Get Involved

Mission - a phone call each day on -

Click on each - date- to see phone number and script

Sept 9th, Sept 10th, Sept 11th. .

I was sent a letter- and I want everyone who follows my page to help me and to take action. If we all act on the same day, our voices will be stronger and more powerful. The goal is 500+ calls on each of the following Days.

Here is the original letter I received:

Good morning, 

I received your contact information from someone who knows your involvement to protect our Democracy.  I am hopeful that you will pass this letter on to those in your contact list or group emails to help us achieve 500+ calls next week.  I am also attaching the two articles that caused such a stir in three people who organized this project. I am one of the three ND retired principals who put our heads together to take action. Please read the letter below and the attached articles.  Let me know if you have questions and if you are willing to make the calls.  It will require you to make one call on, September 9, 10, and 11th. See the directions and information below.

Thanks in advance.

Dear North Dakota Friends (who wish to save Democracy),                                                                                                                    

This communication is designed to develop a campaign of phone calls regarding important topics.  The decision to develop this campaign came after several people read two articles regarding grave concerns for our country.  The full documents are attached to this email.  It is our hope that everyone who receives this message sends it on to others who are concerned, with the overall goal that we are able to stimulate 500+ calls on the dates listed below.   In summary, the Heather Cox Richardson shares information that outlined several major concerns including the middle of the night transportation of immigrant children, the resignations of nine lead people at the CDC, and the use of the National Guard and Marines to “police” cities in the United States.

The other document outlines the importance of phone calls, not only to our US Congress delegates, but also to State leaders such as the Governor, the Attorney General, and the State Treasurer.  Chris Armitage, the author of the second document, states that our state leaders have Constitutional powers to prosecute federal officials for state crimes, to suspend cooperation with federal tax collection and to revoke corporate charters.  According to Armitage, studies prove that personal phone calls in quantity cause leaders to take notice and action

• 10 calls in an hour = staff notices.

• 50 calls in a day = emergency meeting.

• 100 calls a day = office shuts down to handle it.

• 500 calls in a week = policy change consideration.

• 1,000 calls = historical precedent shows this forces action

In discussions yesterday with likeminded people across the state, we concluded that an organized call day to share our concerns is needed.  We need each of you and those on other group email lists to make a call on the specified day on the specified topic.  Below you will find the script on each topic that you may use as is or beef it up if you choose. 

In addition to the Governor and Attorney General of North Dakota (details on next page), please call our US Senators and Representative on the date specified.

• Senator Hoeven 202-224-2551

• Senator Cramer 202-224-2043

• Representative Fedorchak 202-225-2611

BEST TIME TO CALL: 9am-11am or 2pm-4pm, Tues-Thurs

Scroll down for call scripts >

Tuesday, September 9: Call the ND Governor, Kelly Armstrong at 701-328-2200

Topic: The CDC and Health Crisis in the US

Script: Hello, my name is _____.  My zip code is_____ I’m calling to express my concern about Secretary Kennedy’s failure to protect the health of Americans. North Dakota is already leading the nation in measles cases, and with flu season approaching, his rhetoric against vaccines is undermining public confidence when we need it most. How can we count on an effective flu vaccine program when so many CDC employees have resigned due to Kennedy’s lack of scientific knowledge and hiring of unqualified individuals.   His leadership is reckless and dangerous. I urge the Senator/Representative to call for his removal before we face an even greater public health crisis.

 ________________________

Wednesday, September 10: Call ND Attorney General, Drew Wrigley at 701-328-2210

Topic: The use of the National Guard and Marines as police

Hello, my name is_______. My zip code is _________.  I am calling to express my concern about the President's decision to deploy the National Guard in California, Washington DC, and potentially Chicago without a request from local authorities. This move is viewed by many as a step towards creating a national police force under presidential control.

Many Americans are expressing their dissatisfaction with this perceived governmental overreach through protests. The President's actions disregard the Posse Comitatus Act, which was enacted by Congress in 1878 to prohibit the use of U.S. military forces for domestic law enforcement. I believe this action is unlawful and sets a dangerous precedent. I urge you to take immediate steps to ensure this decision is reconsidered and halted. Thank you for your attention to this critical issue.

________________________

Thursday, September 11, Call ND Attorney General, Drew Wrigley at 701-328-2210

Topic: Sending Children to Guatemala without Due Process

Script: Hello, my name is_______. My zip code is _________.Dozens of Guatemalan migrant children were nearly deported in the dead of night until a federal court stepped in. Shelters were ordered to wake children at 2–4 a.m., load them onto buses, and send them to Texas—despite their cases still pending and no final deportation orders issued. These children were denied access to judges, attorneys, and their constitutional rights. Every child opposed return, fearing violence and trauma, yet officials attempted to strip them of legal protections. This reckless, lawless action should shock the conscience of all Americans, and I urge you to speak out and demand accountability.

—-------------------------------------------------------------

Important Note for Callers:

Armitage also suggests that you document each phone call (include date and time and the staffer you spoke with). Email the same message which shows you are tracking.  Post on social media that you called. Call back in three days if you do not get a response.  His article also states how you should respond if they deflect. 

Thank you for making calls!

:Chris Armitage from The Existential Republic

5 Phone Calls Can Stop American Fascism. Here Are the Numbers.

Politicians have a secret math they don't want you to know. Something that is an open secret in politics was shared with the public by former congressional staffers who wrote the Indivisible Guide, here's how they actually count your complaints:

One phone call = 100-1,000 angry voters
One personal email = 10-50 voters
One form letter = maybe 1 voter, if they even count it

This is the economy of political pressure. The Congressional Management Foundation found that individualized contact influenced 94% of congressional offices on undecided issues. Mass email campaigns? 18%. Petitions? Worthless. 

But here's the secret that changes everything: state officials are sitting ducks. 

State Comptrollers generally receive 5-10 constituent calls per month. State Treasurers? Many have never experienced a coordinated campaign. District Attorneys? Only hear from victims and lawyers, not voters. State Legislators? They average 20-30 contacts per week

The magic happens at these thresholds:

10 calls in an hour = staff notices. 50 calls in a day = emergency meeting. 100 calls in a day = office shuts down to handle it. 500 calls in a week = policy change consideration. 1,000 calls = historical precedent shows this forces action

Letter from Heather Richardson Cox

Sept 3, 2025

In the early hours of Sunday morning, in the middle of a three-day holiday weekend, the Trump administration attempted to take children out of government custody and ship them alone to their country of origin, Guatemala.

On Friday, Priscilla Alvarez of CNN broke the story that the administration was planning to move up to 600 children from the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where they are held according to law until they can be released to a relative or a guardian living in the U.S. who can take care of them while their case for asylum in the U.S. is being processed.

ORR is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Its mission, according to its website, is "to promote the health, well-being, and stability of refugees, unaccompanied alien children, and other eligible individuals and families, through culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and strengths-based services. Our vision is for all new arrivals to be welcomed with equitable, high-quality services and resources so they can maximize their potential.”

Alvarez notes that unaccompanied migrant children are considered a vulnerable population and are covered by the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. That law gives them enhanced protections and care, making sure they are screened to see if they have been trafficked or are afraid of persecution in the country they come from. Congress has specified that such children can be removed from the country only under special circumstances.

Nonetheless, the administration appears to have removed about 76 of these children from the custody of ORR—the only agency with legal authority to hold them—where they were waiting to be released to a relative or guardian, and transferred them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Once they were in ICE custody, the administration planned “to put them on flights to Guatemala, where they may face abuse, neglect, persecution, or even torture,” according to a U.S. court.

At about 1:00 in the morning, Eastern Time, on Sunday, August 31, advocates for the children filed a suit to prevent the administration from removing them. Shortly after 2:30 in the morning, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan got a phone call about the case, and by 4:00 she had issued an emergency order blocking the removal and scheduled a hearing for 3:00 that afternoon. She moved it up to 12:30 when she learned that the administration was already moving some children out of the country.

Legal analyst Anna Bower was on the call for the hearing and reported that Sooknanan said: “I got a call at 2:36 am because the government chose the wee hours of the morning on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend to execute a plan to move these children. That's why we're here. And I tried to reach the government. I have been up since then…and didn't reach anyone from the government until later this morning. And the imminence that the plaintiff claimed proved true, because, in fact, those planes *were* loaded. One actually took off and was returned. And so, absent action and intervention by the court, all of those children would have been returned to Guatemala, potentially to extremely dangerous situations.”

Some of the children were actually in a plane to be removed while the hearing was underway. Sooknanan required the government to report to her when each child was back in ORR custody. By noon Monday, according to the government’s lawyers, all the children were back in ORR custody.

The rush to deport children in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, in apparent violation of the law, looked a great deal like the administration’s removal of undocumented immigrants from Venezuela to the notorious terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador in March. At the time, President Donald J. Trump denied that he had signed the order invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act the administration used to justify the rendition of the men to El Salvador. “Other people handled it,” he said, even though his signature is on the document that appears in the Federal Register.

Trump’s apparent distance from that earlier removal comes to mind now because the other big story over Labor Day weekend was Trump’s relative disappearance from public view since last Tuesday. As Garrett Graff of Doomsday Scenario recorded, Trump, who normally talks to the press as often as possible, had no public appearances on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. Coming on top of Vice President J.D. Vance’s odd comment in an interview with USA Today last week that he was ready to be president if needed—“I’ve gotten a lot of good on-the-job training over the past 200 days,” he said—rumors flew. Over the weekend, “Is Trump dead?” was one of Google’s top searches.

Although he posted “NEVER FELT BETTER IN MY LIFE” on social media on Sunday, Trump continued to keep a long distance between himself and the press.

Trump appeared today in the Oval Office—an hour late—to announce he would move Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama, apparently to put the rumors of his ill health to rest.

At the event, Trump referred to the recent court decision declaring many of his tariffs illegal, saying that “if you took away tariffs, we could end up being a third-world country.” In fact, the country’s economy has slowed significantly since Trump instituted his tariffs, and Trump’s agenda continues to take hits.

Yesterday, nine former directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents reaching back to President Jimmy Carter, published an op-ed in the New York Times warning that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “is endangering every American’s health.”

William Foege, William Roper, David Satcher, Jeffrey Koplan, Richard Besser, Tom Frieden, Anne Schuchat, Rochelle P. Walensky, and Mandy K. Cohen listed their concerns about Kennedy’s policies. He “has fired thousands of federal health workers and severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more,” they wrote.

“Amid the largest measles outbreak in the United States in a generation, he’s focused on unproven treatments while downplaying vaccines. He canceled investments in promising medical research that will leave us ill prepared for future health emergencies. He replaced experts on federal health advisory committees with unqualified individuals who share his dangerous and unscientific views. He announced the end of U.S. support for global vaccination programs that protect millions of children and keep Americans safe, citing flawed research and making inaccurate statements. And he championed federal legislation that will cause millions of people with health insurance through Medicaid to lose their coverage.”

Kennedy’s firing of CDC director Dr. Susan Monarez last Wednesday, a firing Trump approved, appears to have been the event that spurred the former directors to speak up as a group. They wrote that what Kennedy has done to the CDC and to public health in the U.S. since taking office is “unlike anything we had ever seen at the agency and unlike anything our country had ever experienced.”

The former CDC directors warned that the health of every American is at risk. They urged Congress to exercise its authority over the Department of Health and Human Services, state and local governments and private philanthropy to cover the funding Kennedy has killed, and physicians to support their patients, and they called upon all Americans to “look out for one another.”

A post on Trump’s social media account yesterday morning seemed to try to blame “Drug Companies” for “let[ting] everyone rip themselves apart, including Bobby Kennedy Jr. and CDC,” suggesting that administration officials are aware that there is a political backlash brewing over the administration’s assault on public health.

The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, says the administration is deliberately “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Today, more than 85 scientists released a joint review of the U.S. Department of Energy’s new climate report, saying it was “biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking.”

Trump’s attempt to defend Russian president Vladimir Putin took another hit yesterday when Russia appeared to jam the GPS of an airplane carrying European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to Bulgaria. The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union, which has stood firm against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and continues to support Ukraine. Russia appears to have been jamming plane GPS in the airspace around the Baltic coast since it invaded Ukraine again in 2022 but denies it is doing so.

A source told the Financial Times that the pilots of the plane carrying von der Leyen had to land using paper maps.

Today, Judge Charles Breyer of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and the Department of Defense acted illegally when they used the Marines and the National Guard in Los Angeles, California. (As legal analyst Bower noted, whether their deployment of the military is legal is a separate case now pending before the Ninth Circuit.)

Judge Breyer noted that Congress had spoken clearly when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law. “Nevertheless,” the judge wrote, “at Defendants’ orders and contrary to Congress’s explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws.” Evidence at trial showed that armed soldiers set up protective perimeters and traffic blockages, engaged in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrated a military presence in and around Los Angeles. “In short,” he concluded, the “Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.”

Breyer noted that 300 troops still remain in Los Angeles, and he warned that Trump and Hegseth have “stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country…thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.” The judge prohibited the defendants “from deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops heretofore deployed in California, to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants.” Breyer stayed the order until noon on September 12 to give the administration time to appeal. 

Yesterday, Americans turned out across the country to protest Trump and the administration, and popular anger at government overreach may be showing in the legal system as well. Six times now, federal grand juries have declined to indict defendants picked up in connection with Trump’s deployment of troops in Washington, D.C. Although right-wing media is slamming Judge James Boasberg today for releasing Nathalie Rose Jones after she made threats against Trump, a grand jury refused to indict her.

More famously, a grand jury last week refused to indict Sean Dunn, the former Justice Department paralegal who threw a submarine sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection  officer. The government charged Dunn with felony assault, for which he would have faced up to eight years in prison if convicted. Although officers tackled Dunn at the scene, the government later posted a dramatic video of heavily armed law enforcement officers going to Dunn’s apartment to arrest him.

As Liz Oyer, a former pardon attorney for the Department of Justice, said: “What’s so extraordinary about this is it shows that we the citizens are the last line of defense for our democracy…and we the citizens are standing strong.”