"The Fight"

By Matt Duncan

Coastal View News

Another addition to the endless annals of COVID bummers is that we’re amidst a mini cinematic Dark Ages. There’s plenty to watch, of course, and there’s still a lot of new TV coming out. But movie production is on hold, and a lot of movies that have already been made are being held up for future theatrical debuts. It’s even tough to know which movies are being released. No one is going to the theaters to see movies, so no one is seeing previews. So those of us not regularly searching for this info are basically in the dark about what is coming out and when.

 

Thus, you may have no clue what “The Fight” (which just came out on Amazon Prime) is about. Is it a “Rocky Balboa vs. Ivan Drago”-type slugfest? It is not. This movie is non-fiction. So is it a real-life boxing story, or maybe an Iraq War thriller? Nope. This movie is about lawyers. And they don’t literally fight, at least not physically. Also, it’s not a courtroom drama. Nor is it a true crime whodunit.  

 

It’s a documentary about the lawyers at the ACLU whose fight over the past four years has been to resist moves by the Trump administration that they think violate people’s rights. There have been a lot of such moves. So there’s been a lot of resisting by the ACLU. But “The Fight” is focused on four legal battles.

 

The first is over family separations at the border. Led by lawyer Lee Gelernt, the ACLU (among others) rushed to respond to the Trump administration’s policy of separating undocumented children from their parents. Mothers went months without seeing their daughters. Fathers had their sons snatched away while they were sleeping. And these events were unfolding so quickly and so widely that lawyers not only had to scramble to write their arguments, they also had to call, email, text, call, call, call almost constantly to get judges to hear emergency arguments.

 

The second legal battled chronicled in “The Fight” is over Trump’s ban on transgender individuals serving in the military. Led by Chase Strangio and Joshua Block, and inspired by the story of 11-year military service member Brock Strone whose career was threatened by Trump’s ban, the ACLU argued that Trump’s order was unlawfully discriminatory.

 

The third fight—fought by Dale Ho, among others—is over whether Trump could add a citizenship question to the census. Trump et al. basically said, “C’mon, why not? It’s a simple question. We wanna know. Why can’t we ask?” However, the Trump administration also let slip their real motive: to discourage vulnerable people from answering census questions, which would help redraw electoral maps in Republicans’ favor. According to the ACLU, there is an easier way to get citizenship data if one really wants it—from the Social Security Administration. So the ACLU argued that the Trump administration wasn’t really looking for data; it just wanted a political edge.

 

The final legal battled in this movie—headed by Brigitte Amiri—is over whether a detained immigrant has the right to an abortion. In the case in question, the young woman had been raped and wanted an abortion. But she was denied access to abortion, with the justification that she did not have the same legal rights that U.S. citizens have.

 

As with most important struggles, these ACLU battles are more guts than glory. They don’t always win. And when they do win, it’s often some kind of half-victory. And it’s not always for the reasons they thought. And it’s most often achieved only after scratching, clawing, dragging, limping, and crawling their way to the finish line.

 

Still, “The Fight” is gripping and interesting. Most of us have heard of these cases, but it’s fascinating—and sometimes surprising, galling, encouraging, or heartbreaking—to learn more about what goes into trying these cases.

 

With that said, this documentary could have stood to avoid some of the more breathless MSNBC-type commentary—not because the commentary is wrong, but because it makes these legal battles seem more partisan, and because, believe it or not—like it or not—MSNBC’s reactions to these case are not shared by everybody.

 

But while “The Fight” may overindulge in moral grandstanding here and there, and may be an exercise in preaching to the choir, it also teaches valuable lessons about how to enact change. It shows that good work, real impact, true progress is rarely glorious, hardly ever glamorous. Whether it’s legal or political or societal or economic, the front lines aren’t always rallies or T-shirts or Facebook debates with your Aunt Marge—they’re law offices buried under mountains of paper, shelters, soup kitchens, hospitals, and local communities. A good fight isn’t any less good because no one sees it, and it isn’t any less of a fight because it’s slow, incremental, deeply frustrating, and often heartbreaking.