Demonstrators gather for the Women’s March on Nov. 2, 2024. Former federal prosecutor Brendan Ballou writes that “advocacy on the outside made advocacy on the inside possible” during the first Trump administration. Credit: Kent Nishimura / Getty

I’ve seen firsthand how resistance to Donald Trump — both inside and out of government — can stop his illegal plans.

In 2017, I was a young lawyer in the National Security Division of the Justice Department. Trump had just been elected, in part on his promise to impose “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” In his first week in office, Trump tried to do exactly that, largely halting travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries. That ham-handed order was quickly blocked by a federal court, but by bad luck, my office in the Justice Department became deeply involved in crafting a workable version of this “travel ban.”

I believed that the proposed order was illegal: […]

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