150 groups back think tank targeted by Trump’s $5 billion lawsuit threat

More than 150 civil society organizations released a joint statement on September 1 defending the Center for American Progress against a $5 billion defamation lawsuit threat from President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, after the think tank refused to retract a report on National Guard deployments.

Trump attorney Alejandro Brito sent CAP a demand letter on August 18 giving the organization until the end of business on August 22 to retract a July 13 report or face the lawsuit, according to PBS NewsHour. The report concluded that Trump’s National Guard deployments to several cities had “no measurable effect on violent crime trends” and that violent crime was “already declining in the cities his administration targeted.”

CAP declined to retract the report. CAP President and CEO Neera Tanden said in an August 21 statement that the lawsuit threat “is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it.” CAP General Counsel Kevin Metz said “truth is not and cannot be defamation,” according to PBS NewsHour.

The coalition statement, organized by the group Nonprofits Together, was signed by more than 150 organizations including the ACLU, Greenpeace USA, the Human Rights Campaign, Indivisible, the National Education Association, Oxfam America, Public Citizen, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, according to Common Dreams.

“The free exchange of ideas, including ideas inconvenient to those in power, is critical” to public understanding of government actions, the coalition wrote in its statement.

In the same statement, Tanden said “independent data, evidence, and analysis are essential to that debate” and that “efforts to silence independent research because its findings are unwelcome by an administration or president should alarm every American.”

CAIR, one of the signatories, said the legal threat followed a pattern in which the Trump administration has sought to punish organizations and researchers whose findings contradict the administration’s public statements, according to a CAIR press release.

CAP’s July 13 report examined crime data in cities where Trump ordered National Guard troops deployed and found the deployments did not correspond to any measurable additional decline in violent crime rates beyond trends already underway before the troops arrived, according to PBS NewsHour.

Brito’s letter to CAP was first reported by The New York Times on August 18, the same day it was sent, according to PBS NewsHour.

The coalition statement cited the case of journalist Mario Guevara as an example of a broader pattern of pressure on critics of administration policy. Guevara, a Salvadoran journalist covering immigration enforcement, was arrested while reporting on a protest in Doraville, Georgia, in June 2025 and spent more than 100 days in ICE custody before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals denied a stay of his removal order, according to the ACLU. He was deported to El Salvador in October 2025.

Nonprofits Together, the coalition that organized the CAP statement, describes itself as a network of civil society organizations that coordinate to support each other’s work, according to its website.

As of September 1, Trump had not filed the threatened lawsuit against CAP in any federal court.