ACLU emerges as main Trump antagonist

By Sandhya Somashekhar March 8 at 7:00 AM

Chris Vance was drinking his morning coffee and reading the text of President Trump’s first executive order banning visitors from some Muslim-majority countries when he decided he had to take action.

So the prominent Republican from Auburn, Wash., who said the order was “antithetical to what I believed as an American,” grabbed his laptop and did what thousands of Americans have done to register their outrage toward the president: He joined the American Civil Liberties Union, pledging to donate money every month to the organization.

Donating to the ACLU has become an act of political defiance in the Trump era as the group has positioned itself as a high-profile and aggressive opponent of the president’s agenda.

Since the night of the election, when the group famously challenged Trump — saying that it would “see you in court” — membership has nearly tripled to 1.2 million, and the group has collected more than $80 million in online donations alone. It is adding scores of attorneys and investigators, and faced with a new surge of volunteers, has started a grass-roots arm to mobilize them to lobby on state and local matters.

It is a new and potentially risky position for one of the nation’s best-known nonprofit organizations, which is liberal-leaning but has built a reputation of crossing ideological lines on issues such as gun rights and political spending and has famously represented some of those most detested in society, from suspected terrorists to neo-Nazis.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/aclu-emerges-as-main-trump-antagonist/2017/03/07/956855c4-fdd9-11e6-8ebe-6e0dbe4f2bca_story.html?utm_term=.48f1154d5eca&wpisrc=nl_evening&wpmm=1