On Monday, a federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order that would severely limit birthright citizenship. It’s the third blow from the bench against the order since Trump signed it; last week, federal judges in Maryland and Washington also issued injunctions against it.
Trump’s attempt to roll back birthright citizenship is an attack on a fundamental principle that undergirds the modern American experiment: that anyone born here is a citizen. It’s a principle that was hard-won across decades by Americans both free and unfree, the children of enslaved people and the children of immigrants.
In the 1850s, Dred Scott, himself an enslaved man, issued the first salvo in the fight to extend citizenship to all Americans. A decade later, more than 125,000 Union soldiers—many of whom were immigrants or formerly enslaved people—were killed fighting the Confederacy in the Civil War. That conflict led to the passage of the 14th Amendment that extended birthright citizenship to the children of the formerly enslaved. In 1898, Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants, won a landmark Supreme Court case that held that everyone born on American soil is an American citizen. In the 1950s and 60s, civil rights protesters endured state violence, terrorist murders, and prison to extend the full promise of citizenship to everyone. In 1982, the Court held in Plyler v. Doe that regardless of immigration status all people are entitled to equal protection under the law.
Now, Trump is trying to single-handedly reverse these advances.
“There are moments in the world’s history when people look back and ask, ‘Where were the lawyers, where were the judges?’” said U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour, a Reagan appointee who issued the first injunction against Trump’s birthright order. “In these moments, the rule of law becomes especially vulnerable. I refuse to let that beacon go dark today.”
The judiciary may be the last official bulwark against Trump’s shocking assault on the Constitution. Since his inauguration, the president has issued dozens of executive orders that clearly overreach his lawful powers. Concurrently, he’s enabled Elon Musk to wage a war on the federal bureaucracy that in all respects amounts to a bloodless coup by an unappointed billionaire. With a sycophantic Republican party firmly in control of both houses of Congress and all too happy to see the rise of authoritarianism, judges are the only branch of government left to defend democracy.
Trump, Musk, and Vice President J.D. Vance, well aware of the judicial roadblock to their authoritarian ambitions, have all signaled their intention to defy the courts. If they make good on their threats, the last vestiges of Constitutional order will crumble and the United States will for all intents and purposes be a dictatorship.
In spite of all this, we remain hopeful. The first sentence of the Constitution establishes the United States as the union of the people, and ordinary Americans have always been the staunchest defenders of our democracy. It was the people who won the rights enshrined in the 14th Amendment. The people, organized into rapid-response groups in Chicago, so thoroughly stymied federal agents’ attempts to detain immigrants that Trump’s “border czar” was publicly taken aback. Last week, the people assembled in fifty statehouses nationwide in a show of solidarity against the president’s dictatorial delusions.
In the coming months and years, we the people—descendants of the enslaved, migrants, and the tired and poor who yearned to breathe free—are the ones who can beat back fascist efforts to destroy America.
