Local organizations prepare for the challenges expected from a second Trump administration

With the reelection of former President Donald Trump, community groups and organizations have begun to strategize how to curtail the potential negative effects of his policy and rhetoric. There’s good reason to worry, considering actions in his first term and his plans for the second – now with control of both houses of Congress and more of the judiciary.

Many promises in his first-term “Contract With the American Voter” backfired or failed. He vowed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, for instance, but having never come up with an Obamacare replacement, he lacked the votes in Congress to get it done. He vowed to build an “impenetrable” wall on the Mexican border to keep out undocumented immigrants and even to make Mexico pay for it, and none of that happened: He built portions of wall for $15 billion, none of it funded by Mexico, and it could be cut through with common power tools or scaled using ladders – and was breached 11 times a day in 2022, according to the libertarian Cato Institute.

Trump caused chaos nonetheless from his inauguration Jan. 20, 2017, to the arrival of Joe Biden to the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, forcing opponents to expend energy fighting back. There was the effort to “cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities,” which a few months later was reduced to affect only grants made by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security; and the “Muslim ban” that went into effect just a week after Trump took the oath of office, stranding hundreds of travelers (including nearly 400 holders of green cards) and inspiring an army of lawyers to head to their nearest airport to offer help.

This time Trump has a 900-page guide called Project 2025. As written by the conservative Heritage Foundation, it would replace civil servants with political appointees throughout the federal government, remove rights for minorities of all kinds and gut environmental protections, educational standards and business regulations. Trump said he has “nothing to do with Project 2025 – I have not read it,” but much of it was written by former (and, given recent announcements by a White House transition team) future Trump appointees. It also aligns with what he tried to accomplish during his first four years in office.

We talked with some experts about what they think lies ahead in the most likely areas of White House policy changes to affect Cambridge and Somerville: immigration, public education, reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights.

Immigration

Cantabrigian Schuyler Pisha, an immigration lawyer with Greater Boston Legal Services, said that with Trump’s reelection “every case that we have becomes more difficult and also increases demand to take more cases.”

During his campaign, Trump promised repeatedly to conduct mass deportations of undocumented immigrants should he be reelected. This has aroused fear and uncertainty in clients of Pisha, who has been “fielding a lot of calls and trying to calm people down” – and many of the calls are “from people who aren’t in danger” of being deported or losing their legal status. “People are very afraid,” Pisha said, but trying to counter that has its own risks. “Outreach can be difficult because you don’t want to speculate that much and spread more fear than there already is.”

There’s a good chance anti-immigrant policies will touch people in Cambridge and Somerville or their families. Twenty-nine percent of the population of Cambridge is foreign-born, and 77 languages were reported spoken by Cambridge Public School students at home, according to city, school and Census data; 25 percent of the population of Somerville is foreign-born, and students speak more than 50 languages at home. Sixty-three percent of Somervillians are white, and 57 percent of Cantabrigians.

Gov. Maura Healey announced in November that state police will not cooperate with mass deportation efforts, but Pisha acknowledged that “what the state can do is limited.” Many deportations today operate via detainers, orders that he said the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency can issue to local police departments to hand over undocumented immigrants in their system who have already been arrested. Local police can choose whether to act on this order, but ICE can also make arrests on its own; in November the agency detained three immigrants accused of child rape in Western Massachusetts. With Trump’s plan to involve the military and federal forces in the deportations, it is unclear how much of a role these detainers will play in his second administration.

Increasing need for services could be a problem for GBLS, which gives legal advice and representation to low-income people but said it already must turn away three out of five people with legitimate claims for help. During the previous Trump administration, “a lot of donors stepped up to fund different types of programs around immigration,” said Pisha, something that “petered out during the Biden administration but was still needed.” Pisha believes his nonprofit “may see some increase in capacity” from increased donations in the coming years, which would allow it to provide services to more immigrants.

Public education

Another of Trump’s campaign promises is to eliminate the federal Department of Education – something Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota was all too eager to act on by introducing a bill in late November. Dayshawn Simmons, president of the Somerville Educators Union, said that while Massachusetts educators and students were relatively insulated during the first Trump presidency, “this time around, everyone should be a little bit more concerned about what can happen” locally and nationally. (Simmons said that he “can speak from the values” of the union, but an official public statement has not been authorized by vote of the board or membership of the union.)

“Especially in the absence of the Department of Education,” Simmons said, “the stories that we hear coming out of Louisiana and Florida and Texas I think could be national platforms soon,” pointing to pushes toward school choice in these states that have caused public schools to close.

If the Department of Education is dissolved, and with it the responsibility for ensuring that “public education stays a right for all” nationwide, the union and it allies will continue to advocate for the codification of “a right to education” at the state level, Simmons said. That “right now might seem largely symbolic, but four years from now it really might not be.”

“Seeing our Legislature do anything would be a bonus,” Simmons said.

Additionally, local schools “see a lot of federal dollars that can be used toward our schools’ infrastructure,” and federal dollars supply significant grants to college undergraduates. Both could be in jeopardy. Simmons said education is “probably going to have a decrease in our workforce” if federal grants to undergraduates who are studying to become teachers are reduced or eliminated.

Reproductive rights

Planned Parenthood health centers “are open and we’re not going anywhere,” said MaryRose Mazzola, chief external affairs officer for the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, but the nonprofit is bracing for the same kind of attempted restrictions to reproductive health care access and targeted attacks as from the previous Trump administration.

The organization is “extremely grateful” for Massachusetts’ codification of Roe protections and the stockpiling of abortion and contraceptive medication, but is now focused on “making sure that the access is equitable,” including for young people, Mazzola said. It is “still a requirement for some minors to get their parents’ consent or go to court,” and the “folks who have to go to court are more likely to be members of historically marginalized groups.”

Abortions increased in Massachusetts in 2023 after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022 allowed for protections to be rolled back in other states – that is, there was a significant increase in patients coming from out of state, Mazzola said, and the organization expects to see that continue.

Planned Parenthood affiliates got about $148 million from the federal government from 2019 to 2021 in the form of grants from the Department of Health and Human Services; the organization expects much of that funding to be withdrawn in a second Trump administration and are “looking to state partners for funding,” Mazzola said. She highlighted a program for nurse practitioners and physician assistants to improve reproductive-care skills that began this year with the support of state funding.

LGBTQ+ rights

There were “pretty clear signs during the campaign or from Project 2025” that a second Trump administration would diminish protections for LGBTQ students and others, said Ricardo Martinez, executive director of Glad Law, a Boston organization that serves Cambridge and Somerville residents fighting laws or regulations that seek to make “a second-class community” of people under its umbrella. (The name stands for GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders.)

Still, Martinez urged the community not to panic. While there are “legitimate concerns” for restrictions in rights for LGBTQ+ youth, “major policy takes time to implement and will face legal challenges” from Glad or another group. This is especially true in Massachusetts, Martinez said, where, for example, the state already codifies students’ rights to attend school safely and be free from discrimination or harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

“There is a lot of process in big policy changes that take time,” he said, and legal challenges will be mounted to “delay or prevent the implementation” of policies such as removing access to proper health care for trans people.

Massachusetts has the second-largest LGBT population of any state as a share of total population, behind Vermont, but that’s still just 5 percent. Cambridge was named by The Advocate in 2016 as the third-queerest city in America.

The organization Martinez has led only since September, after serving as the Equality Texas chief executive since 2019, has defended and advanced queer rights for nearly 50 years. “When the last Trump administration banned transgender military service members, we fought back immediately – and won. When states have attacked LGBTQ+ youth and families, we’ve met that challenge head-on in the courts,” Martinez said in response to Trump’s reelection. “What comes next will require fighting on every front – from the courts and state legislatures to countering the disinformation targeting our communities and ensuring LGBTQ+ people and people with HIV have the information they need to protect and exercise their rights. We won’t back down.”

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