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People are fighting back. But it takes time to organize.

Feb 410 min read

This is not quite a continuation of the previous posts about things to know part 1 and part 2 but it is in supplement to it.


People are getting organized and fighting back. Protests are happening. Lawsuits are being filed. Hakeem Jeffries has a Dear Colleague Letter out detailing 10 things to do. Members of Congress and Senators were at USAID to protest the dismantling of the agency.


Here are some of the pushback against President Musk and FOTUS.






Sunday February 2nd we caught up with Texas Senator Roland Gutierrez to chat about what’s going on in Austin and DC right now. What matters the most to Texans! Listen to what Roland has to say! He has the beat on Texans in a way that Gov. Greg Abbott doesn’t. Roland lays it out! Not a wonder he’s so loved by so many Texans!
Enjoy this great interview.
Nancy Thompson

This public resource tracks legal challenges to Trump administration actions. If you think we are missing anything, you can email us at lte@justsecurity.org. Special thanks to  Just Security Student Staff Editors, Rick Da and Jeremy Venook, and to Matthew Fouracre.
The Tracker was first published on Jan. 29, 2025 and is continually updated.


Archivists saving the government websites.


Dorothea Salo, academic librarian and faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told The Register we've been here before, citing how the prior Trump administration all but disappeared the US Environmental Protection Agency.
"That apparently made him happy enough to try to disappear half the federal government this time," she said.
"As happened last time, lots of citizens and citizen groups are rescuing what they can. It’s organically fairly decent preservation practice – the rescued work is being duplicated in widely geographically disparate places, which lowers the odds that sheer bad luck wipes it out. The difficulty is discovery – who’s got what data [and] where? If, as I hope, US leaders someday return to a belief that government transparency is important to democracy, putting the jigsaw puzzle back together will be a huge lift.
"My heart goes out to all the federal employees, contractors, and grantees, from scientists to records managers, who are seeing senseless destruction of their work. There is absolutely nothing good or useful in this ruinous vandalism."
Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, said that about 28 years ago, Brewster Kahle had the idea to keep a record of the web.
"Every day since then, the Internet Archive has continued that tradition, working to do a better job of archiving and making available the archives of more of the public web," he told The Register. "Generally speaking, on any given day, we archive more than a billion URLs and make those available through the Wayback Machine."
The US government, Graham said, is the largest publisher in the world and every four years since 2008, the Internet Archive has come together in collaboration with partners to archive the material on government websites.
The effort has been in three phases, he explained: Before the election, between the election and the inauguration, and this weekend.
"We kicked off phase three after the election this weekend, where we do a deep dive and work to archive much material from more than 50,000 US government websites," he said.
Pointing to various reports on the online data purge, Graham said several thousand webpages, many related to LGBTQ and DEI topics, have been removed.



Datasets aggregated on data.gov, the largest repository of U.S. government open data on the internet, are being deleted, according to the website’s own information. Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, more than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from the database.
As people in the Data Hoarding and archiving communities have pointed out, on January 21, there were 307,854 datasets on data.gov. As of Thursday, there are 305,564 datasets. Many of the deletions happened immediately after Trump was inaugurated, according to snapshots of the website saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Harvard University researcher Jack Cushman has been taking snapshots of Data.gov’s datasets both before and after the inauguration, and has worked to create a full archive of the data.

A group of researchers and students at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is gathered today for a data preservation marathon, scraping and downloading data related to health equity from U.S. government agency websites before they disappear. Their goal is to make the downloaded data publicly available through repositories such as the Harvard Dataverse.


But the Internet never forgets, and most of the removed web pages are still available to view via The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive is best known for scraping and archiving as much of the Internet as it can and, thus, has saved pages from the CDC from before the president's order. Enterprising individuals can consult the archives to still get the information the CDC was forced to remove from its website. 

I'm quoted in this article. Happy to discuss what we're working on at the Library Innovation Lab if anyone has questions.
There's lots of people making copies of things right now, which is great -- Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. It's your data, why not have a copy?
One thing I think we can contribute here as an institution is timestamping and provenance. Our copy of data.gov is made with https://github.com/harvard-lil/bag-nabit , which extends BagIt format to sign archives with email/domain/document certificates. That way (once we have a public endpoint) you can make your own copy with rclone, pass it around, but still verify it hasn't been modified since we made it.

As federal employees were directed to scrub sites by Friday at  5 p.m., The 19th, alongside many other news organizations, jumped into archival action. 

Here is a sample of the government documents The 19th preserved for future access and accountability:

  • Maternal mortality data from the CDC

  • Abortion and contraception data from the CDC

  • Reports on violence against Native American women from the DOJ

  • Research studies on teens, including the mental health of girls and LGBTQ+ youth

  • Guidelines from the National Academies on how to best collect data about gender and sexuality

  • Report on women in the workforce from the Bureau of Labor Statistics

  • Information from the DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women



Here's all the information you might need.

Official website: https://eotarchive.org/

Internet Archive blog post about the 2024 archive: https://blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/end-of-term-web-archive/

Internet Archive collection page: https://archive.org/details/EndofTermWebCrawls



Indivisible has a guide to reach out to Congress to help stop Project 2025.



There are mass protests going on February 2nd (immigrants striking from work, it's why some businesses are closed), February 3rd at OPM, February 5th, and a general strike is being planned for March 15th.



WE CHOOSE TO FIGHT: U.S. SENATE IN-STATE OFFICE VISIT TOOLKIT

TOOLKIT CONTENTS:










Thousands of people protesting mass deportations planned by President Donald Trump marched in Southern California on Sunday, including in downtown Los Angeles where demonstrators blocked a major freeway.
Protesters gathered in the morning on LA’s historic Olvera Street, which dates to Spanish and Mexican rule, before marching to City Hall. They called for immigration reform and carried banners with slogans like “Nobody is illegal.”



“Can I tell you that Republicans want to see Elon go down?” she told MSNBC’s Alex Witt on Sunday. “I can. Now, will they come out publicly and say that? No, because they’re concerned about whether or not he’ll spend money in their next elections.”



A pair of labor unions has sued the Treasury Department for granting the Trump administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency” access to the federal government’s payment systems.
The American Federation of Government Employees and the Service Employees International Union filed their lawsuit on Monday, alleging Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent violated federal law meant to protect people’s sensitive personal and financial information.

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“People who must share information with the federal government should not be forced to share information with Elon Musk or his ‘DOGE,’” the complaint states. “And federal law says they do not have to.”
The unions were joined in the lawsuit by a labor-backed advocacy group called Alliance for Retired Americans, which said the Treasury Department had endangered the data of its members receiving Social Security benefits.



Approximately two dozen individuals protested outside of the Office of Personnel Management on Sunday afternoon in Washington, D.C., following a Reuters report that associates of Elon Musk, who have taken leadership positions at the federal government’s human resources agency, “have locked career civil servants out of computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of federal employees.” 
Protestors carried signs that read “fork this” and “get the fork out of my data.” They also chanted slogans with the actual expletive as well as “robbery in progress.”
Stephanie LaTour, who spent more than 30 years as a government lawyer, traveled from Brooklyn to protest and was joined by friends. 
“They now have the records of millions of federal employees — access to, control over — which is really like a sort of a cyber coup,” she said. “And so I really wanted to protest, and I thought ‘You know, I’m just going to drive to DC.’ And I just got in my car and drove down here.” 



The goal has always been clear: destroy functioning government, cripple the nonprofit sector and obliterate the hard-earned bonds and benefits of 80 years of post-war American progress.
There’s no hiding from this, because it will touch every aspect of life in the U.S. Just this week, the Trump Administration illegally halted Medicaid and Head Start payments, halted veterans benefits, stopped SNAP benefits for hungry families, launched invasive immigration raids designed to terrorize communities, froze federal grants to nonprofit organizations providing direct service, cut off loans to small businesses, attacked advocacy organizations, banned transgender people from serving in the military and even went so far as trying to silence the history of the Tuskegee Airmen as part of his capricious and bigoted campaign to end DEI programs.

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As Democracy Docket and legal and justice organizations are showing, there is still life left in the U.S. court system — and frankly, given current radical majorities in the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, the courts are our best public options for throwing sand in the gears of the extremists seeking to destroy civil society. But I think there’s a strong adjunct role for most of us building anti-MAGA strength in the 21 months left till the U.S. midterm elections in 2026. 

  1. Our nonprofit sector must band together to oppose the dismemberment of American society. This means working within sectors, but also across sectors — health care with higher education, justice reform with direct services to underserved populations and the arts with everybody. We are starting to see more coalition work (particularly in my home metro area of New York) and collective action, rather than pure competition for grants and philanthropic dollars. This is a time to ramp up more of this, and be ready to stand in partnership with the best of government — and in stoic opposition to the worst.

  2. Political donors of the center-left should adjust their giving habits to support more oppositional causes, perhaps shifting from purely candidates and committees to investments in independent media, regional 501c4 organizing work and legal funds fighting Trump orders directly. This goes for the big donors from groups like the Democracy Alliance to small donors used to responding to the ever more tasteless email campaigns of the big congressional committees and PACs. This is the time to change the model.

  3. Individuals must speak up and speak out in their communities. Yes, the latest outrage can be numbing — don’t spend a day on Facebook debating the ludicrous “Gulf of America” malarkey — but the attempted structural changes should be loudly and vociferously opposed. Talk to friends. Use social media wisely (pick your platforms well). Know your material, and be blunt with both public officials (especially Democratic leadership) and with the news media. Most of all, don’t wait with your head under the covers, because that simply won’t work. Sometimes we’re called to act, and that time is now.




Trump’s goal this time is to remake the American government to enhance his power. He isn’t the first modern right-wing populist to attempt this — he is following a playbook pioneered by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. I lived through Orbán’s power grab as a member of Hungary’s parliament and have been researching populism since. I’ve learned a few things along the way that might help Trump’s opponents understand how he won and how they can fight back.








Faith-based refugee agencies operating in the U.S. ramped up their efforts to assist as many refugees as possible before Trump returned to office, fearing he would eliminate the refugee program. But Soerens said World Relief and other groups were caught off guard on Friday by a federal memo instructing them to stop working with refugees already in the United States.   
World Relief and other refugee resettlement groups, including Catholic Charities, Church World Service and HIAS, receive federal funding to help refugees. They also raise funds from private donors to assist refugees and recruit volunteers from houses of worship.
That volunteer work will continue, said Soerens, who also said that volunteers and private donations will be needed now more than ever. “I don’t think that the government has any authority to tell us, or any church, don’t bring your refugee friends to the grocery store,” he said. “Or don’t help them go to their medical appointments.”

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“I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns?” he told “Meet the Press,” mischaracterizing refugees’ presence in the U.S. as illegal. “Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?”
Faith-based groups that resettle refugees —who are legal immigrants —have faced similar criticism.
Dawood said that Christian critics of the refugee program might want to go back to the Bible to read its passages about welcoming refugees, and, citing his hero, Ronald Reagan, said, “America is the city on a hill, and America is to be honored and blessed by accepting those refugees.”



Take a look at this CIA handbook on sabotage that was used against fascism in WWII. It is the most popular ebook online right now.




Be careful leaking!









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