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My fellow Americans,
The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution states, in perfectly clear language,
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
On the day he was inaugurated President and swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, convicted felon Donald John Trump also signed an executive order that claimed to give him the power to nullify the Constitution and suspend this guarantee of citizenship granted to all those born on American soil.
Of course, he was immediately sued, in many places, and court after court after court held that no president has the power to defy the Constitution. Until now.
Today's Roberts Court decision isn't just about legal procedure or immigration policy. It's about watching the United States Supreme Court, a formerly-great institution that was supposed to protect our most fundamental rights, instead choose power over principle. Dictatorship over democracy. For many of us, this feels like watching the Constitution itself being rewritten in real time—not through the democratic process our founders envisioned, but through imperial judicial decree.
This loss cuts deep because it strikes at something we were taught to believe was bedrock in our country: that our rights, once enshrined in the Constitution, would be forever protected. That the courts would be a check on executive overreach, and there would be no more kings in America. That citizenship to all who are born here—written into our Constitution after the Civil War to ensure that never again would we deny the humanity and belonging of people born on American soil—was settled law.
The grief is real. The fear is justified. For immigrant families, this isn't abstract constitutional theory—it's the terror of not knowing if your children will be legally considered Americans tomorrow. If you will be a citizen tomorrow, or instead have your citizenship stripped from you -- without passport, without refuge, without a country that will take you in -- and subject to deportation to a country you have never known. By a country that used to call itself the “land of the free”. For all of us who believe in democracy, it's watching the rules get changed mid-game by corrupt refs -- to favor those who would unleash terror on American communities to further their own corrupt power.
I won't pretend to know exactly how this feels for you, especially if you or your family are directly targeted by these policies. My own experience of corrupt institutional capture—watching democratically-owned cooperatives and credit unions I believed in betray the people they were meant to serve—feels small compared to what millions in this country are facing right now.
But I do know the particular ache of realizing that appealing to fairness and decency and precedent and rule of law isn't enough -- when the other side has abandoned those constraints entirely. I know the exhaustion of feeling like you're playing by rules that only apply to one side.
But I also know that the Constitution wasn't written by the Roberts Court. It was written by people who had just lived through their own constitutional crisis -- their revolution against a corrupt king, or a civil war against a souless Confederacy -- and chose to build something better. Decent. Honorable.
Every major expansion of rights in American history—abolition, women's suffrage, labor, civil rights, marriage equality—happened not because courts suddenly became enlightened, but because social movements of ordinary Americans made it impossible to ignore the gap between the world as it should be and the world as it is.
The 14th Amendment itself—the very provision they are now trying to rewrite—wasn't handed down from on high. It was written, by people, in 1866, one year after the end of the Civil War, and not ratified for two years after that. That ratification was fought hard for by formerly enslaved people and their allies who refused to accept a definition of what it means to be an American that excluded them. That excluded us.
We fought a Civil War against the slavers -- the plantation owners, the billionaires of their day. We won. And then, in the peace, we organized our voices and our votes and elected an overwhelmingly pro-freedom Congress. And we won again. Not perfectly, not without, perhaps, ever being called to fight that fight again. But we won.
Today, across the country, people are already doing what movements do: turning grief into organizing, fear into collective action and solidarity. Immigration lawyers are filing new cases. State’s attorneys general are coordinating resistance. Faith communities are declaring sanctuary. Workers and unions are planning strikes. Young people are registering their friends as voters. And people everywhere are finding ways to stop ICE from kidnapping and disappearing our neighbors.
This moment reveals something the powerful have forgotten: our rights don't come from their permission. Our rights come from our refusal to accept anything less than full humanity and dignity for all of us. In this country, everyone protects everyone, and not even billionaires can break that.
So, today, we can let this Roberts Court decision stop us—retreat into despair, accept that the game is rigged, give up on the possibility that democracy is possible, that ordinary people can create change.
Or we can let this day clarify what we're really fighting for: not just slowing down the damage they do, but creating a new democracy -- a Free United States -- where, maybe for the first time, power actually belongs to The People, not just those who can buy judges or gerrymander districts.
Today, our choice is whether or not to build our own power -- a people's power. To develop the leadership capacity in our communities that can sustain a long-term struggle for democracy. To learn the tools of organizing, leadership development, and nonviolent direct action that have toppled dictators and illegitimate Supreme Councils and transformed societies all around this world.
This means:
- Organizing our neighborhoods: Building the relationships and infrastructure for sustained collective action, starting with a knock on our neighbor's door and a friendly “hello”;
- Developing leaders: Training people to organize, build power, lead teams, and plan actions;
- Learning nonviolent strategy: Understanding how campaigns actually win through strategic disruption and mass participation; and
- Creating alternative institutions: Building the mutual aid networks, cooperative businesses, and community organizations that can meet people's needs while we fight for systemic change.
Make no mistake -- the Roberts Court's power depends on our compliance and our docility. It depends on us obeying in advance. It supposes a different kind of American than those who won a Revolutionary war against a king, a Civil War against slavers, a World War against fascists, and another kind of war at home against the Klan.
But we are the children, grandchildren, and great-great-great-grandchildren of all those generations of anti-fascists. And we are ready to answer the call to defend our Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, and fight for freedom just as our ancestors did four-score, eight-score, and thirteen-score years ago.
We will fight, but with the modern arsenal of democracy. The force more powerful than dictators and theocratic super-legislatures today is nationwide strategic nonviolent resistance. When our whole country nopes the fuck out of the billionaires’ plan for us.
And when we withdraw our cooperation -- all of us, together, shutting down anything and everything -- we will discover that our power was always greater than theirs. We will make their system impossible to maintain, and force them to surrender to our system.
This isn't about protest as performance or moral witness (though both have their place). This is about nonviolent direct action as a strategy for reclaiming the rights and the Constitution that this fascist regime is trying to take away today -- by creating the kind of sustained, mass, disciplined resistance that makes the system impossible for the billionaires and the theocrats to maintain.
We each hold the power to choose: Will we let this moment defeat us, or will we let it teach us how much we're capable of when we organize together?
The Constitution they're trying to rewrite belongs to us -- we own it. It is our birthright. Its protections are as necessary as oxygen and as sacred as mother's milk. And the day we let them take that from us will never come as long as one real patriot continues to breathe and bleeds red, white, and blue.
Will you join us? Sign up with us here.
May God bless all of us, and may God continue to bless the Free United States.
Jake Schlachter is the founder and executive director of We Own It and an organizing coach and trainer in the Marshall Ganz/LCN framework. Since February, he’s been organizing with former federal workers, particularly USAID and AmeriCorps.
