Independence, Immigration, and the Betrayal of Due Process

 

Independence, Immigration, and the Betrayal of Due Process

One of the most damaging myths in American political discourse today is the casual—and deeply ignorant—assumption that the United States sprang fully formed into existence on July 4, 1776. This misconception is not harmless. It is being weaponized to justify policies that directly contradict the constitutional foundations of the nation, particularly in the treatment of immigrants and their families.

The Declaration of Independence, authored primarily by Thomas Jefferson in 1776, did not mark the birth of the United States as a nation. It was a declaration of intent by thirteen British colonies—whose inhabitants were still British subjects—to sever ties with the British Crown. Independence was neither immediate nor guaranteed. It took seven more years of war before Britain formally recognized independence in the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Even then, no unified nation yet existed. So, in fact, the United States is not 250 years old next year. 

It was not until 1787—eleven years after the Declaration—that a Constitution was drafted to create a new political entity: the United States of America. That Constitution was written overwhelmingly by immigrants. Most of the Framers were foreign-born British subjects, and others came from families recently arrived from across Europe. They were not “natives” in any modern nationalist sense. They were migrants, colonials, and outsiders who understood, perhaps better than anyone, the dangers of arbitrary power.

That is precisely why the Constitution does not speak of “citizens” when it guarantees fundamental rights. It speaks of persons. Those immigrants were establishing a new country, a new nation. The United States did not exist, YET. 

The Fifth Amendment does not say that "only citizens" are entitled to due process of law. Neither does the Fourteenth Amendment. This language was deliberate. The Framers and later Reconstruction lawmakers understood that if the government could deny due process to any group, it labeled undesirable, then liberty itself would rest on nothing more than political convenience.

Yet today, thousands of immigrants are being detained, expelled, or separated from their families without meaningful due process. The logic being advanced—often by figures such as Stephen Miller, the ignorant Dracula look-alike vampire- is not constitutional originalism. It is a constitutional repudiation. It demands that Americans forget not only what the Constitution says, but why it was written.

Birthright citizenship offers another clear example. The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868 precisely because the nation recognized a moral and legal necessity: children born in the United States must not inherit statelessness, vulnerability, or second-class status because of their parents’ origin. This was not an accident. It was a hard-learned lesson born from slavery, exclusion, and civil war.

To attack birthright citizenship today is to attack one of the most stabilizing principles in American law. It is to deny the country’s own history as a nation built by successive generations of newcomers who became Americans not by blood, but by law.

What makes the current moment especially dangerous is not merely harsh rhetoric, but the normalization of constitutional violations. When executive power disregards due process, when law enforcement engages in racial profiling, and when legal institutions are bent to serve political loyalty rather than constitutional duty, the rule of law itself is eroded.

The answer to this crisis cannot be vigilantism, retaliation, or chaos. The Constitution does not survive by being abandoned when it is inconvenient. It survives through lawful resistance: the courts, class-action litigation, congressional oversight, and public accountability. If civil rights have been violated on a massive scale, the remedy must be legal, transparent, and rooted in the very Constitution that is being undermined.

History is unambiguous on one point: when governments normalize the denial of rights to one group, they eventually endanger everyone. The Framers knew this. The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment knew this. Forgetting it is not patriotism—it is historical amnesia.

The United States was not born from exclusion. It was born from resistance to unchecked power. Any movement that demands obedience at the expense of due process is not defending the nation’s foundations. It is repudiating them.

And that is what makes this moment not merely political, but constitutional.