run roughshod over judges. The efforts to kind of get completely into Congress’s lane.
The efforts to shut down members of the media. That shameful settlement between Paramount and Trump, right?
News Clip: “ Paramount has agreed to pay Donald Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit. Over a 60 minutes interview with his former presidential opponent, Kamala Harris Mr. Trump alleged that the interview which aired one month before the 2024 election was selectively edited to improve how then Vice President Harris sounded. CBS denied that.”
A case they would have won a case had they had the gumption to fight it. So it’s really undercutting the independence of our media. Which is such an important part of our system of checks and balances, the fourth estate. So those are ways in which I organize myself, and then that’s kind of like my dashboard. And then I keep thinking what can we do in each one of these different areas to make a difference?
Maria: The fact is that what we are seeing now, Anthony, in terms of violations of human rights…people are being picked up. They’re shipping people around into “third countries” like South Sudan, El Salvador – in the case of Kilmar Ábrego Garcia – without due process. Of course, Kilmar is now saying about his treatment inside that he was tortured in conditions that are just horrific. And essentially, Anthony, it could happen to anyone now.
Anthony: Trump started this anti-immigrant effort as a way that he was gonna target criminals and the worst of the worst – Tren de Aragua, right? And we brought that suit, right, on behalf of the 130 men who were shipped off from the states to the gulag in El Salvador.
And part of what we learned is that we knew that he [Trump] had invoked the Alien Enemies Act in secret. And then we knew that they were going to use that secret authority of this act to remove these individuals without due process.
Now, the Alien Enemies Act – 1798 law. Last time we used it to remove Germans who were on American soil during World War II. And we still gave the Germans due process rights. The Alien Enemies Act was properly invoked. because we were indeed at war with Germany.
We’re not at war with anybody, Maria. So this invocation of this power, which is really for these unique moments when the nation’s at war. And if we gave the Germans 30 days notice, why are we giving them hours notice to our clients who are being moved to a third country? None of them able to contest the reasons why they’re being deported.
Maria:Of course. Anthony, you and I have been saying this for years –
Anthony: Right.
Maria: “You should keep your eyes open.” You know. “ICE and Border Patrol, the largest law enforcement agencies, they’re growing.” “There’s lack of accountability.” We’re having to have conversations about denaturalization, something that I’ve always, under Trump, been highly aware of. I guess I should ask you, how concerned should I be, Anthony?
Anthony: I think we need to be concerned. I don’t think they’ll be able to denaturalize American citizens easily or readily. That’s a process that doesn’t give the executive branch that power. It’s the sabre rattling, which I find increasingly troublesome because it shows that they’re willing to run the gauntlet at any cost unless they’re stopped.
If they were to bring a case to try to denaturalize an American citizen, we will challenge it. Just like we’re challenging the birthright citizenship.
I think the place where we’re not able to stop them and we just have to start to do triage, is this escalation of the law enforcement powers around the Department of Homeland Security with the new bill that was just passed. The “BBB” appropriations bill, right? They’re going to give so much money – $170 billion – to the Department of Homeland Security.
It will make that agency larger than the militaries, some of the top five or six militaries in the world.
Maria: Coming up on Latino USA… I continue my conversation with Anthony Romero. We’re goingto talk about denaturalization, birthright citizenship and some of the major legal challenges to Trump’s proposed immigration policies.
Stay with us. No te vayas.
BREAK #1
Maria: Hey were back. Lets get back now to my conversation with ACLU director Anthony Romero.
Maria: I want to come back to the issue of denaturalization. you’re saying it’s gonna get a lot worse, but also, “hold on one second. It’s not gonna be that easy.”
Anthony: It’s not going to be that easy. The revocation of U.S. citizenship can only occur with a judicial order. And you have to go through civil proceedings or criminal conviction for fraud around the naturalization process. You have to show basically that people lied or committed fraud as they applied for their U.S. citizenship, right?
It’s not like the revocation of a green card of a legal permanent residence. Where if people commit crimes, you can more readily revoke a green card, right? Once you’re a U.S. citizen, it’s really hard to revoke that.
And so anyone they try to denaturalize, we’re going to be all over it. The fact is that they float these as trial balloons, that Trump wants to denaturalize people as a way to further embolden the rest of his constituents.
And it’s also to make the other parts of his agenda look less unreasonable. So when you’re as extreme as saying, “we’re going to denaturalize American citizens,”- “Okay, don’t do that, but you can hold 750,000 people in these new detention centers.” So it’s moving the goalpost on us so that we begin to react to the most extreme part when we’re already in extreme situations right now.
Maria: Which leads me to something that happened recently. Laura Loomer, who is a right wing pundit, close to Donald Trump, went viral recently. She said that there will be 65 million meals for alligators. Alligators, the reference to the immigrant detention camp right in Florida, that’s being built.
Laura Loomer Clip: Right in the middle of the sweltering heat of the Florida Everglades. Reports of mosquitoes the size of elephants, no water to clean yourself and food that has worms in it. Those stomach churning details come form an inmate inside the new Florida detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
And the number 65 million which is the number of Latinos and Latinas in the United States, right? There are a number of more examples of blatant lies, racism now said out in the open, right?
I’m wondering, Anthony, how have you historically seen the use of dehumanizing language, in terms of kind of a precursor for attacking people’s civil rights?
Anthony: Well, that’s part and parcel of what they do, right? They, that’s why they use their dehumanizing words and their labels. And that’s why labels matter, right? That’s why “illegal alien”… What other language could you use to kind of deny someone their due process rights or equal protection under the law? An illegal alien.
And so I think with Laura Loomer, when she was kind of saying that all of us are up for grabs. I mean, this is where I’m saying I think they’re so overreaching that we will harvest the people of good hearts and minds who will say, “no, no, no, no, no, that’s going way too far.” It’s only been what, six months since the president took over. It’s a very different environment than the beginning of his term already.
I mean, there are 325 lawsuits. We have about 134 legal actions against the Trump administration. We’ve won on major cases, whether it’s the Alien Enemies Act, I still think we win on birthright citizenship.
It shows you just how far they’re willing to push. And I think ultimately, the dehumanization of our communities and of our people and of our immigrant populations has got to be part of their job because otherwise they’re not gonna get good Americans to agree with their agenda.
Maria: Now, one of the cases, you, you brought it up. Trump is actively seeking to end citizenship for children who are born to non-citizen parents in the United States. I want to talk about the most recent Supreme Court verdict on this issue, because it is confusing, right? Give us the layman’s, laywoman’s, understanding of what happened with the Supreme Court. How concerning should this be?
Anthony: Birthright citizenship for me is hollowed ground, right? In the 14th Amendment, it is how we turned the children of slaves into U.S. citizens. It’s also how this nation of immigrants allowed for people to be all equal under the law, right? It’s not just in the Constitution, it’s also in the statutes. So I don’t think we lose.
I will tell you, I wasn’t so sure there would be that kind of brazen, right? We were preparing all sorts of cases for his first day. What would it be? What would it be? And then I was able to have a conversation with someone. And I learned that, oh my God, they’re actually going to file an executive order to repeal birthright citizenship on day one.
And I remember coming back to the office and telling Lee Gelernt, who’s one of our top lawyers, saying, “you gotta get me that damn lawsuit ready. I wanna see it. I wanna see the briefs. I wanna see the pleadings. We got tobe ready day one.” And there was a whole debate within the ACLU. No, they’re not gonna do that. They’re not gonna be that brazen. And yes, they were. So the idea that they dared step on the hallowed ground, a nation of immigrants, and fixing America’s original sin, for me was indication that the gloves were off and they were gonna run the gauntlet as far as they could.
Now, birthright citizenship – what happened with the Supreme Court just recently was this question of there were multiple lawsuits. And the question was whether a federal judge in any one of these jurisdictions should be able to issue what they call a universal injunction. That stops the policy from being implemented across the country
Now the court went out of its way to strike down universal injunctions. Within two hours of the Supreme Court decision coming down, we filed a nationwide class action lawsuit. And they’ll fight us tooth and nail and we’ll succeed because we know how to do this. We’ve been doing this for 105 years. For a class action, you have to show that there’s a cohesion among the plaintiffs in the class, that they’re all similarly situated, that they all have a similar harm, that they can all seek a similar remedy.
I promise you we’ll get it done. They made it harder for us. They’re going to make it more time consuming, but if those are the rules they are going to put to us, fine. We’ll comply.
Maria: We’ll be right back.
MINI BREAK 2 FOR BROADCAST
Maria: Hey, we’re back.
Maria: I know you remember this, cable news networks were exploding with talk about Latino men. Latino men voting for Trump. Latino men were the ones who did this. Latino men handed the election to Donald Trump. And so what we did here at Latino USA was that we created a series called “Hombre: Understanding Latino Men.’
And we’ve been trying to understand how it is that so many Latino men, many of them children of immigrants, did in fact turn right towards Donald Trump. Give us your sense, in terms of why you think what was it about Latino men in this moment in history, that led them to fall into what Donald Trump was selling frankly?
Anthony: I think part of what happened is we lost a narrative with working people who felt that they weren’t given a fair shot. I have one of my family members who I know voted for Trump. And we’ve had a kind of a hard, loving, hard conversation about how can that be? And why would that have happened? And what this person told me is like, “look, I really want my family and myself and my children to have the chance of living an American dream. The ones in which I believe in, that you shouldn’t have to go to college. But I should still be able to have a good job and provide for my family and have safe schools and what the old American dream was, to be able to provide for your loved ones.”
And for good or bad, a lot of people thought that the Republican party was gonna be able to deliver on that in much better ways than the Democrats. I think ultimately those same groups of people are gonna say, “oh no, I didn’t mean that you should deport all of these folks.”
I mean, look at all this stuff that’s going viral, the lovely Latino who’s being chased by these ICE agents whose, I think two sons, were Marines, right?
News clip: “Porque le pegas?” Masked federal agents were filmed pinning a man to the ground and repeatedly striking him in the head and neck before putting him in an unmarked car. The man in the video has been identified as Narciso Barranco and is the father of two active duty Marines and one Marine veteran. He’s currently being held in ice custody according to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson.
Anthony: That got sent to me by like five people and like, oh no, that’s not what we mean. And I think part of what’s at play is to kind of remind people that the American dream is for all of us. And to make sure it’s within people’s reach.
I think there are only a few people who are bad hearted, evil people. I think most of the people who voted with Donald Trump they’re still good people that we can harvest that kind of, that goodwill without a fight.
Maria: I know you hear this all the time, and I travel around the country and people are like, I don’t know what to do. I’m giving up.There’s nothing to do. What do you want them to do?
Anthony: I have no time for people who tell me that they’re worried, but they don’t want to do anything about it. There is so much to do. At the ACLU, we have this program called People Power. We have over 1300 people who will be trained tonight on “know your rights” issues and how to take action if there’s a raid or a deportation, and we’ll do them virtually. Indivisible is doing amazing work at organizing marches and visits in congressional districts. United We Dream is one of my favorite organizations. They’re building a whole new effort to help the community have access to legal services and humanitarian assistance. That will be announced soon.There’s groups like Democracy Forward that are doing the litigation —
Maria: I think you’re saying,Don’t wring your hands, but realize you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Organizations exist. You can be a part of them in multiple different ways.
Anything that we need to be paying attention to that we might be missing. Something that you’re like, watch this, please.
Anthony: The one thing I am worried about, and I hope I’m wrong, is that they will play the congressional card next, right? We’ve seen the executive order blitz. Blitz number two has been the scaling up of deportations and raids.
The third one is, remember they still control the House and the Senate and the White House. And I can expect them to want to change our nation’s immigration’s laws, right? And that’s where we have to be ready – to hold Democrats accountable. Because too many of the Democrats are gonna try to roll over and dance with the devil. We have to make sure we hold people accountable and make sure we don’t fully allow them to rewrite the laws.
[MUSIC]
Anthony Romero. What’s bringing you some joy?
I think what brings me joy, the work is really meaningful. I work a lot. I work almost seven days a week. It’s hard. But I love my job. And I love the fact that we are fighting for things that really matter to real people.
“People always ask me: “How do you stay optimistic?” It’s not that hope is a precursor to action. Action is the precursor to hope. If you do something right —an act of kindness, if you volunteer, if you support a nonprofit, if you support your neighbors and help them through a hard point, if you accompany them when they’re afraid of what’s happening… In the face of such mendacity and meanness and vitriol, and kind of the dehumanization of the Trump administration, to just be kind, to be thoughtful, to be engaged, is the most flagrant defiance to an agenda that is just trying to make us less human than we are.”
Maria: Don Antonio.Tony. Anthony.
Anthony: Doña Maria. Querida.
Maria: Thank you for being in conversation with me for Latino USA. We really appreciate it.
Anthony: It’s been my sincere privilege and pleasure, Maria.
Maria: Same.
Anthony: I think the world of you Maria. We’ll be in it together.
CREDITS
THIS EPISODE WAS PRODUCED BY JULIETA MARTINELLI AND EDITED BY ANDREA LOPEZ-CRUZADO. IT WAS MIXED BY JULIA CARUSO.
WE RECORDED THE SCRIPT FOR THIS EPISODE IN THE STUDIOS OF CHICAGO RECORDING COMPANY. SPECIAL THANKS TO AIDAN CRAMER.
THE LATINO USA TEAM ALSO INCLUDES:
ROXANA AGUIRRE
JESSICA ELLIS
VICTORIA ESTRADA
MONICA MORALES GARCIA
REYNALDO LEAÑOS JR.
STEPHANIE LEBOW
LUIS LUNA
MARTA MARTINEZ
JJ QUERUBIN
AND NANCY TRUJILLO
FERNANDA ECHAVARRI IS OUR MANAGING EDITOR.
PENILEY RAMIREZ, AND I ARE EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS.
I’M YOUR HOST MARIA HINOJOSA.
“LATINO USA IS PART OF I-HEART’S MY CULTURA PODCAST NETWORK. EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS AT IHEART ARE LEO GOMEZ AND ARLENE SANTANA.”
JOIN US AGAIN NEXT TIME AND IN THE MEANTIME, YOU CAN FIND US ON SOCIAL MEDIA.
AND DON’T FORGET TO JOIN FUTURO+ TO LISTEN AD-FREE AND GET BONUS EPISODES AND SPECIAL VIRTUAL EVENTS. BY JOINING, YOU’LL SUPPORT THE KIND OF REPORTING THAT MAKES EPISODES LIKE THIS ONE POSSIBLE! SO THANK YOU!
CIAO!
***
