The Relations Between Movement Activism and Legal Advocacy in the First 100 Days: Disconnects, Fusions, and Synergies (Guest Post by Sidney Tarrow)
On January 25th, 2025, three nonprofit organizations from Texas and Arizona challenged a proclamation by newly-installed President Donald Trump that disallowed immigrants from remaining in the U.S. while pursuing asylum claims in a federal district court. Ignoring a long series of laws and previous executive actions, the President’s statement barred immigrants who arrived after the date of the proclamation from invoking provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which would permit them to remain in the United States while pursuing asylum claims. On behalf of the plaintiffs, the nonprofits argued that Trump’s order, and the Department of Homeland Security, which was tasked with implementing it, violated multiple laws and Constitutional provisions.
Documented on a new webpage created by Just Security under the rubric Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions, the case against DHS was only the first in a cascading wave of lawsuits by nonprofits, law firms, labor unions, educational institutions, states, and coalitions of states against the Trump administration’s actions. By the end of April, 2025, three months into the new administration, it had documented 209 lawsuits in venues ranging from district courts to the Supreme Court, the most common ones against Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was led by Elon Musk, Trump’s major donor and the CEO of Tesla. A glance at the litigation tracker shows that the administration lost in the vast majority of cases that have been resolved – although many of the decisions were only provisional. However, they left the new administration at pains to know how to respond and encouraged other actors and institutions to follow the lead of those who dared to stand up to the new administration.
As these cases were working their way through the courts and Trump was directing his attacks against an ever-widening range of targets, a second strand of contention began to emerge in the streets. Unlike the 2017 “Women’s March,” which was concentrated into a single day of action following Trump’s first inauguration (as described in chapter 3 of the 2018 book I co-edited with David S. Meyer), these protests took longer to gain purchase and were launched against a multitude of targets and executive actions. Early demonstrators focused on specific actions - like the proposed closure of the US Agency for International Development - and attracted mainly small groups of those who were targeted directly by them. But as the administration’s efforts began to appear part of an effort to subvert American democracy, so too did contentious actions involve a broader range of opponents based on their alarm at the direction in which the country seemed to be headed.
These protests first coalesced into a national demonstration on April 5th, labelled “Hands Off,” which swelled into what PBS estimated to be over 1,000 rallies. This was followed by an even larger one on April 19th, which included marches, demonstrations, and community service activities around the country. Labelled "50501" -- for "50 protests, 50 states, one movement" -- the demonstrations were timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the start of the Revolutionary War, which many protesters recognized with signs reading “No Kings!”
These two strands of contention at first appeared disconnected from one another. They were certainly not fused, as were the actions in the streets and in the courts during the early civil rights movement. In my view, they were related synergistically. I adopt this term from Christopher Coleman, Laurence Nee, and Leonard Rubinowitz’s 2007 article on the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This key moment in the civil rights movement is usually remembered for Black residents of that city walking to work after Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a bus. Less well remembered – except by constitutional lawyers – was the district court case that accompanied the protests, Browder v. Gayle, which led to a Supreme Court summary affirmance that, citing Brown v. Board of Education, effectively declared laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional. The dramatic street protests and the quieter court case were part of a synergy that was more than the sum of their parts.
Is this a distinction without a difference? I think not. Disconnected streams of contention are less than the sum of their parts because of the risk of going off in different directions. Those that are fused are certainly more focused but tend to narrow their targets to those that both sets of participants can agree upon. But synergestic court cases and street protests are more than the sum of their parts and – as the past few months of the Trump administration have shown – they tend to broaden from sectoral protests to wholesale opposition.
Not only that: As sectoral court cases like the one on January 25th gave way to broader suits against the administration and its threat to democracy, groups of plaintiffs and their attorneys began to come together into broader coalitions. For example, when Trump decreed punishing tariffs against the U.S.’s trading partners in March, 2025, a coalition of twelve state attorneys-general went to court on the grounds that the tariffs would punish consumers in their states. And after a letter to Harvard demanded that it accede to a number of changes in its curriculum and its programs and Harvard rejected the demands at the cost of $2.2 billion in federal funds, a statement denouncing the Trump administration’s threats was signed by more than 600 presidents and other leaders of colleges, universities, and scholarly societies.
In parallel, the protests that began to spread across the country in February and March gave rise to coalitions of organizations who were alarmed by Trump’s retributive actions against his political enemies, by his attacks against undocumented immigrants, by threats to law firms that refused to bend to his will, and by his demands that universities change their curricula and control the speech of students and faculty members.
Will these legal and political activities converge into a unified social movement? Probably not. They have taken place in different venues, they employed different skills and different repertoires of contention, and their personnel overlapped only at their edges. But as the authoritarian bent of the administration came into clearer focus, the theme of both the legal suits against his administration and the protests in the streets expanded from opposition to particular policies to a national synergy for the defense of democracy and a quasi-coalition appeared to be forming between both strands of the resistance.