Immigration at issue

Of the lawsuits, 174 have dealt with immigrant rights, targeting the family separation policy, detention and deportation practices and the administration’s repeated attempts to make it harder to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The other lawsuits address an array of issues high on the ACLU’s agenda: voting rights, LGBT rights, racial justice and others. In one long-running case, the ACLU succeeded in blocking the administration’s policy of barring young immigrant women in government custody from getting abortions.

“Donald Trump has provided a full employment program for ACLU lawyers on all of our issues,” Romero said.

By comparison, the ACLU says it filed 13 lawsuits and other legal actions against President George W. Bush’s administration in his first term, mostly alleging encroachments on civil liberties related to counterterrorism policies.

Many of the ACLU’s recent lawsuits remain unresolved. Of those that have been decided, Romero said, the ACLU has won more often than it has lost, though a precise breakdown was unavailable.

Among the setbacks, ACLU national legal director David Cole said, one of the most disappointing involved Trump’s efforts to ban foreign nationals from several predominantly Muslim countries. Lawsuits by the ACLU and its allies successfully blocked implementation of the first two versions of the ban, but the Supreme Court allowed a third version to go into effect in 2018.

By a similar 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court also allowed the implementation of the Trump administration policy barring transgender people from enlisting in the military. Lower courts had supported efforts by the ACLU and other groups to scrap the ban.

Another LGBT rights case recently ended in a major victory for the ACLU and its allies when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in June that gays, lesbians and transgender people were protected from employment discrimination under the Civil

Rights Act of 1964. One of the ACLU’s clients, Aimee Stephens, was fired from her job at a Michigan funeral home because she was transgender; she died just a few weeks before the high court ruled in her favor.