By the end of the week, judges in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Washington state had also blocked parts of Trump's order.

And so two things were born together: an executive order based on hatred of Muslims, and a movement to stop it. A new dynamic was emerging to head off the president’s unconstitutional and un-American policies: crowds and courts. It was already becoming clear that lawyers and protesters — rising through separate efforts but with a common goal—could together be a bulwark against the tide of hate pushed out as policy by President Trump.

In following days and weeks, the ACLU and other lawyers continued to chip away at the apparatus supporting the ban. The ACLU filed about a dozen suits challenging aspects of the ban in different courts around the country, including one in Maryland on behalf of a Jewish refugee resettlement agency, HIAS, as well as IRAP and several individuals. Some 50 ACLU affiliates filed 18 coordinated Freedom of Information Act requests with local Customs and Border Protection offices to learn how the ban was implemented at more than 55 airports. The ACLU and other groups asked for an emergency hearing on the Muslim ban from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which monitors human rights throughout the Americas. Borrowing “from the playbook of despots,” as the New York Times noted, the Trump administration boycotted the hearing.

The Trump administration, for its part, gave up on defending the original order but doubled down on the ban. On March 6, the president signed a replacement executive order that kept the same basic policy but was supposed to be easier to defend in court. The ACLU went after that new order in its Maryland case. The federal court there and another in Hawaii quickly blocked the new ban, too. The main parts of the second order have never been enforced due to these court orders, which the government is now fighting on appeal.

Right after he took office, Trump had also signed another pair of executive orders threatening immigrants’ rights. The January 25th orders called for the immediate construction of a border wall with Mexico and aggressive efforts to expand the number of immigration agents and vastly increase the power of federal and local officers to arrest, detain, and deport. These orders also signaled that the federal government would encourage, and even force, state and local police agencies to participate in immigration enforcement — which has proven time and again in the past to lead to race discrimination and illegal stops and detentions of people of color.

In February, the Department of Homeland Security released two memos implementing Trump’s January 25th orders and setting out a grim blueprint for mass deportation. The directives threatened to shred due process and bypass immigration hearings. They elaborated on how local police and municipal officials would become immigration agents and suggested that those who do not would face financial consequences. They proposed expanding an already bloated federal deportation force by 15,000 new agents. They made clear that under Trump, any person without documents could be deported — without regard to their U.S. citizen children, U.S. military service, length of residence in the United States, or their contributions to U.S. society.

Trump had previously said he was sympathetic toward young people whose parents had brought them without authorization to the United States as children. In a December conversation with TIME, he had promised to help people with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the program that grants them temporary work permits. “We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud,” he said.

But Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents started detaining people with DACA too. Agents picked up 22-year-old Daniela Vargas in Jackson, Mississippi, hours after she spoke out publicly about her deportation fears and against the federal government’s new policies. Her DACA status had lapsed while she saved up money to renew it. People protested, her lawyers filed documents, and Vargas was released.



In Portland, ICE agents banged on the door of 25-year-old Francisco Rodriguez, waking him up on a Sunday morning to tell him he would be deported. He was an elementary school teaching assistant, food pantry manager, and church volunteer, who had one conviction for driving under the influence — and was serving in a diversion program to clean his record. The ACLU of Oregon helped organize neighbors to flood the phone lines of the ICE facility where he was being held, share his story on social media, and rally on his behalf — and ICE released him too.

In mid-February, over the course of a few days, ICE conducted raids in 12 states, sparking anguished protests as longtime U.S. residents without criminal records were torn away from their children, their jobs, their lives, and deported.

Immigration agents began to stake out and arrest people at courthouses when they appeared for scheduled hearings: a Texas domestic violence survivor seeking a restraining order, a Michigan father trying to get custody of his children.

Immigration agents even detained passengers disembarking from a domestic flight and demanded that everyone show documents. People tagged the ACLU in photos on Twitter, and our attorneys are investigating the incident.

The ACLU is also setting up a national network of more than 50 law firms to investigate and respond to raids. We are identifying community organizations across the country that can provide support and mapping every facility that could be used to detain immigrants.

And ACLU affiliates are developing their own projects tailored to their local needs: The ACLU of Texas has established a raid hotline. The ACLU of Vermont is investigating whether immigration agents are targeting individuals for deportation in retaliation for their protests against ICE.

During the February raids, ICE agents in Los Angeles stood outside the house of a man they wanted to deport.

“Good morning. Police,” an agent announced, in a video later released by ICE.

The ACLU of Southern California quickly campaigned against ICE agents misrepresenting themselves as police. Soon Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti wrote to ICE “to urge in the strongest possible terms that ICE immediately cease this practice in our city.”

In March, the ACLU launched People Power, a grassroots mobilization program, with the Freedom Cities campaign to create enclaves of resistance to Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim policies. The campaign encourages volunteers to meet with their local police precinct to discuss policies that make the entire community safer by refusing to turn police into immigration agents. More than 250,000 people have signed up for People Power, and the Freedom Cities resistance training video has been viewed more than a million times.



And just four days before his 100th day, the courts intervened again to stop Donald Trump’s illegal anti-immigrant agenda. On April 25, a federal court in California blocked part of Trump’s executive order defunding so-called “sanctuary cities,” which prohibit their local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. When issuing the nationwide injunction, the judge called Trump’s order “unconstitutional on its face.”

These first 100 days have been marked by amazing popular protests and significant legal victories. They show that together, citizens and lawyers can defeat hateful, unconstitutional, and un-American immigration policy.