Christina Lee, Head Photography Editor

By the end of the Trump administration’s fifth week, last Friday, New Haven was part of two legal moves to counter the new president’s policies: a lawsuit rebuffing threats to withhold funds from sanctuary cities and a brief in support of another lawsuit against medical research funding cuts.

In each case, Mayor Justin Elicker joined a band of local leaders from across the country to publicly challenge President Donald Trump, defending municipal support for undocumented immigrants or the flow of federal dollars to academic institutions like Yale. And in both cases, New Haven received free support from a progressive legal advocacy nonprofit based in Oakland, California, that is mobilizing cities against Trump in the courts.

“We have two options right now. One is to hide under a rock, and the other is to stand up,” Elicker said in an interview, complaining that too many other cities are choosing the former path. “If everyone stood up, we would have a much more powerful resistance to the unbelievably unethical things that are going on in Washington right now.”

Public Rights Project, which works on proactive legal strategy with state and local governments, had not previously worked with New Haven. But its founder, Jill Habig LAW ’09, told the News she based the civil rights group on a model she had practiced as a student and then faculty supervisor at a Yale Law School clinic, the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project.

In starting Public Rights Project in 2017 — after she worked for Kamala Harris’ California attorney general’s office and 2016 Senate campaign — Habig wanted to fill a gap between local governments’ power and their ability to “make use of that authority in ways that advance civil rights,” she said. Public Rights Project employs a dozen lawyers, according to a spokesperson for the organization, and is now hiring four more.

The sanctuary city lawsuit, filed Feb. 7 in federal district court for the Northern District of California, challenged a Jan. 20 Trump executive order that instructed senior officials to ensure that sanctuary jurisdictions — those that limit municipal law enforcement coordination with immigration authorities — “do not receive access to Federal funds.”

In addition to the leading plaintiffs San Francisco and Santa Clara County, the original plaintiffs were Portland, Oregon; King County, Washington, which includes Seattle; and New Haven. More jurisdictions were expected to join the lawsuit this week.

Elicker said New Haven joined the lawsuit after getting in touch with San Francisco’s legal team through Yale’s San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project.

Thanks to Public Rights Project, the only direct cost to the city stemming from the lawsuit is a $328 fee for its top lawyer, Corporation Counsel Patricia King, to be specially admitted to represent the city in the Northern District of California, according to Elicker’s spokesperson. She had not been admitted by Wednesday, after her name appeared in the original lawsuit with an asterisk.

Public Rights Project had a $7 million operating budget last year, according to its spokesperson. Its major funders include the Ford Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and other foundations.

“The federal government can’t possibly carry out a mass deportation agenda without help from local governments,” said Habig, who teaches at Berkeley Law School. “And so cities actually have a lot of leverage if they’re equipped to use it.”

She declined to detail the extent and nature of the organization’s involvement in drafting the lawsuit complaint or assembling the coalition of plaintiffs.

A large group of plaintiffs can show judges the case’s magnitude, according to Habig, and diffuse any potential retaliation from the Trump administration — a fear that Elicker said has kept many other mayors from taking a similarly prominent stand against the sanctuary city crackdown and other Trump policies.

“A number of my conversations with other mayors, their decision is to keep a low profile, and while I respect that decision, I wholeheartedly disagree with that decision,” Elicker said. “If we all stick our heads up, you’re less likely to get your head cut off. And it doesn’t seem fair to me to allow some municipalities to stick their necks out when we all will benefit from the actions of those few municipalities.”

Since 2006, New Haven has barred police officers from inquiring about residents’ immigration status or aiding federal immigration enforcement, expanding the policy to all municipal employees in a 2020 “welcoming city” order. The city has not yet lost any funding due to Trump’s sanctuary city executive order, the mayoral spokesperson said.

The lawsuit echoed one brought by San Francisco in 2017, in the first year of Trump’s first term, against another executive order targeting sanctuary cities. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the city’s favor in 2018 and 2019, creating a precedent likely to help the cities suing this year. New Haven was not a plaintiff in that case, and the Public Rights Project, then in its infancy, was not involved.

Former Mayor Toni Harp, who led New Haven for the first three years of Trump’s first term, made a different kind of statement against Trump in 2018 — when she boycotted a White House gathering of mayors she had planned to attend to protest a Justice Department letter to other sanctuary jurisdictions. “Where’s Toni? Toni? Toni?” Trump asked the crowd.

Harp told the News this week that New Haven’s undocumented immigrant community has long benefitted from Yale Law School clinic work on individual deportation cases.

“People were being picked up,” Harp said, referring to ICE activity in the city during Trump’s first presidency. Law school students and professors, she said, were “vigorously trying to get those people back into our communities with their families.”

Two weeks after the sanctuary city complaint, New Haven and 44 other jurisdictions filed an amicus curiae brief in a cluster of cases challenging cuts to National Institutes of Health funding for scientific and medical research. That case is in the District of Massachusetts.

When asked whether the city would join other legal actions against the Trump administration, Elicker said he is “evaluating different opportunities as they arise” to confront what he called “an existential crisis in our country right now.”

The sanctuary city lawsuit is set for a virtual hearing on May 6.