Op Ed: A moment of gratitude on this 4th of July

Project Salt Box on Legal AF with Adam Klasfeld

Earlier this week, I got the chance to speak about the Trump administration’s failed warehouses-as-immigration-camps scheme with Adam Klasfeld over on Legal AF. We spoke at length about why the plan fell apart, what comes next — and, in no small part, about the work that thousands of you have put in to resist this unjust and inhumane scheme.

Over the past six months, we have worked closely with communities across the country to provide information, documentation, and often proof to help drive decisive action against this unparalleled and unchecked expansion of government authority. Often, our team gets the honor of speaking publicly with the press and legislators and key voices at a national level about the importance of community action. But we know that we are one very small part of a much larger movement, and that there are so many of you out there whose efforts go uncelebrated and unrecognized.

Tonight, as I listen to the fireworks sounding off around Baltimore, I think about what freedom means, and what it is we are celebrating. I had the privilege to serve our nation in the Armed Forces for two decades. I joined shortly after 9/11, at a moment of great national unity and mounting global uncertainty.

One of the lessons I learned from my time in uniform was that no valiant act of rugged individualism or personal excellence counts for much on its own. Instead, the military celebrated and promoted acts of teamwork — often in the form of bridge-building and nurturing strategic relationships — that drew on the expertise and talents of the many over the lone strengths of the one. Those were the skills we valued to win the day.

That lesson predates my service by two centuries. We remember the Declaration of Independence as the work of one man’s pen, though it was drafted by a committee, debated and amended line by line in Congress, and signed by fifty-six delegates who mutually pledged to each other their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

And what that collective effort produced reads less like soaring philosophy than like a bill of particulars: twenty-seven documented grievances against unaccountable power, laid out one by one, because the signers believed that Facts, as they put it, should be submitted to a candid world. One of those grievances accused the King of obstructing the naturalization of foreigners and refusing to encourage their migration to these shores. A government hostile to immigrants was among the abuses the founders considered worth documenting for the world.

Documenting abuses of power, and binding your fate to your neighbors’ while you do it, is the oldest patriotic work there is. When you sent us a record, or flagged a court filing, or read the fine print of a federal lease, you were carrying that work forward.

The signers wrote that promise in a country where nearly a fifth of the people were enslaved, and many of the men who pledged their sacred honor held human beings in bondage themselves. The gap between what the Declaration said and whom it served has been the central American argument ever since, and every narrowing of that gap has come about the same way the document itself did, through people acting together.

Abolitionists built their movement across lines of race and creed, joining free Black organizers with Quaker printers and evangelical congregations. The Reconstruction Congress that wrote birthright citizenship into the Constitution, and the later bipartisan coalition that passed the Civil Rights Act, both depended on cross-party support from lawmakers willing to break with their region and party. That correction remains unfinished.

We are at our best when we work together for a common cause and the advancement of our neighbors’ well-being. A rising tide lifts all boats, after all. You — anyone who sent in a document, or shared your expertise with us, or showed up to a town council meeting, or organized protests, or marched in them, or wrote letters to your congresspeople, or researched tedious records and regulations, or asserted your expertise in support of your immigrant neighbors — are that tide. And so many of you doing this work are immigrants and the children of immigrants, defending communities you belong to.

Common cause is different from compromise. The coalitions in this history agreed on a principle and defended it, and they took allies wherever allies stood — which this year included a city council in one of the reddest states in the country, writing an ordinance against a detention center. Unity of that kind gives no ground on what it defends.

The administration has turned away from this scheme after spending $1.07 billion on it. That is proof of the effectiveness of your steadfast labor. Tonight, we celebrate that spirit. It is hard to be patriotic in times like these. But this week gave us one more thing worth celebrating.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Barbara and rejected the executive order that sought to end birthright citizenship. Adam and I talked about the case in our conversation. The judgment was 6 to 3, but on the constitutional question the margin was a single vote. Five justices held that the Fourteenth Amendment means what it says: every child born on this soil is a citizen, whoever their parents are. A sixth agreed only that the executive order violated a statute, and wrote that Congress remains free to change that statute.

That is the razor’s edge we are dancing on as a nation. The difference between citizenship as a birthright and citizenship as a permission slip came down to one vote.

Justice Jackson’s concurrence (which starts on page 32) is worth reading tonight of all nights, because it recounts the greatest of those corrections: how birthright citizenship was won.

In the decades before the Fourteenth Amendment, Black Americans, most of them barred from the ballot and the courtroom, organized more than 600 conventions to insist that they were already citizens, born here and owed protection here. Rather than seeking a special rule that covered only themselves, they fought, as Jackson writes, for “the shared humanity of all people,” and their organizing gave the Constitution what she calls its anticaste engine, a guarantee that now shelters every child born in this country.

“‘We, the people’—not we, the white people—not we, the citizens, or the legal voters—not we, the privileged class, and excluding all other classes but we, the people; not we, the horses and cattle, but we the people—the men and women, the human inhabitants of the United States, do ordain and establish this Constitution, &c.”

- Frederick Douglass, Speech on the Dred Scott Decision, 1857

The Court’s precedent here is itself an immigrant’s story. Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents during the era of Chinese exclusion, and when the government barred him from returning to his own country after a trip abroad, he fought the case to the Supreme Court and won. His victory in 1898 settled that the children of immigrants are citizens, and this week’s decision held that line.

Jackson also offers a clear warning in this moment: quoting Douglass’s insistence that “nations should have memories,” she writes that the distortion of historical facts “may be an even greater threat” than the fading of memory itself.

As you stared down warehouses in your communities, how many of our countrymen had forgotten Manzanar, Topaz, and Gila River, where the government confined Japanese Americans behind wire on land that, in Gila River's case, it took from a tribe that objected? At Crystal City, Texas, the government interned entire families, including more than two thousand Japanese Latin Americans whom the United States had seized from their homes in Peru and elsewhere and shipped here, some to be traded to Japan in hostage exchanges.

Fewer still remember the confinements that came before them. The Army marched the Navajo three hundred miles to Bosque Redondo and held them there for four years. Plains Indian prisoners were shipped across the country to Fort Marion, a stone fortress in Florida, and the officer who ran that prison went on to found Carlisle, the model for hundreds of boarding schools built to hold Native children apart from their families and their languages.

Chinese immigrants were detained and interrogated at Angel Island, in the same bay where Wong Kim Ark was born.

And then there is Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which held Geronimo’s Apache as prisoners of war for a generation, held Japanese American men in 1942, and in 2019 was proposed as a detention site for migrant children, until survivors of the wartime camps stood at its gates and said no.

This spring brought a counterexample from the same state. The Choctaw Nation, whose people the federal government marched to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears nearly two centuries ago, purchased the vacant warehouse in Durant that ICE had been eyeing as a detention site, on the same stretch of road as the tribe's own headquarters, childcare center, and elder services. The purchase took the property off the federal market and with it, by our analysis, an estimated 8,500 detention beds. A people that remembered federal confinement made sure it would not happen on that ground.

That is why I call unity in our common pursuit an inheritance. The Court described citizenship as “the right to have rights.” Douglass called it “the glorious birthright of our common humanity.” It was secured by ordinary people who linked their fate to their neighbors’ — freed men and women, the children of immigrants, citizens who refused to let the promise shrink — and it survived this week by a single vote because the memory of their work has yet to be erased.

It will stay secured the same way it was won.

Adam and I ended our conversation on what comes next, and I will close here the way I closed there: “Beyond this July 4th, and beyond this administration, democracy is constantly under threat so long as we let those forces continue to have a foothold. We’re not out of the woods yet. So continue to build those community bonds. Continue to be strong. Show up. Protest. File FOIA requests. Write letters. Whatever it is you bring to the fight, do it, because it is a winning fight so long as you stay engaged.”

Tonight we celebrate the brave patriots who came before us, who laid the bricks of social justice and common decency, toward a more perfect union, just as we celebrate our wins this year toward the same. Living up to that American birthright is the hard work worth doing.