Interview with Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.
The US right has had quite some time to prepare a toolbox with repressive instruments. The latest one we have heard about is HR 9594, also called “nonprofit killer bill” by NGOs and the left. It has not passed the Senate though. What role could it play?
It is the result of a long-planned move by the right wing that is largely centered around shutting down the left and left perspectives. Specifically, it creates a process for the US Department of the Treasury to designate specific US nonprofits as organizations as supporting terrorists or terrorist activities, and then removing their nonprofit tax status. What that means practically is that for organizations like the Center for Constitutional Rights or Jewish Voice for Peace that are very deeply connected to supporting Palestinian human rights, a right-wing appointee could designate any of these groups as supporting terrorism without a hearing, without a process, and immediately cut off their tax status. As a result, these organizations´ ability to raise money would be greatly curtailed. Particularly troubling is that the incoming Trump administration, their appointees and the Trump acolytes in Congress have been conflating the right to our government’s position on aiding and abetting a genocide with supporting terrorism. In other words, when organizations say that the US should not be supporting an Israeli genocide, the right wing hears that the organizations are supporting Hamas. We remain very concerned that our right to dissent from the US position can be labelled pro-terrorist rhetoric by a right-wing government – which puts us all at risk.
HR 9495 was supported by a majority in the House of Representatives on November 21, including 15 Democrats. Why were they voting with the Republicans?
There is another way to look at this question. A precursor to this bill was introduced by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in April 2024. During the vote, Democrats overwhelmingly voted in favor of the bill with only 10 Democrats voting against it. Everything changed after the November elections. Since then, the Republicans have been flooding the House floor with all manner of extremist legislation, and, in great part due to the pushback from human and civil rights organizations, the Democratic response has been to vote against them. While it is problematic that anyone would vote in favor of HR 9495, the fact that there was a big switch and so few Democrats did so in November is actually progress. That said, many Democratic members in explaining their switch still say that they agree with cracking down on Palestinian organizations and viewpoints. But they feel that with Trump coming into office again, it is too powerful and broad a tool. Among the reasons for many Democrats’ refusal to embrace human rights for all, particularly Palestinians, is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) significant influence in Congress. Not only do they spend money and work behind the scenes to lobby politicians and their staffers in support of Israel, but in this last election cycle, they spent great sums of money too.
Should US-NGOs that have nothing to do with Gaza be worried?
Certainly, some should, yes. But I think this bill is one of a wide array of intimidation tactics likely to be used by Trump administration, all of which are currently being used by the Biden administration. For example, irrespective of this bill, Department of the Treasury already has the authority to designate individuals and groups as terrorists, and criminally prosecute the people and entities that provide “material support” to them. The administration also has the power to criminally prosecute protest leaders and nonprofits that fundraise for protest movements for failing to register with the Justice Department as an “agent of a foreign principal” in violation of the Foreign Assets Registration Act. The list goes on forever. Unlike the more drastic criminal penalties, this bill potential provides a quick and dirty elimination of left voices without all the cost and bother of constitutional due process protections. It would basically give the federal government permission to duct tape the mouths of political dissenters. When added to the vast prosecutorial scheme that the US has put in place following 9/11, this bill would make it easier to kneecap the left. Notably, this bill also has the potential to intimidate funders and supporters of social change generally. For example, foundations and donor-advised funds can generally only donate charitable gifts to nonprofits that have federal tax-exempt status. If that status is stripped from one of their grantees, they will not be able to fund them. Moreover, if a racial or gender justice group issues a statement in support of a ceasefire – or even doesn’t publicly distance itself from one that does -, such a group and its funders could potentially be subject to the whim of the Treasury Secretary. Additionally, there is concern for environmental groups, which have been on the right wing’s radar for decades. Here at the Center for Constitutional Rights, we represent the men still detained in Guantanamo against their illegal detention by the United States. It has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. But that set of work is potentially under scrutiny in a bill like HR 9495. In addition, Muslim, Arab and South Asian groups in the United States could be at risk where they are advocating for their rights as a community, pushing back against surveillance, sweeps, crackdowns and so on. If the right determines that NGOs supporting Muslim communities in the US is the same as supporting Muslim terrorists anywhere in the world, this bill would be their go-to-tool. The problem is that there is no guideline, no limiting principle to what HR 9495 requires, and therefore a great many organizations in the social justice space need to be worried.
A few unions have been criticizing Israel and called for a ceasefire, like the United Auto Workers. Are unions at risk of being targeted as supporting terrorism?
That particular bill would not apply to unions, because they’re not nonprofits under the revenue code 501C3. However, I think the rhetoric on the right is what’s really dangerous here, even more so than the mechanism. This bill will very likely be passed in 2025. There is no reason to think that the plan to silence the left based upon strained notions of supporting terrorism would be limited to nonprofit organizations. Those of us on the front lines that are nonprofit organizations certainly face the biggest threats under the bill. But bigger organizations, like unions, colleges and universities and private foundations will likely face them too. I’m quite convinced that union leaders, university presidents and foundation heads will be hauled in front of Congress and required to either drive a wedge between them and Palestinian human rights or suffer the consequences. We’ve already seen this happen in the year since October 7. It will happen again once the Republicans take control. The mechanisms of oppression in an authoritarian context are many, but they are always driven by a central narrative very much like the one that we are seeing here in the United States.
The blueprint for the far right is “Project 2025”. It has been known for months. How come NGOs seem to be relatively unprepared for the right-wing assault?
Project 2025 is a tremendous problem. I can’t speak for all NGOs, but certainly our NGO and a number of organizations that we work with have been focused on this for close to a year. Project 2025 calls for dismantling the government infrastructure and shifting the role of various agencies in creating different power dynamics. One key example is that we remember after 911 when the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security, which we thought was terrible because it was consolidating all of this law enforcement power around immigration and anti- terrorism work into a massive entity. Project 2025 wants to dismantle that. Which might lead some people to think that’s a good idea. But it’s actually a worse idea because they’re dismantling Homeland Security to be able to build out more immigration enforcement power so that they can deport masses of people. So, for NGO’s there is work to be done within the current Congress and administration in order to protect the institutional infrastructure. And for radicals amongst us: they might think one of the worst things you can do is protect institutional infrastructure. The infrastructure has not worked for us, they´ve surveilled black and brown communities, they jail black and brown communities, they deport black and brown communities. So why would we want to invest in the infrastructure? I think that at some level, Trump gives us no choice. Because without even the minimal levels of protection in that infrastructure, the Presidential executive power becomes unpredictable, unaccountable and unconstrained. So, we have to build constraints. Other work that is under way is largely defensive work, which is around the role of race and gender in our federal civil rights laws and under federal policies since Project 2025 wants to remove all reference to race and gender. It represents a full-frontal attack on the multiracial democracy that we have to defend. We have been trying to build a multiracial democracy in the United States for 250 years. It has not happened yet, and this is one of the most significant threats in our current lifetime to that body of work. Our job, in this moment, is to keep our progress moving forward as much as we can. Not all of the work facing us has to do with preserving our NGO status.
Are you worried about the CCR?
Yes, but my view is that there’s no point of having a Center for Constitutional Rights if we’re more concerned about our continued existence than we are about dismantling the right-wing threats to human dignity and building the world that we want. Frankly, we can and should go out of business fighting, as opposed to staying in business cowering behind whatever the latest right-wing ploy is to demonize NGOs.
What needs to be done concretely?
First, as a practical matter, we have to assume that the United States government is listening and knows all about our work and plans. That requires us to protect the activists and the organizers that work we work with, doing whatever we can to increase and improve existing digital security, and doing whatever we can to stay in constant communication with organizers and activists as they begin to see the threats on the ground. We are organizing networks of lawyers to be able to represent people who will the subject of right-wing policy, very much like CCR did in the 1970s and the 1980s. Second, the Center for Constitutional Rights and other groups are organizing and participating with a group of lawyers who are going to challenge every iteration, every policy that comes out of Project 2025. We realize that Trump has appointed so many federal judges that we cannot rely on the courts to be able to protect us. We need to be able to put up that fight. Third, NGOs need to continue to engage what government we have left, certainly not with the leadership under the Trump administration because that’s useless, but to the extent that there are career people within the executive branch who will provide the ability to slow down or even stop the worst of what is to come. This approach has worked in the first Trump administration, and it could work in the second administration as well.
So, these legal obstacles are not new…
I would even go back further. We have the same challenge in 2024 that we had in 1974 when the US used surveillance, misinformation fear and confidential informants for FBI and CIA inquiries under COINTELPRO and other endeavors. The right wing has re-wrapped a 60-year-old destabilization strategy for Christmas this year. Where the old wrapping said “students, violence and communists” in 1964, the new wrapping says “students, violence and terrorists” this year. No matter how they decide to wrap it, they are gifting us the same set of problems.
But not all NGOs think that radically as the CCR…
Correct. They think in terms of issues, if they can just get one case in front of the Supreme Court, or if they can just make a legislative proposal that they’re going to win. This approach might win the issue in the kindest of administrations. But it’s like building a sandcastle too close to the ocean. It does not create the type of lasting change that we want. They will realize in the new Trump administration that none of that is going to work and that organizations need to put their political and methodological differences aside. We don’t have to agree on everything. We only must agree on one thing: we are all under threat together over the next four years unless we act together to undermine the threat.
Interview by Max Böhnel. Max is a freelance journalist in New York. He works for German -speaking media.
Top image: MANDEL NGAN (Getty Images)
