Grantees revved up their rapid response machinery as President Obama delivered his final State of the Union address Tuesday night, seeking to address Americans’ anxieties about terrorism, immigration and gun violence, among other issues, while providing context about what has been accomplished on his watch over the last eight years and urging listeners not to give in to the forces xenophobia and division. He expressed regret about his inability to narrow the partisan divide during his tenure, suggesting a president with the gifts of Lincoln or FDR might have done better. Notable in the audience: a robust list of Muslim guests.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, whose state hosts a key contest in the 2016 GOP nominating campaign, delivered the Republican response,  which was criticized by some conservatives as a veiled attack on Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.

Congress will take its turn at agenda-setting in the coming days. Sen. McConnell has indicated he plans to bring up the House-passed legislation that seeks to effectively suspend the administration’s program for resettling refugees from Iraq and Syria; opponents will work to try to block the motion to proceed, the procedural means for bringing the bill to the floor. Democrats were also hatching plans to try to get Republicans on the record in a vote on Donald Trump’s call to bar Muslims from entering the U.S. Two Democratic senators introduced a measure aimed at removing protections that shield gun manufacturers from liability in gun violence cases.

Meanwhile, states continued to consider restrictive anti-immigrant measures. Kansas Gov. Brownback issued a harsh new order, following on his call for his state to ban refugee resettlement. The Virginia House of Delegates took up a new bill to bar state officials from taking part in any effort by the federal government or NGOs to put the refugee resettlement program in place. And Florida has a proposal in the hopper which not only gives the governor the means to bar refugee resettlement but allows the chief executive to call in the military if needed to keep “restricted persons” out. 

Advocates and grantees, while playing defense against such measures, also continue to press the administration to end its raids rounding up migrant families who arrived in the U.S. after 2014 and were denied asylum by an immigration judge. The Center for American Progress published a piece critical of the raids, arguing that the immigration judges’ rulings were due in part to the lack of counsel for a large number of those going through these proceedings.

Among other grantee activities: 

--The ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology were among the grantees signing on to a new letter urging world leaders to support encryption technology. The letter, signed by more than 200 activists, companies and experts in 42 countries, comes in the face of law enforcement efforts, in the U.S. and elsewhere (India, China and Kazakhstan are among the countries considering measures that to loosen encryption protections), to get companies to provide them a back door to encryption schemes in the name of national security.

--A mosque in Wheaton, Illinois fell victim to a cyberattack that created a fake website seemingly linking it to the Islamic State. The move was denounced by advocates working against Islamophobia, who cited a report by grantee Muslim Advocates on the spread of hate online.