I was elected Oregon Attorney General in November 2024, and I filed my first case a month into the role.

On January 21, 2025, Oregon and three other states filed the first case against an executive order titled Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, which aimed to end birthright citizenship for certain children born in the United States.

Oregon was one of the first states to bring legal challenges against actions taken by the Trump administration.

This was possible in large part because “[T]here was an incredible amount of collaboration moving into this space among attorneys general across the country. And the other important thing to note is that you had people at the Oregon Department of Justice, frontline attorneys, already working on these issues before I took office.”

The decision to file a lawsuit is pretty simple. First, we ask: “Is Oregon or are Oregonians being harmed by the actions going on in Washington, D.C.?” Then: “Is the cause of that harm something unconstitutional or a violation of law? And are we, as a state, the right folks to bring the lawsuit forward?”

If the answers to those questions are yes, then the Oregon Department of Justice absolutely must move forward, because we are in the rule of law of enforcing the rule of law.

Sometimes we’re not the best party to bring a lawsuit, and in those cases, we’ll partner with other organizations and file an amicus brief to support what’s happening elsewhere. That helps lend credibility to the voices of Oregonians in those cases.

Note: There are 33 lawsuits currently filed as the State of Oregon.

Democracy is about participation. It’s about the involvement of everyone in community.

I think about what’s been happening over the last six months. A lot of these funding decisions were supposed to be made in public. Some of them were. There’s a law that says, “You need to fund this.” And the federal government has said, “No, we’re going to ignore that law.” That’s why some of these lawsuits exist.

But many decisions are being made in the dark—without our input. So we have an obligation, in our own unique ways, to speak out and provide that public input—to let the federal government know: This is not the direction we want our country to go. This is not the country we want to live in.

We have an obligation to do that in a democracy. And yes, that can be hard depending on where we are in life. But right now, in this moment in history, people are doing that more than ever before.

I often think about water. We never talk about water—because it’s boring. It only becomes important when there’s a crisis, because it’s essential. Democracy is very similar. We’ve reached a crisis point, and now people are paying attention.

The question is: How do you maintain that investment in democracy? It’s like a relationship. You have to keep investing in it. You can’t just show up every two years when there’s a crisis.

We’ve had a lot of rulings against the Trump administration so far. In some cases—especially involving immigrants’ rights and ICE—we’ve entered some very gray areas. I will sit here and say that I think there have been some malicious uses in the way they have not followed those orders.

But in most of our funding cases and civil rights cases, the federal government is following the court’s orders. In those instances, the rulings are very black and white. I have no indication that in any of the cases the State of Oregon is involved in, they’ll do anything other than follow them.

Now, if the federal government chooses not to follow the Supreme Court, there are different avenues of contempt, civil contempt, and ways that you can hold the administration accountable. It’s not that you’re going to put the President in jail, but you can hold the administrators of each agency accountable in a way where it does include putting people in jail in a civil contempt context.

We never want to get to that point. I hope we never do. But those tools exist—and there are even more creative tools beyond them.