I am a civil rights lawyer. I’m terrified that Trump will come back | Opinion

On election night, I watched the results come in like everyone else, with my own fears acting as a filter for the news Donald Trump would be our next president. The next day, it was clear to me as a civil rights attorney and a black man that the future of civil rights and their protections in America would soon be under attack by the new administration.

Even as we read about the myriad ways in which Project 2025 threatens to erode, if not entirely erase, our civil rights, the larger and more troubling issue is the removal of the system’s guardrails that serve as a backstop to accountability.

For many, especially Black and LGBTQIA+ people, the sense of danger that has increased since Election Day is not imaginary; it is so real that it is palpable. Roadside bigotry has already been encouraged and upgraded, now using technology. Just days after the election, Black Americans across the country — many of them young and in school — have been micro-targeted with hateful messages. racist text messages.

The rapid timing of these messages, some of which reference cotton picking and a return to the days of slavery, suggest that we are entering yet another era of heightened racial violence. Instead of crosses burning in the yards of black people and those who oppose racial injustice, text messages and cyberattacks are constructed to achieve the goal of terror and harm.

As disturbing as these actions may seem, what’s worse is that they signal more to come. It also raises important questions about how our civil rights laws will be enforced, who will be responsible for protecting them, and when they are violated, whether those responsible will be held accountable.

If history is any indication, there’s more than just cause for concern. Under the previous Trump administration, the Ministry of JusticeAmerica’s Civil Rights Division has been on the wrong side of seemingly every substantive issue involving America’s most targeted and most vulnerable. We witnessed the revocation of several consent decrees resulting from findings of impropriety related to police activities.

In many ways, these court-ordered decrees were one of the few tools of accountability and redress that reminded already troubled law enforcement agencies that they were being watched.

Yet under the Trump administration and a Jeff Sessions Ministry of Justice, these safeguards have been removed. The same Civil Rights Division also declined to investigate Minnesota police for deeper systemic problems after the killing George Floyd and during a period when the number of reported hate crimes had increased, federal investigations and prosecutions of these crimes did not occur at a pace consistent with the increase in the number of reported occurrences.

A consideration of police brutality and Trump’s comments about absolute immunity for officers is terrifying. But equally frightening is the potential removal of any protection for our civil liberties. Consider both of those things Breona Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery were murdered in 2020, during the Trump administration. We only know their names now because organizers and protesters took to the streets at the time and did not want their stories buried with their bodies.

Without peaceful demonstrations drawing attention to their respective cases, they probably would never have received the attention they did to put pressure on the way that was done to bring about further investigation and prosecution of the police in the case . Taylor’s case and the vigilante killers in Mr. Arbery. (An important point of clarity is that these investigations and actual prosecutions did not come under Trump-appointed Attorney General Bill Barr, but during President Trump. Joe BidenKristyn Clarke’s tenure as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.)

Seen in the context of a second Trump administration, the Project 2025 blueprint calls for commitment US military against demonstrators. That is to say, as our right to peacefully assemble is threatened, we may never know the names or hear the stories of countless others who have been victims of racist violence born of a heightened sense of contempt for the protection that our civil rights should provide. afford us. It is both a dizzying and cyclical paradigm to consider, and a sobering reality that is much closer than many of us may understand.

Our civil rights in America are among the few but hard-won guarantees designed to keep America’s brand of freedom a unique standard in the free and democratic world. In large part, this positions these rights as a cornerstone of American democracy and their protection as paramount. We’ve already seen that former President Trump was no defender of American civil rights, and there is even less hope for newly elected President Trump, armed with a shiny toy in the Project 2025 playbook, along with a CongressAnd Supreme Court all of whom seem ready to do his bidding. The only thing that can accelerate the real threat to the security of the lives of Black Americans and others who must protect these civil rights is if we continue to misunderstand the urgency of the moment.

As justice, democracy and freedom fade into obscurity, we must immediately place the fragility of our civil rights at the center of our national dialogue. If the DOJ under Trump II fails in its duty to protect our rights and enforce these laws, it will require us to extend our support to the network of organizations like the Legal Defense Fund, American Civil Liberties Union, Lawyers Committee and others increase exponentially. whose litigation programs have jeopardized the protection of civil rights while the government may have shunned its own moral obligation.

We cannot escape the sad reality that there are people who see this as a space to violate our rights. However, when these laws are seen as less than worth enforcing and accountability becomes negotiable, if not completely non-existent, the net effect is not only to dissolve our collective faith in our democratic institutions, but to undermine the very nature of democracy itself fundamentally changes. .

Charles Coleman Jr. is a civil rights attorney and former district attorney in Brooklyn, NY. He is a legal analyst at MSNBC and co-host of the MSNBC special Black Men in America: The Road to 2024. (X: CFColemanJr)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author.