The American Civil Liberties Union has appointed a veteran civil rights lawyer as the new national legal director as it gears up for Donald Trump’s potential return to the White House.
Cecillia Wang, the first woman of color promoted to the role, says the ACLU’s lawyers have been poring over both presidential nominees’ policy pledges for the past 18 months.
“We’ll be looking to bring litigation to check all of Trump’s anti-civil rights, anti-civil liberties impulses, however he tries to implement them through federal policy, and again, presidential overreach,” Wang said in an interview.
Wang, 53, has experience fighting Trump’s policies. The immigration lawyer oversaw the organization’s challenges against his Muslim travel ban, US-Mexico border wall, and family separation policies, and his effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
She successfully opposed a third iteration of the Trump administration’s policy that restricted US immigration from majority-Muslim countries before the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, but the US Supreme Court later upheld the restrictions.
Those wins, and losses, offered some important lessons that Wang and the 200 lawyers she now leads will use to prepare for a second Trump term, if he wins Nov. 5.
“The theme of Trump’s presidency from 2017 to 2020 was gross overreach in terms of presidential authority,” Wang said. “There’s a lot of preparation going on now so that we’ll be ready for whatever comes after the election.”
Trump promises to restore many of his immigration policies that Wang and her ACLU colleagues fought during his first term, including construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border and restrictions on US immigration from Muslim-majority countries.
Wang said the organization is also preparing to challenge the “vast due process violations” that Trump’s plans to launch the largest deportation operation “in American history” would entail.
“We would anticipate that if he is elected, he would carry out his promises to override statutory and due process protections that are in our immigration laws currently—that we might see him trying to detain vast numbers of people without any individualized hearing on whether detention is warranted,” she said.
They’re also keeping watch on Trump’s threats to use military personnel to suppress protests and target those he deems his political enemies. The group has filed lawsuits against the administration that alleged First and Fourth Amendment violations for that practice, and they’re ready to do that again, Wang said.
A June ACLU memo outlines how the organization’s lawyers plan to tackle potential ways the former president would use the military as a domestic law enforcement tool.
Wang is the daughter of Chinese immigrants who moved from Taiwan to Mississippi in the late 1960s as graduate students. She grew up hearing stories about the discrimination they encountered in the Deep South, and the racism they witnessed against Black people, Wang said.
She credits the Civil Rights Movement for having paved the way for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that lifted racial quotas on immigration in the United States “and made it possible for my parents to become Americans.”
“It’s thanks to the Black-led Civil Rights Movement in the South that I was born in the United States, that I’m an American, and so I feel a real debt that I pay off every day at work and that’s why I do the work I do as a civil rights and civil liberties lawyer,” Wang said.
The University of California, Berkeley and Yale Law School graduate was drawn to the law after learning about the Japanese American lawyers in the 1980s who sought reparations for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, Wang said during an interview with the National Immigration Forum in 2018.
By becoming a lawyer and engaging in civil rights work on behalf of the immigrant community, “I could do my part to try to get to the America that we really want to be and want to live up to,” Wang said
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