US Senator Cory Booker appeared on a livestreamed discussion with the ACLU Thursday evening, still riding high on his record-setting speech of 25 hours. While many viewers in the comment section were excited to have Booker appear, a sizeable number expressed their anger and disappointment that Booker had voted to confirm Charles Kushner, father-in-law to Ivanka Trump, and who had been pardoned in 2020 by President Trump, as US Ambassador to France.

Booker took no questions from the viewers of the discussion, but took questions from Deborah Archer, President of ACLU National.

Prior to the senator’s talk, AJ Hikes, Deputy Executive Director for Strategy and Culture, highlighted the ACLU’s recent court battles against the Trump administration, saying that they had filed over 110 legal actions, including 50 lawsuits. Their main concerns were that the Trump administration has been invoking wartime powers, such as the Alien Enemies Act, to facilitate deportations, ignoring constitutional obligations to due process. Hikes noted that the Alien Enemies Act had been invoked by FDR to intern Japanese-Americans into camps during World War Two. The ACLU is also trying to pressure the government for the return of people unlawfully sent to El Salvador’s mega-prison, although the administration has been so far unwilling to return even those they admitted, then retracted their admission, were incorrectly sent. They are also alarmed by students being picked up by unidentified immigration law enforcement, apparently targeted specifically due to their campus dissentions or protests against the Israel-Gaza war.

Hikes said that their efforts against the Trump administration would come down to a matter of “stamina.”

New Jersey ACLU executive director Amol Sinha spoke about the arrest of Newark mayor Ras Baraka attempting to conduct an oversight review of a detention center in his city, which made international headlines. “The Trump administration has targeted all of us, and New Jersey is no exception. ICE has opened the biggest detention facility on the East Coast, right here in Newark, and so we've become a hub for the Trump administration's anti-immigrant agenda, and he's delivered on his promise of targeting leaders who disagree with him by arresting and charging elected officials from New Jersey. So, we're ground zero for the fight for immigrants’ rights and for the assault on checks and balances and the rule of law, but we're ready for it. We are also the epicenter for defending and expanding our rights. This isn't about politics. It's about patriotism. I was at a rally recently and a young person shouted out, ‘where are our heroes?’ It's time for heroes like all of you, patriots who refuse to allow democracy to be eroded.”

Sinha described Senator Booker as a friend who worked to address inequalities and enact reforms while he was mayor of Newark before introducing ACLU President Archer.

Booker said that he “never imagined” the US would have a leader openly attacking basic liberties and the right to free expression, and that students in higher education were being warned to watch what they say, especially online, or that corporations would be “called to heel and threatened.” Booker said that he was aware some non-profits were being targeted and told to answer to DOGE, even though they take no federal money. “They’re trying to make us afraid, intimidate, and overwhelm.”

During his discussion, Booker invoked Frederick Douglass, who said, “The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those who are oppressed,” stressing that the more the administration can “get away with,” the more they will try to go farther.

Archer asked the senator how he would respond to fears about the Trump administration undermining court orders. Booker said that the first lawyers to come under attack were those within the government itself, particularly those charged with protecting citizens’ rights, with many resigning or being relocated. He said that Trump’s continued “trolling” of judges has led to increased violence and threats of violence against judges around the country, and that law firms were coming under attack as well. “We are at a point of crisis,” he said, but that “fear is a necessary precondition for courage.”

Booker noted that the government was dropping their cases against police abuse, which in turn undermines the credibility of legal institutions. The consequence, he said, was that as the institutions of democracy and the rule of law become discredited, people turn to more authoritarianism in its wake. “We have to be doing something that we haven’t been doing before,” Booker said.

Police accountability on the state and local level is crucial for keeping communities safe, he said, citing his conversations with Newark police who said the city has become less safe because immigrants are afraid to talk to the authorities. Local leaders who are “complicit” in undermining their communities “are paving the road to chaos,” he warned. Those local leaders who have been at the forefront of resistance, often putting themselves at risk, he said, were vital, describing them as a bulwark against that chaos. He said the arrest of Mayor Baraka and the charges being filed against Rep. LaMonica McIver were unjust and represented an abuse of power.

Booker said that he had delivered his 25-plus-hour speech in the senate because he had felt the pressure from his constituents to do more. He said someone had asked him if he “was an AmeriCAN or an AmeriCAN’T” and that had spurred him to try to take further action. As a minority party in both houses of Congress, the Democrats’ options are somewhat limited, but Booker emphasized that pressure from the people does not go unnoticed. He was particularly emphatic that concerned citizens in Republican-led districts do not give up in their attempts to persuade their Republican Representatives and Senators to change their course.

Republicans, in general, have been advised not to hold in-person town halls as a result of widespread negative public backlash. This has presented an opportunity for Democrats, such as Booker, Bernie Sanders (an Independent, not a Democrat), and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to go into those districts and try to reach out to and connect with ignored or sidelined residents there. “You can be part of the chorus,” Booker said, encouraging people to engage in the process. He said that living in a Republican district or state “is not permission to not push and protest and do things that make a difference.”

Throughout the discussion, Booker praised the role the ACLU has had in shaping public policy and being a driving force for change around the country.

“I'm blessed because I live in one of the greatest communities I could ever imagine. I live in the central ward of Newark, New Jersey. We don't mistake wealth with worth in our community,” Booker said. “We are at or below the poverty line in my neighborhood, but the people I meet every day are heroes of hope in my community, and strength and resiliency, for how much change we've made over the last 25 years in our community.” He talked about a tenant president of one of the Newark projects he knew, a woman who stayed and fought for the tenants when she could have left to live somewhere else.

“She taught me that hope, ultimately, is the active condition that despair will not have the last word, and she was going to have the last word,” Booker said. “My neighborhood is full of people where life has often given them the most difficult blows, but yet still somehow, bruised and battered, struggling, they still find a way out of no way, to hold a community together, to love on folks, to lift people up, and to keep on going. So, this is one of those times where all of us are feeling weary and overwhelmed, where all of us are angry, where we turn on the TV and say, ‘what's it going to be today?’ There are going to be losses. There are going to be times where we feel defeated even, but we can never give up. This country so desperately needs heroes, and heroism is not a person in a high office or title. Heroism will always be found in the community, will always be found in the streets, will always be found in those Americans who don't give up in fighting for America, even when they don't feel like America is showing up for them … those people who never lose their faith in this nation, who keep loving her and hoping her back to health. Those are the heroes we need.”