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      US supreme court seems open to religious public charter schools

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      The US supreme court’s conservative majority seemed open to establishing the country’s first public religious charter school as they weighed a case Wednesday that could have significant ramifications on the separation of church and state.The Oklahoma state charter school board approved the application for St Isidore, a Catholic virtual charter school. The ACLU and other groups filed suit, as did Republican attorney general Gentner Drummond. The state supreme court sided with Drummond, ruling that the US and Oklahoma constitutions “prohibit the state from using public money for the establishment of a religious institution”.The case is part of a broader push to erode the separation of church and state, a concept established through the US constitution via the “free exercise” clause of the first amendment. Oklahoma is at the forefront of this debate.The eventual ruling is seen as a test of the role of religion in the government and in schools. It comes as school choice programs like vouchers that allow students to use public monies to attend private schools grow nationwide and amid a sustained campaign against public schools.Charter schools are taxpayer-funded and free for students, but operate independently and with more autonomy than traditional public schools. Drummond’s attorney warned the case could upend charter school systems throughout the states, said Gregory Garre, who is representing Drummond in the case. Some states may respond by ramping up religious charter schools and others could halt their charter programs to avoid approving religious schools, he said.“This is going to create uncertainty, confusion and disruption for potentially millions of school children and families across the country,” Garre told the high court.The school’s proponents argue the school is not a government entity, so the state is not endorsing or funding a single religion. They also contend that denying the school from becoming a public charter effectively discriminates against religious organizations and people of faith, and that blocking the school would deprive Oklahoma students of an educational option.Jim Campbell, an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing the state charter board, said there are hundreds of families signed up for the school already, despite it not being open. “They’re part of Oklahoma’s community too. They should not be treated as second class,” he said.The conservatives on the court asked questions along similar lines, contending that the school simply wanted to be treated as non-religious entities. Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the school was asking not to be excluded on the basis of religion. He also questioned whether religious-affiliated programs for foster care or food banks could be negatively affected by a ruling against the charter school.“Our cases have made very clear, and I think those are some of the most important cases we’ve had, of saying you can’t treat religious people and religious institutions and religious speech as second class in the United States,” he said on Wednesday. “And when you have a program that’s open to all comers, except religion … that seems like rank discrimination against religion.”Siding with the school would fit with recent court rulings that have eroded the separation between church and state. Rulings in 2022 determined that state governments were in some cases required to fund private religious education and that a Christian football coach at a public school could lead his athletes in prayer.The liberal justices asked how the school intended to include religious beliefs and practices in its curriculum and whether creating a religious charter school crossed the line into the state endorsing a religion.At one point, the liberal Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether other religious communities might teach different curriculum based on their faith, and a lawyer for St Isidore pushed back, saying these hypotheticals shouldn’t justify religious discrimination.“Religious communities are really different in this country, and are often extremely different from secular communities in terms of the education that they think is important for their young people and is critically important to their faith,” Kagan said.The Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, has supported St Isidore, calling the lawsuit “the biggest religious and education freedom case in our nation’s history”. Ryan Walters, the Republican superintendent of public schools in Oklahoma, has frequently spoken in favor of St Isidore and has claimed there should be no separation of church and state. He wrote in a Fox News op-ed this week that denying the school would be “religious bigotry”.“Instead of fighting against parents and telling them that government officials know what is best for their children, we should instead listen to them,” Walters wrote. “There is hope that the supreme court will give us this chance, a chance to take power away from government bureaucrats and give it back to the people.”The Trump administration supported St Isidore in an amicus brief and solicitor general D John Sauer argued in court on Wednesday that denying the school to be a public charter would violate the free exercise of religion.Justice Amy Coney Barrett has recused herself from the case, so it is possible the court could split evenly, which would keep the Oklahoma supreme court’s ruling in place and prevent the school from being a public charter. Barrett has not given a reason why she recused herself, but she is close friends with Nicole Stelle Garnett, who is a faculty fellow at the Notre Dame religious liberty clinic that has represented the school. Barrett also taught at Notre Dame’s law school before joining the court.A decision in the case is likely later this summer. More

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      Judge re-ups demand that White House show efforts to retrieve Kilmar Ábrego García from El Salvador

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      A federal judge on Wednesday again directed the Trump administration to provide information about its efforts so far, if any, to comply with her order to retrieve Kilmar Ábrego García from an El Salvador prison.The US district judge Paula Xinis in Maryland temporarily halted her directive for information at the administration’s request last week. But with the seven-day pause expiring at 5pm, she set May deadlines for officials to provide sworn testimony on anything they have done to return Ábrego García to the US.Ábrego García, 29, has been imprisoned in his native El Salvador for nearly seven weeks, while his mistaken deportation has become a flashpoint for Donald Trump’s immigration policies and his increasing friction with the US courts.The president acknowledged to ABC News on Tuesday that he could call El Salvador’s president and have Ábrego García sent back. But Trump doubled down on his claims that Ábrego García is a member of the MS-13 gang.“And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that,” Trump told ABC’s Terry Moran in the Oval Office.Police in Maryland had identified Ábrego García as an MS-13 gang member in 2019 based on his tattoos, his Chicago Bulls hoodie and the word of a criminal informant. But Ábrego García was never charged. His attorneys say the informant claimed Ábrego García was in an MS-13 chapter in New York, where he has never lived.The gang identification by local police prompted the Trump administration to expel him in March to an infamous Salvadorian prison. But the deportation violated a US immigration judge’s order in 2019 that protected him from being sent to El Salvador.Ábrego García had demonstrated to the immigration court that he probably faced persecution by local Salvadorian gangs that terrorized him and his family, court records state. He fled to the US at 16 and lived in Maryland for about 14 years, working construction, getting married and raising three children.Xinis ordered the Trump administration to return him nearly a month ago, on 4 April. The supreme court ruled on 10 April that the administration must facilitate his return.But the case only became more heated. Xinis lambasted a government lawyer who could not explain what, if anything, the Trump administration had done. She then ordered officials to provide sworn testimony and other information to document their efforts.The Trump administration appealed. But a federal appeals court backed Xinis’s order for information in a blistering ruling, saying: “[W]e shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision.”The Trump administration resisted, saying the information Xinis sought involved protected state secrets and government deliberations. She in turn scolded government lawyers for ignoring her orders and acting in “bad faith”. More

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      Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi freed after federal judge orders release

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      Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and Columbia University student who was detained for his activism, walked out of immigration detention on Wednesday after a federal judge in Vermont ordered his release.Mahdawi had been detained and ordered deported by the Trump administration on 14 April despite not being charged with a crime.“The two weeks of detention so far demonstrate great harm to a person who has been charged with no crime,” said Geoffrey Crawford, a US district judge, at a hearing on Wednesday, according to ABC News. “Mr Mahdawi, I will order you released.”Mahdawi was arrested by Ice in Colchester, Vermont, while attending a naturalization interview.He is one of a number of international students who have been detained in recent months for their advocacy on behalf of Palestinians. The Trump administration is attempting to deport them using an obscure statute that gives the secretary of state the right to revoke the legal status of people in the country deemed a threat to foreign policy.In his ruling, Crawford stated that the evidence before the court “suggests that Mr Mahdawi is neither a flight risk or a danger to the community, and his release will not interfere with his removal proceedings”.Crawford wrote that the government “failed to demonstrate any legitimate interest in Mr Mahdawi’s continued confinement” and that his “continued detention would likely have a chilling effect on protected speech”.Crawford ordered that Mahdawi be released from prison on bail, pending the resolution of his case in federal court.The order allows Mahdawi to continue residing in Vermont and to travel to New York to attend school and meet with his lawyers. His case in federal court will continue alongside separate immigration proceedings.Upon his release, Mahdawi , greeted supporters and thanked them for their support.“For anybody who is doubting justice, this is a light of hope and faith in the justice system in America,” he said in a brief address. “We are witnessing the fight for justice in America, which means a true democracy, and the fight for justice for Palestinians, which means that both liberation[s] are interconnected, because no one of us is free unless we all are.”Shezza Abboushi Dallal, one of Mahdawi’s attorneys said outside the courtroom on Wednesday that “today’s victory cannot be overstated”.“The court’s order to free Mohsen today is a victory for Mohsen, in his just pursuit of continued advocacy for Palestinian lives, and it is a victory for all people in this country invested in their ability to dissent and speak and protest for causes they are morally drawn to,” Abboushi Dallal said. “We will continue our legal battle for Mohsen until his constitutional rights are fully vindicated.”Attorneys for Mahdawi, a lawful permanent US resident, argued that he was being unlawfully detained in “retaliation for his speech advocating for Palestinian human rights” and say that it was “part of a policy intended to silence and chill the speech of those who advocate for Palestinian human rights”.The Trump administration is seeking to deport 34-year-old Mahdawi, claiming that his presence and activities in the US “would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences and would compromise a compelling US foreign policy interest”. Critics say that the crackdown that swept up Mahdawi constitutes an unprecedented assault on free speech.In new court filings submitted on Monday, the justice department included a two-page letter from Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, saying that Mahdawi’s activities and presence in the US “undermines US policy to combat antisemitism” according to NPR, and that his activities could “potentially undermine the peace process underway in the Middle East”.In a statement following Mahdawi’s release, the Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin declared: “No judge, not this one or another, is going to stop the Trump administration from restoring the rule of law to our immigration system.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis week, the Vermont senate voted to condemn “the manner and circumstances” of Mahdawi’s arrest, and called for his immediate release.Several Democratic members of Congress – joined by Senator Bernie Sanders – rallied outside of the state department this week on his behalf.“He has used his voice to advocate for peace, justice and dignity for Palestinians and Israelis” Sanders said. “Not only was this action cruel and inhumane, most importantly, it was illegal, it was unconstitutional.”David Myers, a Jewish history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been involved in Israeli-Palestinian dialogue efforts with Mahdawi, said he was overjoyed at the release of his friend. He called Mahdawi’s detention “a profound miscarriage of justice”.“Mohsen was such a clearcut case, given his extraordinary commitments to non-violence, dialogue across difference, and acknowledging the humanity of all,” he said in an email. “If it is a crime to embody such values, then the edifice of democracy in the United States has completely crumbled.”Mahdawi immigrated to the US over a decade ago and began attending Columbia University in 2021. According to his attorneys, last year, as a student at Columbia, he was “an outspoken critic of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and an activist and organizer in student protests on Columbia’s campus until March of 2024, after which he took a step back and has not been involved in organizing”.Mahdawi, who was born and raised in a refugee camp in the West Bank, spoke with NPR this week from the Northwest State correctional facility in St Albans, Vermont.“I’m centered, internally I am at peace,” Mahdawi told NPR. “While I still know deeply that this is a level of injustice that I am facing, I have faith. I have faith that justice will prevail.”Also this week, a federal judge in New Jersey ruled that a lawsuit filed by the Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, who is also challenging his detention and deportation order, can proceed.The Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk and Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri also remain detained and continue to fight against their deportation, which the Trump administration is pursuing on the same foreign policy grounds.Noa Yachot contributed reporting More

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      ‘He’s just a kid’: the Maryland teenager swept into Trump immigration dragnet

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      When 19-year-old Javier Salazar was loaded on to a bus from an immigrant detention center in northern Texas, he had no idea where he was being taken.He wondered if he was being transferred to another facility or maybe deported back to his native Venezuela. He and the other passengers, their hands and feet shackled, settled into a tense silence. Then a terrifying possibility crept into Salazar’s mind.“My fear was being sent to El Salvador,” he said, to the brutal prison where the Trump administration has dispatched more than 200 Venezuelans into a legal black hole. They are accused of being violent gang members, but reportedly on flimsy evidence for most, deported without even a court hearing.Salazar became stressed “because we’d been listening to the news and the other people at the facility”, he said in a telephone interview from detention.His and other buses in the convoy from the remote Bluebonnet facility pulled over on the side of the road for an unexplained 15 minutes then drove on to Abilene regional airport, about 200 miles west of Dallas. Salazar recognized it as where he landed a few days earlier from detention in Farmville, Virginia, where he had been for about a month after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) arrested him and his father in neighboring Maryland.But once they arrived at the airport in Abilene, the buses abruptly turned around. On the way back to Bluebonnet, a guard told them to be thankful to God, Salazar said. Later he found out the likely reason why. An emergency order in the early hours from the supreme court had temporarily blocked their removal from the US, in the latest clash between Donald Trump and the courts.View image in fullscreen“I thank God that we weren’t sent to El Salvador, but I am still sad knowing that I am in this detention facility when I do not [even] have any tattoos [and have committed] no crimes,” Salazar said in a 25 April phone call, through an interpreter.He is being held in stark conditions, separately from his father, and unable to speak with his ailing mother, who lives in Colombia.Salazar’s case demonstrates that “if your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail,” said his attorney, Travis Collins. Based on court documents, exclusive interviews with Salazar, his brother and his attorney, and a review of an 23 April phone conversation between the 19-year-old and his legal team, the Guardian has pieced together how Salazar was swept into the administration’s dragnet.Javier Salazar came to the US as an unaccompanied minor in 2022 and reunited with his father and some other relatives. The Guardian is using only his middle name, as he fears retaliation in Venezuela.His father had listed him as a beneficiary on his own US asylum application, where an unmarried offspring under 21 gains asylum if it is granted to the parent. Javier has no known criminal record, was at school and, per the justice department website, has an immigration court date in Virginia scheduled for 14 May, where Collins had planned to request Salazar’s release from Ice detention while his legal case progresses.But on an early mid-March morning, agents entered his father’s house in Maryland and took Salazar and his father away in handcuffs.Afterwards, scrolling through his social media on their phones, agents interrogated Salazar and asked him to identify various people in his network. Salazar saw one of the agents writing down in his notes something about a gun – an English word he recognized, he said.View image in fullscreenThe agents did not show him the image, but Salazar remembers insisting to them that whatever they saw was probably a toy water pistol. The Guardian has reviewed an image that Salazar’s family thinks Ice may have been referring to, it shows a person standing near Salazar with a blue-and-white item peeking out of a pants pocket that resembles a small plastic water pistol.Salazar was recorded in the authorities’ computer system as an alleged member of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua criminal gang and was made to wear green prison clothing that signifies an alleged gangster, according to a court filing.Ice was approached by the Guardian for comment but did not respond before publication.Javier’s older brother Daniel described Salazar as the video game-obsessed “baby” of the family.“He’s just a kid, still in the process of growing up,” Daniel told the Guardian in Spanish. Daniel’s full name is being withheld as he has an open immigration case. “Like any human being, he deserves a chance,” he added.The family is in pain. “We miss him, my family, my aunts, my mom, what we do is cry,” Daniel said.He has been posting social media slideshows with photos and videos set to music of Javier making peace signs at the beach, doing bicep curls at the gym, horsing around in a school cafeteria, rolling up a snowball.“You are not a criminal, you are a human being with many dreams and goals, you do not deserve that injustice,” text on one of these slideshows reads in Spanish.On 7 April, the supreme court ruled that immigrants subject to the obscure Alien Enemies Act (AEA) wartime law Trump is using to justify summary deportations must be given due process and time to seek legal remedies “before such removal occurs”.A week later, attorneys heard murmurs that the Trump administration was preparing to ship more migrants to El Salvador. On 14 April, when a 9am video call with Salazar from detention in Virginia was abruptly cancelled via email at 7.11am, Collins knew something was wrong.He scrambled to figure out where his clients were, “fearing the worst”, he said. Only two days later did he learn that they were taken to northern Texas, which at that time was not subject to a court block on summary removals under the AEA.On 17 April, Bluebonnet staff separated Salazar from his father, took him outside and handed him a notice in English. They asked him to sign it without reading it to him in Spanish or giving him a chance to consult his lawyer. When he refused, the agent said: “It ‘doesn’t matter, you’re going to be deported within the next 48 hours. Where you’re being deported to, I don’t know,’” Salazar later recounted to Collins in the phone conversation reviewed by the Guardian.The next thing Salazar knew, he was on that bus. The supreme court order has now bought him some time, but the battle is far from over. In a court filing from 24 April, the administration said it believed a mere 12 to 24 hours was a “reasonable” amount of time for detainees to contest their removal – and that it may continue with removals even if such a petition is pending, if a court denies a request for an emergency pause.Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)’s Immigrants’ Rights Project vowed that his organization “will continue to fight in courts around the country, including the US supreme court, to ensure there is due process, so that no individual ends up, perhaps permanently, in a brutal foreign prison without ever having had a chance to contest the government’s allegations and use of a wartime authority during peacetime”, he told the Guardian.Salazar’s relatives grapple with their decision to seek refuge and opportunity in the US. Daniel had thought that “the process would have been fair” based on how America has been portrayed on television, he said.“I feel guilty because I told him to come so he could have a better life,” he said. “And look at what happened.” More

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      Trump 100 days: tariffs, egg prices, Ice arrests and approval rating – in charts

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      We are witnessing slow constitutional collapse in the US | Moira Donegan

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      It’s possible that later, when we know more about how the Trump regime reshapes the US and about how it ultimately comes to an end, we will look back at this moment in 2025 and conclude that we were already living under an autocracy. Checks on executive power seem to have all but vanished; the Trump administration is not acting like either the courts, the judiciary or the people have any prerogatives that they must respect.Science is suffering: massive cuts to federal funding of research into medicine, climate change or anything that might include a word on a long list of banned ones – like “transition” – has decimated research, made the US a global laughingstock, and set the cause of human thriving back by years. The economy is in chaos, and the bribery is all but out in the open; it no longer seems to occur to many Americans that their politicians should not be on the take.Immigrants appear to have lost the entitlement to due process, and the administration appears to be trying to deport as many of them as possible, paying smaller countries in the American sphere of influence to imprison them at forced labor camps from which they have no means of petitioning for their own release. Dissidents are being captured on the streets, kidnapped from their homes and arrested in the courtrooms they preside over as punishment for their speech. In light of all this, even without the benefit of hindsight, it is already becoming more difficult to speak of American “democracy” with a straight face.Which is not to say that the developments of the past few months are unprecedented. In many ways, the first 100 days of Trump’s restoration are much like the first 100 of his initial term, in 2017: they are marked by a dizzying whirlwind of scandals, so numerous and preposterous as to be difficult to keep up with; by a cartoonish incompetence; and by public displays of aggression, cruelty, malice and dominance – be it over the federal workforce, his political rivals, foreign leaders, major institutions or the American people themselves.But the second Trump term has also been more reckless, more focused and more frictionless in its work to consolidate power and cut off its political opposition. Long gone are the first-term administration staff members who sought to have some sort of moderating influence on Trump – the bureaucrats and institutionalists who thought they could slow him down with procedure, the more cynical Republican opportunists who thought they could bend his charisma to their own ends. What is left in Trumpworld are only the true believers, or those with the zeal of converts. They are no longer being slowed down from the inside.Nor are they being opposed much from without. In 2017, when liberal Americans could still comfort themselves with the notion that Trump’s election was an anomaly, and in the early months of Trump’s first term, an uncharacteristic level of civic engagement and pride sprang up. The Women’s Marches attracted millions, and crowds swarmed the airports to lend support to travelers from the countries that Trump had targeted with his Muslim ban. But while the early resistance movement had tremendous amounts of feeling, it ultimately lacked direction: all that outrage did not find a useful place to go, and eventually it ebbed. It is hard to find hopefulness, now, among American liberals, and the Democratic party is showing few signs of life. On the Sunday talkshows last week, the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer was asked about the administration’s attacks on institutions of higher education, which have lost federal funding as the regime attempts to restructure their curricula and faculties. Schumer replied that he had sent a strongly worded letter.The United States has long been in a state of constitutional erosion. The role of Congress, the most representative of the federal branches, has been dwindling for decades, as gerrymandering and malapportionment have made its two chambers less competitive and more partisan, leading to permanent gridlock and dysfunction. Congress was once endowed with both the power of the purse and the sole power to declare war; it has largely handed the latter off to the executive, endowing the president with broad powers to use the US military abroad even without congressional approval and has not seemed interested in taking that power back.Now, the Trump administration seems to have also usurped Congress’s power of the purse for the executive, declaring that the president may refuse to appropriate congressionally allocated funds by personal fiat. This is a profound constitutional change, one that shifts a massive power into the hands of one man; and again, Congress does not seem to be interested in this assault on its own prerogatives, with even many Democratic leaders seemingly preferring to have less power – and, hence, less responsibility.For a long time, the decline of Congress meant the ascent of the federal judiciary, which appropriated large swaths of de facto policymaking authority to itself in light of congressional paralysis. This was already a degradation of democracy: the unelected judges came to have far too much influence over federal policy. And the judges were not the neutral, non-ideological referees that they claimed to be: many interpreted the law to be maximally deferential to the whims of the powerful and only minimally respectful to the rights of the less powerful.The US supreme court, in particular, seemed to change its doctrine almost as whim based on whatever outcome would best serve conservative priorities. Indeed, the judiciary itself seemed more than willing to share in democratically unaccountable power with the president, so long as that president was a Republican: it declared last year that the executive was immune from almost all criminal prosecution, thereby carving out a category of person – Donald Trump – to whom federal criminal law mostly does not apply. But even this wildly partisan federal judiciary does not seem to be good enough for the restored Trump regime, which wants to eliminate all possibility that its agenda might be checked by the courts: JD Vance, the vice-president, has taken to complaining in public when judges rule against the administration, claiming, falsely, that they do not have the authority to check the executive. But such petulant little demonstrations may not long be necessary: increasingly, the Trump regime is simply ignoring judicial orders that it does not like.Critics of the Trump administration have called this state of affairs a constitutional crisis. I have come to think of it more like a constitutional collapse: long vacant, the vestiges of the US’s democracy are crumbling to the ground, falling like an empty tent. We don’t yet know what, exactly, will be erected in its place.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Trump 100 days: after tepid start, protest movements – and Democrats – find footing

      by

      Those opposed to Donald Trump’s agenda started his second term on a worse footing than the beginning of his first term.This time, the social media platform owners who previously tried to tamp down on false claims stood with him at his inauguration. Some major media outlets attempted to stay in Trump’s good graces. Democrats were wrecked by a popular vote loss, believing they lacked the backing to lead an opposition. The courts were stacked in Trump’s favor and had ruled the president had absolute immunity from criminal punishment for “official acts”.“Strategically, we are objectively worse off this time than we were last time,” said David Karpf, a professor at George Washington University who studies political advocacy and strategy.While Trump’s first term began with the massive Women’s March, which drew millions from around the country, the second term’s resistance grew more slowly and deliberately. As Trump passes his 100th day in the White House, the pushback to his agenda has grown considerably, and both Democratic lawmakers and people across the US have ramped up their actions in opposition to Trump and his policies that have struck directly at the established norms and practices of US governance.This opposition has included street protests across the country that have grown in size since February. The largest single day of protest since Trump retook the White House came on 5 April, dubbed “Hands Off”, when several million people rallied in cities and towns nationwide.The courts have also proved a potent avenue of pushback against the second Trump administration. Legal advocacy groups and Democratic attorneys general have hit Trump with lawsuit after lawsuit over his executive orders and policy directives. The Democratic attorneys general, in particular, have had a high level of success in stalling Trump’s policies.Despite the common refrain that the Trump 2.0 protests have been tepid, research from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium showed that there were twice as many street protests between 22 January of this year and March than in the same period in Trump’s first term. The 2025 People’s March on 18 January, the Women’s March successor, marked the most protests in a single day in over a year, the consortium found.These large demonstrations have come as the Trump administration cracks down on protesters, trying to deport some who participated in pro-Palestinian protests at their colleges.“The fact you can get that many million people turning out shows that they are not all afraid enough yet,” said Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard political scientist in the Crowd Counting Consortium. “It’s important to have moments where there are breakthroughs on the public awareness – if you feel like what’s going on is wrong, you’re definitely not alone, and actually there’s a lot of people who agree.”Growing street protests and economic resistanceVincent Bevins, who wrote a book about mass protest movements around the world in the 2010s and how those protests often did not lead to durable change, said the Women’s March in 2017 was an important moment for the anti-Trump opposition, but that it didn’t get in the way of Trump completing his first term and then winning another one.He said he thought the strategy that protesters are using this term – demonstrate against Trump’s overreach instead of his inauguration – was an effective one.“A repeat of the Women’s March would have likely been read in larger society as saying, we wish that Kamala Harris would have won,” and that message does little when Trump already won the White House, Bevins said.Though inauguration weekend was quiet in Washington – a drastic change from the estimated half-million people who came to the nation’s capital during inauguration weekend in 2017 – people started taking to the streets again by February. The burgeoning, often decentralized anti-Trump protest movement began in part on Reddit. Established advocacy groups also began to rally outside government agencies in Washington as the so-called “department of government efficiency” moved from agency to agency to slash programs and staff, calling attention to the cuts.Musk, the world’s richest person who is cutting government programs through his Doge agency, proved a potent target for protesters, who derided the oligarchy and chanted against kings. An economic boycott of Tesla, Musk’s car company, and protests at his dealerships tanked the company’s revenues, showing the power of withholding dollars. Some acts of vandalism marked the boycott, leading the government to install harsh penalties for “domestic terrorism” against the company.Protests grew in size over the next two months, with a 5 April protest dubbed “Hands Off” drawing several million people to big cities and small towns alike. The protest served as a catch-all for anti-Trump coalitions, and messages calling for Trump to stop meddling with social programs, the courts, immigrants and trans people.In one red area in Minnesota, a newspaper columnist said 5 April was the biggest turnout she or others who attended could remember seeing. “Politicians from this area might not change their votes or their rhetoric but they had to have taken note of the crowd size,” the Minnesota Star Tribune columnist wrote.The grassroots nature of the current protest movement is beneficial at a time when many don’t think the Democratic party has a lot of credibility, said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.“I think that actually has the potential to be more effective in the long run,” said West. “The fact that it’s ordinary people from across the country actually gives the protests more authenticity.”Democrats find a spineElected Democrats have followed, not led, as grassroots opposition materialized, grasping the energy in the streets and starting to launch opposition movements of their own.Earlier this year, some protests targeted Democrats, asking them to unify as an opposition party. Some elected Democratic leaders said those efforts were misdirected. “What leverage do we have?” the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, asked out loud in February. Some Democrats said they should work with Trump and Republicans when their priorities aligned.Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, helped allow for the passage of a Republican spending bill, spoiling what little structural opposition the Democrats had in Congress. The missed opportunity led to ongoing calls for Schumer’s resignation, which he has rejected.But other Democrats more quickly took up the resistance mantle. The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have toured the states on a “Stop Oligarchy” tour that has drawn tens of thousands of people. Other elected Democrats and the Democratic National Committee have held town halls in Republican districts, and angry constituents showed up to the few Republican town halls armed with pointed questions.“What you want to do when you lack the ability to actually stop the madness is provide a vessel for effective outrage and, like, vibes,” Karpf said. “Vibes aren’t enough, but vibes are worth a bit.“The thing that I like about AOC and Bernie going on tour isn’t that that’s going to be the turning point that changes it all, because nothing will be right now. But it allows people to come together in solidarity and feel not alone.”As crowds kept showing up to oppose the Trump administration, elected Democrats started finding ways to meet the moment. The New Jersey senator Cory Booker gave a record-breaking 25-hour speech on the Senate floor to draw attention to the harms of Trump’s agenda. A group of Democrats, including the Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen, went to El Salvador to call attention to the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, a man deported against court orders. Booker and Jeffries held a sit-in on the steps of the US Capitol on Sunday, inviting other elected officials to join them.“People have complained Democrats have been too passive, and Booker very effectively made the point that he’s really upset about the things that are happening, and he’s willing to put himself on the line,” West said.Where does it go from here?Trump’s 100-day approval ratings are the lowest in 80 years, and polls are showing growing opposition to his agenda. But the next opportunity to retake Congress isn’t until 2026, and the opposition’s most potent adversary, Musk, is reportedly leaving his government role soon.Protests are expected to continue and to grow, organizers say. The next collective day of protest is set for 1 May, May Day, focusing on labor and immigrants’ rights.Indivisible, the progressive advocacy group formed during the first Trump administration, has seen its numbers rise considerably since Trump won again in November. Run for Something, an organization that helps progressives run for office, said in April that nearly 40,000 people had reached out to get information on how to launch a campaign since the November 2024 election.While the protests themselves might not succeed in stopping Trump’s agenda, they could inspire defections from Trump supporters.Defections help movements grow and then win, said Chenoweth, of Harvard. It’s not getting the most diehard Maga people to sour on Trump; it’s getting people on the periphery to move one notch over and stop going with the status quo.“One of the things that’s hard for folks is to figure out how to pull apart what looks like this very monolithic extreme group,” Chenoweth said. “And they’re never as monolithic as they look. There are a lot of people in the periphery who are not as extreme as they come across.” More