New York state officials have told the Trump administration that they will not comply with its demands to end diversity, equity and inclusion practices in public schools, despite the administration’s threats to terminate federal education funding.

Daniel Morton-Bentley, counsel and deputy commissioner of the state’s department of education, said in a letter dated Friday to the federal education department that state officials do not believe the federal agency has authority to make such demands.

“We understand that the current administration seeks to censor anything it deems ‘diversity, equity & inclusion,’” he wrote. “But there are no federal or state laws prohibiting the principles of DEI.”

President Donald Trump said Thursday he was moving to suspend the security clearances of attorneys at a prominent law firm linked to Democratic-funded opposition research during the 2016 presidential campaign into ties between the Republican candidate and Russia.

The sanction against Perkins Coie is the latest in a series of retributive moves by Trump and his administration targeting a broad cross-section of perceived adversaries, including Justice Department prosecutors, career intelligence officials and most recently private-practice attorneys. Taken together, the actions appear designed not only to settle scores from years past but also to deter both government officials and private sector workers from participating in new inquiries into his conduct.

“This is an absolute honor to sign. What they’ve done is just terrible. It’s weaponization — you could say weaponization against a political opponent, and it should never be allowed to happen again,” Trump said after being presented with the executive order at the Oval Office.

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President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting the legal community pose “a grave threat to our system of constitutional governance and to the rule of law itself,” according to a court filing submitted Friday by more than 500 law firms.

The brief represents the most organized pushback to date against a series of White House executive orders that have sought to punish some of the country’s most elite firms and to extract concessions from them. Some of the targeted firms have sued to halt enforcement of the orders, while others have struck deals with the White House either to avert an order or to have it rescinded.

The filing was submitted as part of a lawsuit filed by Perkins Coie, which is among the firms that have challenged the orders in court. The order against that firm and others demands that security clearances of its lawyers be suspended, that federal contracts be terminated and that employee access to federal buildings be restricted.

Thousands of protesters in cities dotting the nation from Midtown Manhattan to Anchorage, Alaska, including at multiple state capitols, assailed Trump and billionaire Elon Musk ‘s actions on government downsizing, the economy, immigration and human rights.

On the West Coast, in the shadow of Seattle’s iconic Space Needle, protesters held signs with slogans like “Fight the oligarchy.” Protesters chanted as they took to the streets in Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, where they marched from Pershing Square to City Hall.

Demonstrators voiced anger over the administration’s moves to fire thousands of federal workers, close Social Security Administration field offices, effectively shutter entire agencies, deport immigrants, scale back protections for transgender people and cut funding for health programs.

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