Photo by Paul Goyette, CC BY 2.0
This piece was originally published by Balls and Strikes.
In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, as rural hospitals and abortion clinics close, ICE raids escalate, and federal worker protections get gutted by executive order, many liberal institutions are still trying to figure out how to fight back. But one movement isn’t flailing. It’s filing.
Organized labor has become one of the most effective legal opponents of the Trump administration’s second-term agenda—not because it wants to, but because it has to. Take, for example, CBS’s sudden cancellation of The Late Show, which is hosted by frequent Trump critic Stephen Colbert. While fans mourned and celebrities voiced their sadness at the loss of Colbert’s spot in the late-night circuit, the Writers Guild of America issued a statement castigating CBS for “terminating a show in bad faith due to explicit or implicit political pressure”—a choice they called “dangerous and unacceptable in a democratic society.” Not content to just issue a fiery statement, the WGA asked New York Attorney General Leticia James to investigate the cancellation, and sue if necessary.
This is the kind of speed and clarity needed to cut through Trump’s noise. So far, the labor movement is proving itself to be uniquely positioned to deliver.
Already, the Trump administration has focused on weaponizing the federal bureaucracy to target workers. He ignored statutory removal protections to fire the NLRB’s Gwynne Wilcox, taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s comfort with short, unsigned opinions to chip away at checks on the executive branch in the process. He’s made workers less safe on the job, freezing a critically important pending heat safety rule and gutting the black lung prevention program at the National Institute for Occupational Health. Despite promises to work on affordability, the Trump DOL revived the subminimum wage for disabled workers, and pushed executive orders that make it harder for federal employees to organize. Meanwhile, the nominee to replace Gwynne Wilcox as chair of the NLRB is a former partner at Morgan Lewis, a law firm that has represented Amazon in high-profile union-busting efforts.
The strategy isn’t subtle: use a barrage of obscure administrative tools—midnight memos, stop-and-go rulemaking, unannounced enforcement shifts—to move faster than the opposition can react. If your enemy is delayed, procedural chaos is your friend.
That is, unless your opponent knows how to file a TRO by breakfast. Unlike most would-be challengers to Trump’s policies, unions don’t need time to get organized. They are organized. They have in-house counsel and outside counsel on speed dial, and are used to going to court in the middle of an organizing campaign to block employer retaliation or enforce a contract. They know how to challenge rulemakings at DOL and NLRB because they’ve been doing it for decades. They have members—millions of them—who can serve as plaintiffs, witnesses, press spokespeople, and direct action organizers. Most importantly, they proactively train their base to know their rights and how to enforce them in the moment, making every member ready for action the moment their rights are stepped on.
And unlike many public interest organizations that depend on the slow churn of foundation grants and fundraising emails, unions are funded by dues—meaning they can focus energy on the work, instead of on fundraising. In February 2025, days after the Department of Labor became the next target of DOGE, a coalition of unions filed multiple lawsuits to block DOGE from accessing Social Security data and confidential case data stored at the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In May, when Trump issued an executive order banning strikes and demonstrations by federal workers under the pretense of national security, the American Federation of Government Employees had a federal judge enjoining it within the week.
Photo by Paul Goyette, CC BY 2.0
Labor even has responded to ICE kidnappings. Back in March, SEIU California President David Huerta was detained and injured by ICE agents during a protest in Los Angeles, marking the fourth run-in between one of SEIU’s own and DHS since the Trump Administration escalated ICE activity. SEIU condemned the incident, staging additional protests in more than a dozen major cities within days, rustling up statements of support from politicians and even the more Trump-friendly union leaders. This rapid response effort created enough pressure to force the LAPD to release Huerta and other detained SEIU members within days.
Similarly, in March, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a sheet metal apprentice with SMART Local 100, was deported to El Salvador despite having legal protections and a court order preventing his removal. The Trump administration later admitted to an “administrative error” in deporting Garcia, even eliciting a rare rebuke from the Supreme Court ordering his return. Although traditionally the building and construction trade unions have a more conservative tendency, they reacted strongly to Abrego Garcia’s deportation, raising over a quarter of a million dollars from members to support his family and sending direct appeals to rank and file to contact their representatives in support of bringing “Brother Kilmar” home.
In each of these cases, union law departments didn’t act alone. They moved in coordination—with workers, organizers, and allies on the left all rowing in the same direction. And they did not need to create this structure to prepare for Trump. It was already in place, and well practiced from years of taking on some of Trump’s biggest supporters.
This is what movement lawyering actually looks like. Labor’s advantage isn’t just speed or legal savvy—it’s structure. Unions don’t treat legal work as a siloed, specialist domain. Workers are plaintiffs and messengers, who show up at agency hearings, enforce contract clauses, and use the Administrative Procedure Act like a baseball bat. And unlike constitutional impact litigation, which often happens far in both time and space from where people actually live and work, labor’s legal fights are immediate, tangible, and winnable. The stakes aren’t abstract—they’re about enforcing a broken contract, taking care of a workplace injury, or restoring a paycheck that disappeared.
Over the past several years, and especially since Trump took office again, there has been a great deal of headscratching about how the left plans to address the right-wing takeover of the courts. But people are already recognizing and responding to the labor movement’s successes: Among a bipartisan set of voters, organized labor’s popularity and enjoyment of public trust far outpaces every other institution. There might not be a roadmap for stopping the conservative counterrevolution. But making it easier for workers to organize—and training labor lawyers to fight on their behalf—would be a fine place to start.
