In a statement issued following former President Donald Trump’s resounding victory over Vice President Kamala Harris last week, the executive director of the Maine American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said the nonprofit is “prepared to act” to resist the “dangers” posed by Trump’s return to the presidency.

“For 105 years nationwide and 56 years in Maine, the ACLU has consistently and fearlessly defended all people’s constitutional freedoms and fought politicians’ abuses of power – and we are not stopping now,” ACLU of Maine Executive Director Molly Curren Rowles stated.

“As a proudly non-partisan organization with commitments that transcend election cycles and party politics, we are clear-eyed about the dangers posed by a second Trump presidency and the challenges ahead,” Rowles said.

Rowles said that the Maine ACLU has been preparing for a potential second Trump administration for the past nine months.

“Just like in 2016, we will get to work immediately to resist repression and totalitarianism,” Rowles said.

“In the coming weeks and months, the ACLU of Maine and its counterparts in all 50 states will move forward decisively here in Maine and across the country to vindicate the rights and freedoms of those most vulnerable, to give voice to the values of our multicultural democracy, and to preserve the commitment to justice for all,” she added.

The national ACLU released a roadmap of initiatives they plan to put into motion as soon as Trump is inaugurated in order to thwart the policy mandate he was elected to carry out by the American people.

Those initiatives include a coordinated effort to block the Trump administration’s plan of mass deportations of illegal aliens, providing legal defense to whistleblowers and critics in the second Trump administration, and challenging any policies the ACLU believes to be discriminatory in the courts at the state and local levels.

The director of the national ACLU, Anthony Romero, went so far in his post-election statement to call the potential policies of a second Trump administration “anti-liberty” and “fundamentally anti-American.”

At a September townhall event led by an immigration advocacy organization in Portland regarding the 2024 presidential election, Maine ACLU policy counsel Michael Kebede announced the organization’s intention to work with the State Legislature to pass laws protecting illegal immigrants from deportation, while comparing federal immigration authorities to Nazis in 1930s Germany.

“And so, one thing the ACLU hopes to see and will work for, and I hope all of you here will be interested in working toward, is trying to prevent state cooperation with all of the federal government’s deportation efforts,” Kebede said.

In cases when a migrant is in the U.S. illegally, Kebede argued that the State of Maine and local municipalities should “stop cooperating with the federal government” and say “we will not help you deport our neighbors.”

“We have to pass laws — that’s the only thing that’ll put a barrier between federal deportation efforts, federal persecution efforts, the prosecution of people by out of state actors and people in pain,” he added.

The Maine ACLU policy counsel labeled supporters of deportation of illegal immigrants as belonging to “vile political communities,” comparing U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the Nazi Party of 1930s Germany.

“There’s also the moral consequence of belonging to vile political communities, which I don’t think anyone one of us wants to belong to,” he said.

“When history books write about us and we’re asked, ‘what were you doing when the ICE officers marched into businesses, marched into courthouses, marched into schools and took children, took their parents, and sent them back to countries where the best you can hope for is a meager survival, but in some cases where they died, what were you doing?’” Kebede said, extending his analogizing ICE with the Nazis.