dangers in the mirror are often closer than they may appear. In other words, the next few paragraphs may seem to be hyperbole but are, in fact, expressions of reality (animated by a cold fury).
On September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court did its best to murder what’s left of civil rights in this country. As Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported, in an unsigned 6-3 ruling, it overturned a lower court’s order forbidding ICE and the Border Patrol in Los Angeles from stopping, interrogating, and detaining people based on any of four factors: “apparent race or ethnicity; the fact that they speak English with an accent or speak Spanish; their presence at particular locations like farms or pickup sites for day laborers; and the type of work they do.”
Those six conservative justices might as well have stood in front of the court and set fire to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed segregation and discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin in a wide variety of venues and actions, including public accommodations, education, the provision of government services, housing, transportation, and voting. The Civil Rights Act outlawed exactly the kind of racial profiling now being practiced — and permitted by our highest court — in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants.
While they were at it, those six robed arsonists might as well have burnt the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which outlaws unreasonable searches and seizures and requires a court-issued warrant for arrests. They could have added the Fourteenth Amendment to their bonfire, which was one of three passed and ratified during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. Those three amendments established full citizenship rights for emancipated Blacks and future generations of U.S. denizens, regardless of race. The Thirteenth Amendment, of course, outlawed slavery, and the Fifteenth secured voting rights for all (male) citizens regardless of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude. The Fourteenth Amendment, while establishing birthright citizenship, also guarantees “all persons” (regardless of citizenship status) due process under the law — including those suspected of being in the country illegally.
No one gave us those rights. Successive generations of Americans fought for them, starting in the late 1780s and in the 1791 passage of the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to our Constitution. That’s when the Fourth Amendment established the rights that centuries later would be invoked to prevent people from being stopped for “driving while Black” or seeking work while looking Latino. (It’s also when, thanks to the First Amendment, we secured freedom of speech and the press, which gives me the right to state publicly, even in the wake of his despicable assassination, that the founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, built his organization on explicit contempt for women, especially women of color, and LGBTQ people.)
It took a civil war and the deaths of almost 700,000 soldiers on both sides to end legal slavery in this country and give us those three Reconstruction amendments, passed between 1865 and 1870.
