Last March, Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, stepped onstage for a “resistance training” event with 2,000 volunteers packed into an arena at the University of Miami. It had been seven weeks since Donald Trump took office. Now, Romero said, it was time for the volunteers to join the group in fighting the Trump administration's crackdown on civil liberties. “Let's do it together,” he said, to cheers from the crowd. “We need you to be protagonists in the struggle.”
The event, which was live-streamed to more than 200,000 people watching at gatherings around the country, was unlike anything the ACLU had ever done in its 97-year history. Founded after World War I in reaction to government raids targeting immigrants, union organizers, and left-wing activists, the ACLU has served as the nation's foremost champion of civil liberties for almost a century. It has been involved in some of the most important and controversial legal cases in U.S. history, cultivating a reputation as a nonpartisan organization that confronts the government on a principled basis, regardless of which political party is in power.
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