Lawyers of the Anti-Trump Resistance

Updated | Bob Ferguson was ready. It was the end of January, and the Washington state attorney general had been concerned that President Donald Trump would soon issue a sweeping executive order targeting immigration. A bespectacled former chess champion, Ferguson had been plotting for weeks with various immigrant rights groups in the state about how to combat Trump’s first move. Then, on the last Friday in January, the White House issued its now infamous executive order targeting immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Ferguson was home that weekend but went into his office to work on an appeal. His solicitor general, Noah Purcell, a former U.S. Supreme Court clerk, guzzled coffee from a full-sized Starbucks box in his office, as opposed to the chain’s ubiquitous white cup. Within a day,, “I’m going to keep going where the law takes me.”