By Talia Richman, The Baltimore Sun
BALTIMORE — President Trump’s election integrity commission is what keeps Kristen Clarke up at night. For Thomas Saenz, the issue on the front-burner is immigration enforcement.
Fatima Goss Graves and Sarah Warbelow say it’s impossible to pick just one issue from the first six months of the Trump administration that worries them most.
These four panelists, all leaders of various legal teams, discussed their strategies for dealing with Trump’s presidency as part of the NAACP’s Continuing Legal Education seminar Sunday. The nation’s oldest civil rights organization is holding its national convention in Baltimore through Wednesday.
Breaking with tradition, Trump declined an invitation to speak at the 108th annual convention. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that though he declined the invitation, “certainly the invitation for dialogue with that group would happily take place and we’d certainly like to continue to do that.”
NAACP General Counsel Bradford Berry began the panel by discussing recent incidents of police brutality and the spike in hate crimes. He decried efforts that he views as trying to suppress voters and limit civil rights.
“But there is some good news,” Berry said. “Some of that good news is what happens when we stand and fight.”
Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, said her organization has filed multiple complaints against Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is co-chair of Trump’s commission to investigate voter fraud. Trump has alleged without evidence that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election, causing him to lose the popular vote to his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights encourages people to call into their election protection hotline to report instances of intimidation or other voter suppression tactics.
“This is an unprecedented effort to roll out and push voter suppression policies and laws on a national scale. It is one of the most dangerous threats to democracy that we’ve seen in modern times,” Clarke said. “We’re going to fight tooth and nail until we shut this commission down.”
Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center, said her organization is pushing to educate people about the impact of Republican plans to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Once people know what the health care plan would actually do, Graves said, it is deeply unpopular.
“For black women in particular, this heath care repeal plan is just devastating,” she said.
Within the Latino community, Trump’s rhetoric has sowed “unprecedented levels of fear and confusion,” said Saenz, president and general counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
And for those who identify as LGBT, there is concern about “excessive amounts of discrimination,” said Warbelow, the Human Rights Campaign’s legal director.
After an hour of slamming Trump’s policies, Berry challenged the panelists to name one bright spot from the administration’s first six months.
“I hesitate to call it bright spot, but the bright spot in my mind is the incompetency of the administration, which has limited what bad things they’ve been able to accomplish,” Saenz said to applause. “There’s a daily battle of which will get more attention: the inhumanity or the incompetence. … I’m happy when the incompetence wins.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
