https://www.fcd-us.org/when-communities-fight-back-the-power-of-plaintiffs-to-defend-the-vulnerable/
As a lawyer for the ACLU, I depend on partnership with plaintiffs to do my job defending our civil rights and liberties. Each case that we file needs a plaintiff prepared to go to court. Recently, however, the scare tactics of the current administration have chilled the willingness of plaintiffs to come forward, compromising our ability to guard against federal abuses of power. We must fight back against this intimidation.
Overcoming Skepticism About the Legal System
I grew up in a small Chinese American community in suburban Massachusetts with a healthy dose of skepticism about the law. I worked with my mother in a Chinese restaurant, where we staffed the phones and front desk, acting as intermediaries to the rest of the town. One of our most dreaded interactions was with lawyers and those who invoked the law to threaten the restaurant and its employees. We understood the legal system as a tool that could only be used against us -- to intimidate and shame -- for supposed violation of rules that we could barely comprehend. We never thought of the law as a way to vindicate our own rights. We knew coworkers who, after experiencing wage theft and harassment in other restaurants, had simply chosen to relocate. No one dreamed of suing. Above all, we wanted to stay out of court. This sentiment, I’ve learned, is not uncommon to many Chinese American and other immigrant communities across the country.
That sentiment, however, is one that we must all work to overcome. In a country built on the belief that no one is above the law, preserving the ability and willingness of people to challenge unlawful government action in court is paramount. A single court case brought by a single plaintiff can have an enormous impact.
The Legacies of Wong Kim Ark and Yick Wo During a of Period Chinese Exclusion
Years later, in my constitutional law class in law school, it came as a surprise to me that Chinese immigrants had helped to shape the foundation of civil rights law at a time when anti-Chinese sentiment was at a fever pitch. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, restricting Chinese immigration into the country. In the years following, Chinese immigrants filed thousands of lawsuits challenging discriminatory laws and policies, such as laws denying Chinese immigrants the means to work or own property.
Two of these cases reached the Supreme Court. In United States of America v. Wong Kim Ark, the plaintiff, Wong, challenged the government’s denial of his entry into the United States and refusal to recognize his citizenship status. Wong had been born in the United States to Chinese parents. After a visit to China in 1895, however, he was stopped at the border and denied entry on the ground that he was not a U.S. citizen. Wong brought suit against the federal government and, in 1898, the Supreme Court recognized in a landmark decision that Wong was a U.S. citizen because he was born in the country. Wong’s case continues to serve as a foundational precedent confirming the right to birthright citizenship -- most recently in Barbara v. Trump, the ACLU’s victory at the Supreme Court this term, where the Court found President Trump’s Executive Order seeking to end birthright citizenship unconstitutional.
Around the same time, another plaintiff, Lee Yick, challenged a city licensing ordinance that was discriminatorily enforced against Chinese laundry owners. Yick was a Chinese immigrant who had owned a laundry business for 22 years in San Francisco. In 1885, however, after passage of the ordinance forbidding laundries to operate in certain kinds of buildings, the city of San Francisco denied Yick a permit and issued him a fine for operating his laundry illegally. While the law purported to regulate all laundries, it was only used to penalize Chinese owners. Yick refused to pay and brought a case challenging the local ordinance. In Yick Wo v. Hopkins, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Yick’s favor, holding that discriminatory enforcement of laws, even those that appear neutral on their face, violates the Equal Protection Clause in the Constitution. The case serves as a bedrock of Equal Protection doctrine and, like Wong Kim Ark, continues to be cited in civil rights cases and scholarship.
As I learned about this history, I was amazed that it was not more broadly known among Chinese Americans today, especially because the lawsuits were part of a concerted resistance against governmental abuses. While taking on these cases was undoubtedly daunting in that political moment, Wong and Yick had the support of their community members; the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association helped to fund both lawsuits, among many others brought by Chinese plaintiffs at the time.
Wong and Yick remind us that, within our legal system, a small group of people can vindicate the rights of millions. And the lawsuits that plaintiffs bring -- even when the chances of success seem uncertain -- can change the course of history.
The Current Campaign of Intimidation
These lessons are crucial to carry with us as we face the current offensive on civil rights and intimidation of people and institutions that dare to respond. As we at the ACLU prepared for attacks on women’s rights, we knew that the administration would attempt to destroy the federal care infrastructure that supports working women, particularly immigrant women and women of color. We prepared to defend the Head Start program, which provides educational services to children who are the most in need, as well as federal childcare subsidies that enable parents to work and attend school. We stood ready to fight for women’s financial security and independence and push back against the efforts to drive women out of the workforce and back into the home.
But as the administration began to carry out these attacks in 2025, we saw an additional kind of threat: a campaign of intimidation against individuals and institutions that dared to challenge and speak out against abuses of power. From targeting universities, law firms, and public officials, the administration has made clear that it is willing to retaliate against entities that stand in the way of its radical policy changes. It has ordered strict compliance with its priorities among federal contractors and recipients of federal funding. Indeed, just weeks into taking power, the administration caused chaos and panic by abruptly freezing all funds for federal grantees, including Head Start providers, fair housing organizations, and medical researchers, to assess their compliance with supposed “anti-DEI” decrees.
These threats have had profound chilling effects among the safety net service providers that depend on federal grants in order to survive. As the ACLU began to recruit plaintiffs to challenge significant new restrictions on federal grants, we encountered profound fear and reluctance to draw the attention of those in power. Many organizations expressed concern that the risks of filing a lawsuit in the current political moment were simply too great.
Of course, this response is completely understandable, particularly in communities that do not regularly litigate. For many, we were asking them to place faith in a legal system with which they had little - or negative - experience.
The Enduring Courage of Civil Rights Plaintiffs
Against this backdrop, I have been deeply inspired by the courage of the individuals and organizations that decided to become plaintiffs. The clients in our recent case defending against the attempted dismantling of the Head Start program serve as an important example that many are still willing to step up to carry on the proud tradition of civil rights plaintiffs.
In the case, the ACLU represents a coalition of parent and provider groups, each led by courageous staff. We are challenging policies that conflict with the core of Head Start’s mission to help children in need prepare for school, including the administration’s ban on “DEI,” restrictions on eligibility based on immigration status, and the abrupt firing of over half of Office of Head Start staff.
For the clients, the decision to serve as plaintiffs did not come lightly. ACLU lawyers and plaintiffs’ staff discussed the potential impact, benefits, and risks of litigation over the course of months, building trust and mutual understanding. Linda Wang, Director of Member Engagement and Outreach of the Illinois Head Start Association, recounted that she also had to overcome initial questions about bringing a lawsuit. Like me, she had grown up in an immigrant community that was skeptical about legal interventions. But as she saw that the traditional tools of advocacy were no longer working, she knew they had to consider other options. Deepa Mehta, Director of one of the Association’s members, agreed that even though suing the administration was outside of their comfort zone, it seemed to be the only way to get their voices heard. Lauri Morrison-Frichtl, the Association’s Executive Director, told me that she ultimately considered standing up for the children in her state to be a moral obligation.
In our lawsuit, the plaintiffs provided firsthand descriptions of how the administration’s policy changes would impact providers and parents, and, most importantly, the children that Head Start is designed to serve. The plaintiffs explained that changes would lead to an immediate decline in services and access for hundreds of thousands of children -- including infants and toddlers -- who need them the most: students with disabilities, dual language learners, and children from different cultural backgrounds. The changes would also drastically reduce enrollment of children from immigrant families and affect the eligibility of hundreds of thousands of children.
After taking these powerful accounts into consideration, the court ordered the federal government to halt the policies we challenged all across the country. Sandy Diaz, Advocacy and Family Engagement Specialist of the Washington Head Start Association, reflected that while the prospect of being a plaintiff had been daunting, she felt empowered by the realization that they were able to have such an enormous impact. She was proud that, by taking on the case, she and her colleagues were able to provide cover for providers and families who faced greater risk and could not speak up. Because of the courage of a small group of organizations, Head Start programs everywhere were spared from many of the administration’s attacks.
Since these initial victories, several of our plaintiffs tell us that litigation, particularly when paired with other advocacy strategies like public education and media outreach, has become part of the common language of their organizations. Lauri reflected that coordination around the litigation brought their membership -- Head Start providers across Illinois -- closer together and provided them with a clear, shared goal. Joel Ryan, the Executive Director of the Washington Head Start Association, explained that the litigation also helped to mobilize their families and communities more broadly. And media coverage of the litigation gave both us and our clients a way to take control of the narrative, providing a platform to explain to the public and elected officials the scale of the attacks on Head Start and the toll the new federal policies were taking on providers and families.
I hope the experiences of our plaintiffs will continue to inspire courage and strengthen resolve in others, particularly as we’re still seeing relentless attacks on Head Start and other educational and childcare programs.
I understand why many immigrant and working-class families see the law as a threat and why so many are afraid. The administration’s campaign of intimidation has been designed to exploit that very real fear. But we have much to learn from the indomitable courage of the plaintiffs who still step forward despite the risks. That courage exists, even in communities that have been led to believe, over generations, that the law does not protect them against the powerful. It exists in individuals willing to say: I will be the plaintiff. I will stand in court. I will fight.