The Week Ahead

March 30, 2025

Joyce Vance Mar 31

Even though it’s almost a week out, it’s time to think ahead to April 5, a national day of protest, and what that could mean. So far, fiery town halls, some with empty seats for absent Republican representatives, have been building momentum and visibility to propel us into a moment of outrage. The motto for the day is “Hands Off.” Hands off our Medicaid, our libraries, our Social Security, our freedom of the press, our jobs. Our liberty.

Free and fair elections are the most important marker for democracy

Engaged citizens are the line that separates democracies that survive challenges from those that succumb to autocracy. We need look no further back than South Korea, where an elected official scaled a wall and others broke through police lines to get back into parliament to vote against martial law while outraged people gathered on the streets in protest. Democracies survive because enough people get involved to hold on to the next election, and then, their ranks are swelled by additional people who vote with them to keep democracy. Protests and lawsuits can help to defend a democracy against attacks from within, but it’s elections that move them forward. Free and fair elections are the hallmark, the essential element of a sustainable democracy, so as we prepare to protest in ways both big and small, it’s important to focus on key goals—chief among them, fighting to protect elections and make sure as many citizens as possible participate in them.

Last week brought good news for Democrats in Pennsylvania’s special election, where Dan Goughnour won in House District 35 with about 63.4% of the vote—13 percent ahead of where Democrats were in 2024. That meant Democrats reclaimed control of the House in that state. There was also good news in the Pennsylvania Senate, where the Democrat, James Malone, won a tight race with 50% to the Republican candidate’s 49.1% While that vote is too close for much comfort, it came in a district that consists of conservative suburban and farming community, and Malone was up 16 points from where Democrats were in 2024.

Last Week, the House in Pennsylvania passed a legislative package “designed to enshrine key elements of the Affordable Care Act into state law.” Democracy exists in multiple levels in our system of federalism, and whatever the damage in Washington, Democracy can still function at the state and local levels, and we should invest in it. And of course, state elections matter; they even matter on the national level when it comes to issues like gerrymandering and our ability to participate in democracy, as we discussed last night (in case you missed it).

So, Democrats head into Wisconsin on Tuesday feeling strong, despite Elon Musk’s efforts to inject pay-for-vote in the guise of paying people for signing a petition about so-called activist judges into the mix. Trump won Wisconsin in 2024 with 1,697,626 or 49.7% of the vote. But it was close, with Harris taking 48.9% of the ballots.

Also up Tuesday, a pair of House races in Florida—one for Matt Gaetz’s old seat and the other to replace National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, who is trying to survive the Signal chat debacle. Trump carried both districts by more than 30 points, and the seats are essential to the Republican majority in the House. That balance currently stands at 218 to 213 with four vacancies. Waltz’s district hasn’t sent a Democrat to Congress for forty years. If Democrats win or even if the Republican margins tighten, the shift in momentum could be just the punch in the arm Democrats in Washington need.

Immigration

Trump’s promised mass deportations haven’t materialized yet. Instead, his administration has resorted to kidnapping foreign students off the streets. The widely circulated video of Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk being taken into ICE custody by masked agents depicts a woman in a headscarf on her way to celebrate a Ramadan break fast, looking about the furthest thing possible from a threat to our national security. The best ICE could muster was that she co-authored an article calling for Tufts to allow students the opportunity to criticize Israel. Deborah Fleischaker, the Biden administration’s chief of staff, said in the New York Times that she thought the arrest was a First Amendment violation and that “ICE had a policy in place that said that First Amendment activity was not to be the basis of enforcement action.”

Why is this happening? Why did ICE arrest a mechanical engineering student at the University of Alabama, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, a recent graduate of Columbia with a green card, a Russian scientist at Harvard Medical School who came here after protesting for Ukraine, and students at Georgetown and Cornell? What prompted Secretary of State Marco Rubio to claim at least 300 student visas had been revoked?

We can make an educated guess. By February 11, NBC was reporting that Trump, who had promised mass deportations while on the campaign trail, wasn’t happy with the pace of removals. They reported that a person who was “familiar with Trump’s thinking” said that “It’s driving him nuts they’re not deporting more people.” That happened despite January reports that Trump officials had given ICE officials daily arrest quotas. The Washington Post reported that “Each field office has been instructed to make 75 arrests per day, with managers ‘held accountable’ for failing to meet the targets.”

Those targets would have increased arrests across the nation from a few hundred each day to a range of 1,200 to 1,500, but where were the people to come from? It’s not like ICE wasn’t doing anything before Trump resumed office. The federal crime of “aggravated reentry,” which applies to people who reenter the United States without permission after a previous deportation and have a history of violence or gang affiliation, was already a high priority for prosecution. So ICE appears to have turned to low-hanging fruit: foreign students on visas who participated in First Amendment-protected protests.

On February 12, 2025, The Guardian reported that two senior ICE officials were reassigned over the “slow rate of deportations and arrests” and that the “reassignments were a result of ‘frustration that deportation and arrest numbers were not increasing fast enough’ to meet the Trump administration's targets.” On February 21, CBS reported that the acting head of ICE had been reassigned due to similar concerns.

Numeric production targets may work for manufacturing Teslas, but they’re a horrible idea for law enforcement. They distort police exercise of discretion and force officers and agents to focus on meeting quotas, not doing justice. Studies show that when law enforcement officers have quotas imposed, they ignore violent crime and focus on easier, quicker cases to meet targets. Quotas increase the potential for officer misconduct. The classic example of setting quotas is for traffic tickets—imagine how much worse the incentives are when a president decides to force dramatically more arrests and deportations. That could explain why students’ visas are being revoked and suggests that there will be more.

This rivals the family separation policy of the first Trump administration for sheer inhumanity. But it also harms Americans in very real ways. Who will want to study or come work here in this climate? Just one example, nearly 25% of practicing doctors in the United States are international medical graduates, demonstrates how this harms our own future prospects.

Americans continue to rise to the moment in ways both big and small. In Boston, residents posted information about handling encounters with ICE agents.

The Supreme Court

The Trump administration now has a number of cases pending on the Supreme Court’s docket as they seek to get out from under injunctions.

In the case out of Northern California, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to interfere with Federal Judge William Alsup’s order that forces the Trump administration to rehire probationary employees it had fired. The Justice Department appealed that order on the administration’s behalf. A response is due Thursday.

The administration has already appealed multiple cases involving Trump’s effort to strike birthright citizenship out of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Court wasn’t in a hurry to decide those cases, which may not bode well for the administration, although the arguments focus more on the sustainability of nationwide injunctions issued by one judge than they do on the substantive issue of birthright citizenship. A response is due in those cases on Friday.

The coming week could also bring action in a case involving Department of Education grants, where briefs were filed last week, and in the Alien Enemies case, where most of the speculation that we will get an early take on how the Court views the new administration’s conduct is focused. The plaintiffs’ response to the government’s petition is due on Tuesday, and it focuses on two of the issues we’ve previously discussed, whether the case should be dismissed since the lawsuit was filed in Washington, D.C., not in Texas where the plaintiffs were in custody, and whether a judge can issue a nationwide injunction on this matter. Some common themes emerge!

So far, the courts have been holding. But many of us are holding our breath to see if that continues when Trump gets back to the Supreme Court. Attorney General Pam Bondi had this comment, suggesting she expects a friendly bench when they get there, “We are going to fight back, and we are going to win, and the Supreme Court will be ready to hear these cases again.” After the presidential address to Congress last month, Trump shook Chief Justice John Roberts’ hand and said, “Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget it.” The question is whether the Supreme Court, or at least a majority of the Justices, are ready to. It’s time for them to follow the law, not pander to the President.

We’re in this together,

Joyce