This Organization’s Already Filed Over 25 Lawsuits Against the Trump Admin. 

Democracy Forward, led by Perryman, for example, has already taken over 25 legal actions against Trump’s administration. Their clients include illegally terminated federal employees, and communities and organizations impacted by federal funding cuts, ICE raids, and attacks on diversity programs (aka anything that even references marginalized identities). A few of their legal challenges have seen early successes, including ones to stop the Trump administration from terminating DEI-related grants, block Trump’s attempt to freeze vital foreign aid funding, and block ICE from entering churches. Dozens more cases remain pending.

“Our clients and communities are really pushing back in order to be able to push forward,” Perryman told Jezebel in a conversation after the panel, Of course, in response to court rulings against their agenda, members of the Trump administration like JD Vance and unelected billionaire Elon Musk have issued statements insinuating the courts lack authority over the administration. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive branch’s legitimate power,” Vance tweeted in February. Those statements have been alarming, but Perryman stressed that, thus far at least, these are just words, and that they’re only trying “to deter people from using the courts to protect their rights.” Vance essentially hopes the public will just give up.

Over the course of U.S. history, some of our most fundamental rights have lived and died in the legal system. If we can win, then lose, then maybe win back our rights to bodily autonomy—to abortion access and insurance coverage of abortion—then what does building a stable future for those rights look like? To this, Freedom for All’s president Mini Timmaraju explained that, for the time being, organizations like hers are in “emergency rapid response mode, putting out fires, taking things directly to the people in the states where we can do that”—for example, putting abortion rights measures on ballots. “We also have to be thinking about the long-term strategy, and how we game the system the way our opposition has done for 50 years,” she added, which includes continuing to build public opinion and having specific legislation ready to go, like the bill to end the Hyde Amendment, a budget rider prohibiting federal funding to pay for most abortions. (In 2021, the then-Democratic-controlled House passed a budget bill without Hyde for the first time in 45 years, but the Senate then blocked it.)

Right now, Perryman and Timmaraju both see the courts as a vehicle to, in Timmaraju’s words, “slow [Trump] down as much as possible,” through both “litigation and winning all the state and local races we can.”

Perryman doesn’t expect to win every one of the numerous lawsuits her organization has helped file against Trump. There are no fast fixes, and courts alone certainly can’t deliver us everything we need. Plus, progressive judges won’t be elected and appointed to the judicial system en masse overnight. But the legal system is just one—albeit very big—part of the equation. There are other tools, like community organizing and elections, and we all have our own roles to play,” Perryman told Jezebel. “The main thing that we want from people across the country right now is to not give up hope.”