There’s no sugarcoating it: 2025 was tough. Eleven months into the second Trump administration, we’ve faced challenges in the District like none in recent memory.
Our streets remain occupied by National Guard troops. At the beginning of the year, Congress blocked the District’s access to $1 billion in already-collected local tax revenue, undermining local control over funding for essential public services. Our police department briefly experienced a hostile and unjustifiable takeover by the federal administration, and it remains unclear to the public what the ongoing level of cooperation is between the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and ICE.
Day after day, our neighborhoods are confronted by an incursion of federal agents and reports of harassment, potentially unlawful detention, and arrests of D.C.’s immigrant residents (and those who are profiled as immigrants). The District and its residents have dealt with illegal mass layoffs of federal workers, executive orders that ignore the powers of local government, and repeated congressional efforts to pass laws in direct conflict with those enacted by D.C.’s elected officials. These attacks on our rights are threatening to destroy the pillars of our democracy. However, we have collectively proven that we are resilient and have the power to fight back. We, alongside our clients, partners, and supporters, have mounted a strong resistance against the erosion of our rights.
And we have begun to see some wins. We are making headway in defending D.C.’s right to self-govern and protecting our constitutional rights, and our work is reaching new audiences nationwide who are listening and taking action. You can count on ACLU, both in the District and around the country, to use every tool we have at our disposal to fight authoritarianism, defend civil liberties, and advance equality and justice.
Taking Donald Trump to Court
A functioning democracy requires an independent and strong judiciary. ACLU-D.C. has fought hard in courts and been sorely tested through 2025, as the Trump administration continues to run roughshod over our constitutional rights. Keeping Trump in check has meant ACLU being in the middle of some of the most high-profile litigation.
Two days after Trump’s inauguration, for example, we joined with the national ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union in a challenge to his executive order fast-tracking deportations of a larger group of people than ever before. If the administration’s order had been allowed to stand without challenge, people anywhere in the country who had arrived in the U.S. in the past two years could have been expedited for removal had they not been able to prove their citizenship or right to be in the United States. People in this position would have had fewer due process rights than people contesting a parking ticket.
Representing Make the Road New York, we sued and won a district court order stopping Trump’s fast-track deportation executive order. The case is now on appeal.
Also in those early months of 2025, the administration used the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century law intended for wartime, to deport people to El Salvador without due process. Never before had a president invoked that law during a time of peace to deny immigrants the right to due process.
We filed an immediate challenge and stopped these deportations before they could continue. That win resulted in potentially life-changing interim relief. However, while those deported to El Salvador were released from the notorious prison where they were being held, they were later taken to Venezuela. Our work to undo this harm is not done.
This year, ACLU-D.C. has also fought for the rights of federal workers. Along with co-counsel, ACLU-D.C. is representing several former federal workers who were fired due to their perceived political views or the nature of their current or past work being around diversity, equity, and inclusion. These firings involved a disproportionate number of women, people of color, and non-binary employees.
This case is now in federal court as a class-action lawsuit on behalf of our clients and similarly situated former federal workers.
In total, we have filed 12 cases challenging abuses of the second Trump administration.
It’s no surprise that all of this has led to an increase in demand for help from ACLU-D.C. Our legal department has received more than 1,500 complaints this year, which is more than five times our normal annual amount.
Occupation of Washington, D.C. and Its Fallout
When Donald Trump said that our cities should be “training grounds” for the military, we knew that difficult times were ahead. Because of our status as a federal district and not a state, D.C. is especially vulnerable to the whims of a president prone to using the military as a political tool. As we are home to the seat of our country’s government, increased militarization of D.C. and federal crackdowns on constitutional freedoms spell trouble for our democracy.
In August, Trump declared an emergency in D.C. and deployed to our streets the D.C. National Guard (over which District local leaders have no control). He also convinced the governors of several states to send their National Guard troops here. Trump’s emergency declaration gave him the power to temporarily direct the MPD for a 30-day period, too.
With more than 2,000 National Guard members deployed in D.C., we created new resources to help Washingtonians know their rights when encountering military troops. We conducted Know Your Rights trainings with partner organizations and have distributed over 20,000 Know Your Rights cards—in English, Spanish, French, and Amharic—to help residents and visitors stay safe. ACLU-D.C. has also created new Rights Hubs for students, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants to help all of us understand our rights, access critical resources, and prepare for potential interactions with local and federal law enforcement.
Polling shows that the people of D.C. largely oppose Trump’s occupation of our home. And they have found ways to express their dissent. One local resident, Sam O’Hara, peacefully followed National Guard troops while playing the Imperial March from Star Wars. O’Hara’s protest is protected by the First Amendment, but that did not matter to one member of the Ohio National Guard, who called MPD officers to “handle” O’Hara. When the officers arrived, they detained and handcuffed O’Hara.
ACLU-D.C. sued the Ohio National Guard sergeant and four MPD officers for violating O’Hara’s constitutional rights.
Part of the fallout of this hostile occupation of D.C. has been hundreds of arrests of local residents as they’ve gone about their daily lives. Many of these arrests happened without the required legal basis for an arrest and without a warrant. We went to court in September on behalf of four residents and the national immigration organization CASA, to challenge the administration’s policy and practice of warrantless arrests without probable cause. In December, a court temporarily halted the policy.
When Federal Overreach Backfires: Growing Support for D.C. Self-Governance
Trump’s tactics have shone a very bright light on why D.C. needs full autonomy and independent self-governance through statehood.
District residents and those visiting D.C. are much more vulnerable to whatever the president and Congress want.
We’ve always known that the District should be a state. Now, people around the country who care about democracy are getting it, too. Since August 1, more than 47,000 messages have been sent to members of Congress from people across the country in support of D.C. statehood and self-governance. That’s more people than have taken action through ACLU’s platform on this issue in the last five years. In addition, a majority of voters nationwide oppose President Trump’s deployments of the National Guard to D.C.
Donald Trump has actually handed us an opportunity.
ACLU-D.C. is seizing this moment to build political power in support of D.C. statehood and independent self-governance. In 2025, we launched a new federal advocacy project to ensure that we directly educate House and Senate offices on the importance of defending Home Rule and build relationships with offices that are interested in supporting D.C. This year, we engaged extensively with local and federal policymakers—testifying before the D.C. Council, conducting 40+ policy interviews, participating in stakeholder convenings and providing thought leadership, tracking 67 federal bills, engaging 45 congressional offices, and analyzing over a dozen executive orders to protect our rights.
The Future We Seek
It can be exhausting playing defense all the time. But we haven’t given up working on a better vision of the future. To that end, 2025 saw us take a different approach to the D.C. budget, framing our advocacy through our values. We provided overarching principles that we then used to advocate for specific budget recommendations with individual agencies.
These same principles guided a report we released in November, Building Safety Through Resources: A Better Path to Public Safety in D.C. The report highlights successful programs the District can grow or replicate to better serve D.C. residents and truly support safety. We know that militarization is not the way forward.
We are in the fight of our lives to keep the democracy we have and make it better. I’m proud of our team and our community for everything they’ve accomplished, in what can feel like the worst of times. And I’m grateful to everyone for your commitment to defending our rights during this challenging year and what will surely be another intense year in 2026.