Erika Bolstad, Stateline

PORTLAND, Ore. — One year into President Donald Trump’s second term, Democratic attorneys general have filed 71 lawsuits against the administration.

There’s more to come in 2026. The lawsuits are part of a coordinated legal strategy by Democratic AGs in 22 states and the District of Columbia to resist the ever-widening power of the executive branch.

It’s not unusual for states to sue an administration; the party not in the White House has often turned to the courts. But it’s one of the few pathways for Democrats now, since Republicans hold the presidency, both chambers of Congress and have appointed a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. And Trump in his second term has taken a much broader view of presidential power than previous administrations, asserting far more authority than his predecessors.

Democrats hope to retake at least one chamber of Congress in November’s midterm elections. But for most of the coming year, the party will be relying on AG court challenges as their main venue to take on Trump.

One of the most prolific AGs is Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield, who has led or joined 52 lawsuits against this Trump administration.

“It’s not a slogan or a political brand,” Rayfield said of the coalition in an email interview with Stateline. “It’s a working partnership. When we coordinate, we’re able to defend the constitutional balance, push back when a president overreaches, and make sure our residents aren’t left paying the price for unlawful decisions coming out of Washington.”

The state AGs have brought cases over Trump’s tariffs and National Guard deployments. They’ve also fought cuts to federal research, education programs, food assistance, disaster recovery, health care and housing. And they say it’s their job to maintain core civil rights protections as well as stick up for the people in their state who, they argue, are harmed by the whims of the president’s executive orders.

“None of the institutions in our government have been built to respond and react to the scale and speed of the destruction that’s being wrought by the Trump administration,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez told Source New Mexico.

Since the beginning of 2025, the attorneys general have toured the country on multistate listening tours and have touted their accomplishments on progressive legal podcasts. They’ve won 40 of the 51 resolved cases, according to a tracker from the Progressive State Leaders Committee.

The AGs are not alone in taking legal action. Individuals, businesses, labor unions, associations, universities, local governments and other entities have filed 554 cases against the president’s expansion of executive branch powers, according to Just Security, a daily digital law policy journal with a litigation tracker that monitors challenges to Trump administration executive actions.

But the attorney general coalition serves as “a coordinated, quick-moving and high-capacity force protecting the rule of law, federal funding streams, and people’s rights,” said Jonathan Miller, chief program officer of the Public Rights Project, which helps state and local governments partner on litigation that protects and advances civil rights.

The attorneys general have proven such a successful coalition that the Public Rights Project is adopting a similar approach that makes it easier for cities and counties to pool expertise, coordinate legal theories and act collectively, Miller said.

“The rule of law is ultimately about people,” Miller said. “When courts enforce the law, families stay housed, public health and emergency services stay open, and local leaders can govern without political coercion. That’s the foundation for restoring faith in democratic institutions: making the legal system work the way it’s supposed to for the people it’s supposed to serve.”

Immediate action

Democratic AGs began filing their multistate lawsuits the day after Trump took office, challenging the president’s executive order ending birthright citizenship. The immediate legal action was intended to send a clear message to the Trump administration that state attorneys general will “stand up for our residents and their basic constitutional rights,” New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin said in a statement at the time. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments in the case this spring.

Rayfield said some days their work aims to build an emergency firewall to halt unlawful presidential actions — such as deploying the National Guard. Other days, it’s more targeted, fact-driven litigation designed to keep money, benefits and services flowing to states.

In December, Rayfield, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Washington Attorney General Nick Brown led a coalition of 19 attorneys general and the governor of Pennsylvania in challenging the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for threatening to punish doctors, hospitals and clinics that provide gender-affirming care.

In early November, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments from Oregon’s then-solicitor general, Benjamin Gutman, who argued on behalf of a coalition of a dozen states that sued over Trump’s sweeping tariff policy on most goods entering the United States. Rayfield and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes began discussing a tariff lawsuit in April, before a joint appearance at a town hall in Oregon. Both had been considering it, but it was their in-person discussion that led to the collaboration, Mayes said during a panel discussion hosted by the “Legal AF” podcast on the MeidasTouch Network.

“This is not what I get up every day wanting to do,” Mayes told Cronkite News outside the Supreme Court, after Gutman argued the tariff case. “But if Donald Trump decides to violate the Constitution, violate statute, or harm the people of Arizona, I’m going to file that lawsuit.”

After Trump’s 2024 election, Democratic attorneys general began meeting almost daily over Zoom to prepare their legal approach for a second term. This time around, they had a better sense for what was coming because it was outlined in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that has shaped much of the Trump administration’s agenda so far.

As they enter their second year of legal collaboration, the AGs continue to meet regularly, but because they’ve developed close working relationships, it’s at a “more sustainable cadence,” Rayfield said.

Republicans sue, too

Republican attorneys general say they, too, are taking action to protect state sovereignty. Alaska Attorney General Stephen Cox wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post in November that lawsuits emerging from progressive states, particularly state- and municipal-driven cases in state courts over climate change, are “as much of a threat to state sovereignty as the federal government” as well as an attempt to “remake the nation in the image of progressive enclaves such as San Francisco and Portland, Oregon.”

“They reach into states like Alaska with their rules and regulations,” Cox wrote. “They push misguided legal theories targeting ordinary Americans. And they file lawsuits that would give state courts in ideologically aligned jurisdictions the chance to control the economies of states like mine.”

Republican attorneys general have been largely supportive of the president’s second-term agenda, including supporting the deployment of out-of-state National Guard troops to protect federal facilities. Led by Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, Republican attorneys general in 26 states sent a letter in support of such a mobilization in June in Los Angeles, describing it as “the right response — and one we fully support.” And as recently as October, Republican attorneys general in 16 states wrote a letter supporting the Trump administration’s attacks on boats it says are smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.

State attorneys general have long taken on the executive branch, no matter who was in power.

Democratic attorneys general filed 138 multistate lawsuits against federal agencies during Trump’s first administration, according to a 2020 assessment by Paul Nolette, a political scientist at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

And some Republican attorneys general were especially litigious during the Biden administration. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton famously sued the Biden administration 106 times, including a suit challenging the administration’s offshore drilling policy in the final days of the presidency. Paxton followed in the footsteps of his Republican predecessor, now-Gov. Greg Abbott, who sued the Obama administration 31 times as a Republican attorney general: “I go to the office. I sue the federal government. Then I go home,” he told The Dallas Morning News in 2012.

Attorneys general in more progressive states say their actions during the current administration have kept their states from losing billions of dollars in federal funds that would have otherwise been blocked for schools, public health, domestic violence prevention and other services. In Oregon, it’s an estimated $4.5 billion, Rayfield said. Arizona estimates it has held on to $1.5 billion. In California, it’s $168 billion.

In Oregon, one of the lawsuit hearings this fall drew an audience so large that an overflow courtroom adjacent to a packed main federal courtroom was needed. A crowd quietly watched arguments on a video display as lawyers for the state of Oregon and the city of Portland argued that the Trump administration’s deployment of National Guard troops was not only a vast federal overreach, but also a threat to state sovereignty and public safety.

The administration said it deployed the Guard to protect federal agents, including those from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But when an attorney for the U.S. Justice Department described protesters as “vicious and cruel radicals” for their demonstrations outside of an ICE facility in Portland, the phrase elicited muffled snickers from the otherwise decorous courtroom observers.

Among the protesters dominating news reports and social media feeds was a 20-something in a chicken costume. Other peaceful protesters spawned a new symbol of resistance: inflatable frog costumes. And naked bike riders rolled up en masse to the ICE facility, too, braving a cold, wet day and exposure on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

But the issue in front of U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut was no laughing matter.

Oregon’s lawsuit challenging Trump’s National Guard deployment was a critical public safety outcome for the state, Rayfield said. It prevented troops from mobilizing in Portland, forestalling what he described as “the kind of escalation that could have caused real harm.”

Attorneys general are prepared in 2026 to monitor and enforce their courtroom victories, Rayfield said. He and other state officials and local prosecutors have warned U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi that excessive force by DHS officers won’t be tolerated during immigration enforcement activities. If warranted, they’ll refer them for prosecution, he said.

“That isn’t just a legal win — it’s a safety win,” Rayfield said. “The president cannot use federalization as a shortcut to move troops into American cities without lawful cause. That matters for Portland, and it matters for every state watching what happened here.”

DURKEE, Ore. — Bert Siddoway heard the fire before he saw it, no seconds at all between the flash of lightning and the boom of thunder. The strike “shook the whole flipping town,” he said, and immediately ignited a wildfire in a hard-to-reach spot in the hills above the community where he is both a rancher and captain of the rural volunteer fire department.

On July 20, three days after it started, the Durkee Fire was 15 miles wide and moving at 30 mph, and was, for a time, the largest wildfire in the nation. Fueled by dry grasslands, the fire jumped over Interstate 84 near the Oregon-Idaho border, closing the road to traffic for several days and cloaking the region in smoke. Last month, pine trees reduced to snags continued to puff smoke from embers smoldering deep within. The once-tawny hills, scattered with sagebrush and pines, were charred black as far as the eye could see.

“By the first of August when fire season is supposed to start, we were burned out,” Siddoway said, on a tour of the fire damage. “For a while, it looked like the whole world might burn.”

As the Durkee Fire burned in Eastern Oregon, other major fires blazed at the same time across Oregon and Washington, straining both national and state resources. Fire crews were so strapped nationally that firefighters from Virginia with little experience with range wildfires were the only personnel available. When the fire season began to ebb at the end of September, 1.9 million acres in Oregon had burned — a state record.

As summers grow hotter, Oregon and other states will have to dedicate more resources to fighting wildfires that have become more frequent and intense. Oregon must also figure out how to help ranchers and grasslands recover. Wildfires in grassland or shrubland made up about 60% of the acres burned in the state’s record-breaking summer, a troubling development in the state’s fire patterns as intense heat waves driven by climate change collided with invasive, combustible grasses and longer fire seasons.

“The 2024 fire season highlights the reality that’s before us: The wildfire season is getting longer with larger fires burning for more time,” said Kassie Keller, a spokesperson for the Oregon State Fire Marshal. “This is not news to the fire service, but this season did help make more people aware of our new fire reality.”

The average acreage that burns each year statewide has doubled every decade since the 1990s, said Oregon state Sen. Jeff Golden, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Interim Committee on Natural Resources and Wildfire, and who represents a southern Oregon district hard hit by fire in 2020. There, the Alameda Fire destroyed 2,600 homes and killed three people, a tragedy that, along with catastrophic wildfires in other, wetter forests that used to see fewer fires, spurred changes in the state’s wildfire policy.

“It’s just a very steady upward curve,” Golden said. “And what was distinctive about this year was the overwhelming majority of those acres were in Eastern Oregon, the far east. We haven’t seen that before.”

Because Eastern Oregon is sparsely populated, fewer structures were affected. Nonetheless, the grassland wildfires are expected to prove devastating to ranchers, who had to scramble to move cattle and protect their homes and other property. In Baker County, roughly three times the size of Rhode Island and the epicenter of the Durkee Fire, cattle outnumber people 75,376 to 17,000.

This year, the state found itself at its highest alert levels for a longer amount of time than prior years, Joy Krawczyk, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Forestry, wrote in an email.

“There are only a finite number of firefighting resources and competing demands throughout the state and nationally,” Krawczyk said, “so we focused on doing the best we could with whatever we had available to protect Oregonians.”

Fighting wildfires

Most states, including Oregon, have cooperative agreements with federal agencies to fight wildfires. The states generally pay for the cost of fire suppression and then are reimbursed by the federal government. States have multiple, complex ways of paying for fire suppression and programs that harden communities against the effects of wildfire.

Many states use money from their general funds, a budgeting practice that can put states under fiscal strain, according to a 2022 report by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Estimates used to craft wildfire budgets often prove insufficient, which means states have to cover spending gaps with supplemental appropriations and other after-the-fact measures. While those measures “provide needed flexibility during emergencies, they also obscure from the state budgeting process the true costs of wildfires,” the report found.

In Oregon, current funding mechanisms are inadequate to address the growing complexity and cost of wildfires, Krawczyk said, and the need for a “sustainable and equitable funding structure” for wildfire response and mitigation “has never been more urgent.” So far in 2024, the state has spent nearly $250 million on wildfires, according to the Oregon Capital Chronicle, or about 2.5 times the money budgeted for wildfire response. State lawmakers are expected to address additional funding mechanisms in 2025.

Towns could save themselves from wildfire — if they knew about this money

“It took 2020 to get us to make the investment in the big wildfire bill in 2021,” Golden said of the devastating 2020 fire season that displaced so many of his constituents. “And the sight of communities burning down, people dying, people’s lives being ruined, people being unable to get insurance again, all of that. But that’s a pretty high price to pay to get some legislation passed.

“I think we’re running the risk of very deep regret as we look at the ashes of future fires,” he added.

Golden would like to see a return of the severance tax on timber harvests to pay for prevention programs and wildfire response, rather than a reliance on the state’s general fund. Many large tracts of timber are owned by real estate investment trusts, Golden said, which means they don’t pay corporate income taxes in the state. A revived severance tax on timber harvests could be a dedicated source of money to address wildfires, Golden said, but it faces significant opposition from the timber industry. It’s also a nonstarter among his Republican colleagues, who last month called on state agencies to reconsider their forest management approaches first.

“Lives, property, and livestock are lost when fires ravage our state,” state Rep. Jeff Helfrich, the House Republican leader, said in a statement. “This is the direct consequence of bad policy.” Helfrich called on his colleagues to relax restrictions on the timber industry that, he said, prevent it from “clearing out deadwood and decreasing the severity of fires.”

Major changes expected

Meanwhile, the scars from the 294,265-acre Durkee Fire will remain visible on the hills for the next 40 years, Siddoway said. And in the short term, the state’s ranchers will have to find new grazing land for cattle. The state’s congressional delegation and the governor have asked the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to adjust grazing permits. Ranchers will need to repair burned fences as well as rebuild water structures, replace outbuildings and manage downed trees. Some grassland may need reseeding, putting thousands of acres of range off limits to grazing for several years while soil and grasses recover.

The ranching industry is likely to see major changes in Oregon because of the wildfires, in part because so many acres of rangeland burned, said Matt McElligott, president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association. It could take several years to recover, and in the meantime, ranchers will need to find somewhere for displaced cattle. At $676 million annually, cattle are the second-most valuable agricultural commodity by gross dollar sales in the state of Oregon behind only nursery products, McElligott said.

Hay prices have already risen, Siddoway said. Moving cattle to new rangeland is pricey, too. And Siddoway points out that he couldn’t get insurance on his cows this summer, despite having the same agent and type of policy in place for the past 15 years.

Officials don’t know yet how many cows and calves were lost in the blaze — that may not be certain until November or December when Oregon ranchers round up their cattle, which range on a mixture of federal, state and private grazing land from April into the late fall.

“Everybody will need new pasture next year,” Siddoway said. “All of the economic issues are magnified.”

McElligott said he wasn’t sure if the true scope of loss will ever be known.

“I don’t know if we’ll get a real tally on what’s lost. Some of these people did the best they could to save their animals and property and belongings. Just in a matter of hours, everything you’ve worked for — as a rancher, it’s a lifelong job — could be gone,” he said.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.