NEWARK, NJ — Warning that the Trump administration’s actions likely pose a serious threat to constitutional rights, a federal judge has temporarily blocked the government from deporting a legal U.S. resident under a little-used statute that allows the Secretary of State to deport non-citizens for expressing views deemed contrary to U.S. foreign policy interests.
Although the Supreme Court affirmed in 1945 that freedom of speech applies to all persons within the United States, including non-citizens, the Trump Administration has systematically weaponized its immigration enforcement in order to punish political dissent, targeting university students engaged in peaceful political protests for arrests, detentions and deportations. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate married to a U.S. citizen and father to a newborn, was arrested on March 8, 2025, by agents with the Department of Homeland Security for his vocal yet nonviolent criticism of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. In coming to Mahmoud Khalil’s defense, a legal coalition that includes The Rutherford Institute and FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) warned that allowing deportation based on a government official’s disapproval of someone’s speech threatens free expression for everyone.
“Political speech—even when unpopular or controversial—is protected under the Constitution,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “If non-citizens can be jailed or deported simply for criticizing government policy, then we’re all at risk. The First Amendment protects everyone on American soil—citizen or not—but this case threatens to undermine that fundamental freedom.”
Although Mahmoud Khalil has not been accused of any vandalism or physical violence related to his protest activity at Columbia University, he was arrested and transported to an out-of-state detention center in Louisiana where he remains in ICE custody, far from his attorneys and family. In response to a Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, asking for Khalil’s release, the federal court granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting the government from detaining or deporting Khalil based on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s determination that Khalil’s nonviolent protest activity would compromise a U.S. foreign policy interest—a determination which the court found likely violates due process rights when coupled with First Amendment protections. The judge warned that if such a law can be used against Khalil, “then other, similar statutes can also one day be made to apply. Not just in the removal context, as to foreign nationals. But also in the criminal context, as to everyone.” The court further invoked a chilling analogy: “Imagine…how quickly our constitutional [alarms] would rise if a local police chief were granted the power to arrest any person whose mere presence would cause potentially serious adverse consequences for the public peace.”
The court gave the Trump administration 40 hours to appeal or release Khalil from this charge. However, government lawyers did neither. Instead, the Trump administration pivoted, justifying Khalil’s ongoing detention on a second charge for allegedly failing to disclose that he was a member of certain humanitarian organizations—such as the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees—on his 2024 application for lawful permanent residence.
Ronnie London, Conor Fitzpatrick, Will Creeley, and others at FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) advanced the arguments in the Khalil v. Trump amicus brief.
The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.
In Trump’s America, the bar for martial law is no longer constitutional—it’s personal.
Indeed, if ever we needed proof that Donald Trump was an operative for the Deep State, this is it.
Despite what Trump would have us believe, the Deep State is not the vast numbers of federal employees who have been fired as part of his government purge.
Rather, the Deep State refers to the entrenched network of unelected bureaucrats, intelligence agencies, military contractors, surveillance firms, and corporate lobbyists that operate beyond the reach of democratic accountability. It is a government within a government—an intelligence-industrial complex that persists regardless of who sits in the Oval Office and whose true allegiance lies not with the Constitution but with power, profit, and control.
In other words, the Deep State doesn’t just survive presidential administrations—it recruits them. And in Trump, it has found a showman willing to turn its agenda into a public performance of raw power—militarized, theatrical, and loyal not to the Constitution, but to dominance.
What is unfolding right now in California—with hundreds of Marines deployed domestically; thousands of National Guard troops federalized; and military weapons, tactics and equipment on full display—is the latest chapter in that performance.
Trump is flexing his presidential muscles with a costly, violent, taxpayer-funded military display intended to intimidate, distract and discourage us from pulling back the curtain on the reality of the self-serving corruption, grift, graft, overreach and abuse that have become synonymous with his Administration.
Don’t be distracted. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be sidelined by the spectacle of a police state.
When Trump issues a call to “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” explaining to reporters that he wants to have them “everywhere,” we should all be alarmed.
This is martial law without a formal declaration of war.
This heavy-handed, chest-thumping, politicized, militarized response to what is clearly a matter for local government is yet another example of Trump’s disregard for the Constitution and the limits of his power.
Political protests are protected by the First Amendment until they cross the line from non-violent to violent. Even when protests turn violent, constitutional protocols remain for safeguarding communities: law and order must flow through local and state chains of command, not from federal muscle.
By breaking that chain of command, Trump is breaking the Constitution.
Deploying the military to deal with domestic matters that can—and should—be handled by civilian police, despite the objections of local and state leaders, crosses the line into authoritarianism.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
In the span of a single week, the Trump administration is providing the clearest glimpse yet of its unapologetic, uncompromising, corrupt allegiance to the authoritarian Deep State.
First came the federalization of the National Guard, deployed to California in response to protests sparked by violent and aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across the country. Then, just days later, the president is set to preside over a lavish, taxpayer-funded military parade in the nation’s capital.
These two events bookend the administration’s unmistakable message: dissent will be crushed, and power will be performed.
Trump governs by force (military deployment), fear (ICE raids, militarized policing), and spectacle (the parade).
This is the spectacle of a police state. One side of the coin is militarized suppression. The other is theatrical dominance. Together, they constitute the language of force and authoritarian control.
Wrapped in the rhetoric of “public safety” and “restoring order,” the federalization of California’s National Guard is not about security. It’s about signaling power.
This is the first time in over half a century that a president has forcibly deployed the National Guard against a state governor’s wishes. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s public opposition to the deployment was met not with dialogue, but with the threat of arrest from Trump himself—a move that evokes the worst abuses of executive power.
This is more than political theater; it is a constitutional crisis in motion.
As we have warned before, this tactic is familiar.
In times of political unrest, authoritarian regimes invoke national emergencies as pretexts to impose military solutions. The result? The Constitution is suspended, civilian control is overrun, and the machinery of the state turns against its own people.
This is precisely what the Founders feared when they warned against standing armies on American soil: that one day, the military might be used not to defend the people, but to control them. Where the military marches at home, the Republic trembles.
And this is not unprecedented.
It is a textbook play from the authoritarian handbook, deployed with increasing frequency under Trump. The optics are meant to intimidate, to broadcast control, and to discourage resistance before it begins.
Fear is the Deep State’s favorite tool—it doesn’t just control the people, it conditions them to surrender voluntarily.
Thus, deploying the National Guard in this manner is not just a political maneuver—it is a strategic act of fear-based governance designed to instill terror, particularly among vulnerable communities, and ensure compliance.
As President Harry S. Truman observed, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”
Under Trump, the lines between a civilian democracy and a military regime continue to blur. American streets increasingly resemble war zones, where peaceful protests are met with riot gear, armored vehicles, and surveillance drones.
America is being transformed into a battlefield before our eyes.
Militarized police. Riot squads. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Stun grenades. Crowd control and intimidation tactics.
From federal law enforcement to local police, from border patrol to the intelligence agencies, the guiding doctrine is the same: treat Americans as suspects first, citizens second—if at all.
This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.
This is the language of force.
This is what happens when the rule of law gets replaced by the rules of force: war becomes the organizing principle of domestic governance, law becomes subordinate to command, and liberty is reclassified as a liability.
The war zone mentality—where citizens are treated like insurgents to be subdued—is a hallmark of authoritarian rule.
This transformation is not accidental—it’s strategic. The government now sees the public not as constituents to be served but as potential combatants to be surveilled, managed, and subdued. In this new paradigm, dissent is treated as insurrection, and constitutional rights are treated as threats to national security.
What we are witnessing today is also part of a broader setup: an excuse to use civil unrest as a pretext for militarized overreach.
You want to turn a peaceful protest into a riot? Bring in the militarized police with their guns and black uniforms and warzone tactics and “comply or die” mindset. Ratchet up the tension across the board. Take what should be a healthy exercise in constitutional principles (free speech, assembly and protest) and turn it into a lesson in authoritarianism.
We saw signs of this strategy in Charlottesville, Virginia, where police failed to de-escalate and at times exacerbated tensions during protests that should have remained peaceful. The resulting chaos gave authorities cover to crack down—not to protect the public, but to reframe protest as provocation and dissent as disorder.
Charlottesville was the trial run—California is the main event.
Then and now, the objective wasn’t to preserve peace and protect the public. It was to delegitimize dissent and cast protest as provocation.
Yet the right to criticize the government and speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.
The government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power. While all kinds of labels are now applied to “unacceptable” speech, the message is clear: Americans have no right to express themselves if what they are saying is at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.
Where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.
Which brings us to this present moment: there’s a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention.
Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests. Tensions rise, violence escalates, and federal armies move in. Meanwhile, despite the protests and the outrage, the government’s abuses continue unabated.
It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the Deep State. The government wants a reason to crack down and lock down and bring in its biggest guns.
They want us divided. They want us to turn on one another. They want us powerless in the face of their artillery and armed forces. They want us silent, servile and compliant.
They certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, much less attempt to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully.
This is how it begins.
We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.
This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.
Today, California is being staged as the test site for the coming crackdown.
The Trump administration provokes unrest through inhumane policies—in this case, mass ICE raids—then paints the resulting protests as violent threats to national security. The answer? Deploy the military.
It’s a cynical and calculated loop: create the crisis, then respond with force. This strategy transforms protest into pretext, dissent into justification for domination.
There are disturbing echoes of history in these tactics, and they come with grave legal implications. We have seen this before.
It has been 55 years since President Nixon deployed the National Guard to put down anti-war student protests, culminating in the Kent State massacre. During the civil rights era, peaceful demonstrators were met with dogs, firehoses, and police batons. In more recent memory, federal agents cracked down on Occupy Wall Street encampments and Black Lives Matter protests with militarized force.
All of it under the guise of order.
Trump’s tactics fall squarely in that lineage.
His use of the military against civilians violates the spirit—if not the letter—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is meant to bar federal military involvement in domestic affairs. It also raises severe constitutional questions about the infringement of First Amendment rights to protest and Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure.
Modern tools of repression compound the threat. AI-driven surveillance, predictive policing software, biometric databases, and fusion centers have made mass control seamless and silent. The state doesn’t just respond to dissent anymore; it predicts and preempts it.
While boots are on the ground in California, preparations are underway for a military spectacle in Washington, D.C.
At first glance, a military procession might seem like a patriotic display. But in this context, it is something far darker. Trump’s parade is not a celebration of service; it is a declaration of supremacy. It is not about honoring troops; it is about reminding the populace who holds the power and who wields the guns.
This is how authoritarian regimes govern—through spectacle. North Korea, Russia, and China use grandiose military pageants to project strength and silence dissent. Mussolini marched troops as theater in carefully staged public displays to bolster fascist control. Augusto Pinochet filled Chile’s streets with tanks to intimidate critics and consolidate power. All of it designed not to honor the nation—but to dominate it.
By sandwiching a military crackdown between a domestic troop deployment and a showy parade, Trump is sending a unified message: dissent is weakness. Obedience is strength. You are being watched.
This is not about immigration. It is not about security. It is not even about protest.
This is about power. Raw, unchecked, theatrical power. And whether we, the people, will accept a government that rules not by consent, but by coercion.
The Constitution was not written to accommodate authoritarian pageantry. It was written to restrain it. It was never meant to sanctify conquest as governance.
We are at a crossroads.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Strip away that consent, and all that remains is conquest—through force, spectacle, and fear.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we allow the language of fear, the spectacle of dominance, and the machinery of militarized governance to become normalized, then we are no longer citizens of a republic—we are subjects of a police state.
The only question now is: will we rise up as citizens of a constitutional republic—or bow down as subjects of an authoritarian regime?
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear… If the Bill of Rights were to be broken down, all groups, even the most conservative, would be in danger from the arbitrary power of government.”—President Harry S. Truman (August 8, 1950)
Let us be very clear.
The Constitution is not a suggestion or a negotiating tactic. It is not optional.
Government officials do not get to pick and choose which laws they will obey.
The Constitution is the supreme law of the land: a binding contract between “we the people” of the United States and those we hire to govern. It spells out our expectations for transparency and accountability, limits the government’s authority, affirms the purpose of government as protecter of liberty and property, and reinforces that we are the masters and government agents are the servants.
Thus, any decision by a government official to suspend the rights enshrined in the Constitution should not be undertaken lightly or for political gain or expedience, nor can it be done without following the strict parameters laid out by its creators and the courts.
Bottom line: any attempt to unilaterally override any aspect of the Constitution should alarm every American, regardless of party affiliation.
Which brings us to the Trump Administration’s ongoing attempts to weaponize concerns about national security in order to wage war on the rights enshrined in the Constitution.
We have been inundated with executive orders issued by President Trump purporting to protect national security interests by gutting free speech, eroding equal rights protections, sidestepping the separation of powers, and pushing us ever closer to martial law and outright dictatorship.
Behind the façade of national security lies a more insidious threat: a permanent shadow government—the Deep State—using every “emergency” to tighten its grip and expand unchecked executive authority.
Trump’s most effective ploy to seize power has been his use of illegal immigration to stoke fear and chill dissent. He has used it as a justification to do away with due process, expand the police state, deepen military involvement in domestic policing, and intimidate the nation into compliance.
Even his bid to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants is just another Trojan horse masquerading as a concern for national security.
This is not about protecting America—it’s about redefining America from the top down.
That redefinition is already underway.
The Trump Administration has floated plans to sell $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy investors as a path to citizenship and is considering a pitch for a reality show that would “pit immigrants against each other for a chance at a fast-tracked path to citizenship.”
These proposals are not just absurd—they’re obscene. They reveal a government willing to reduce constitutional rights to commodities, auctioned off to the highest bidder or trivialized for ratings.
This governing by-way-of performance turns a constitutional guarantee into a privilege for sale or spectacle. And it’s part of a calculated effort to recast citizenship as conditional, transactional, and exclusionary. Whether by wealth, loyalty, or ideology, this emerging framework decides who is “deserving” of rights—and who is not.
It is fear-based nationalism that disguises a deeper threat: the normalization of government power to decide who is entitled to rights and who is not.
We see this in action with the Trump Administration’s stance on childbirth and citizenship.
It’s a contradiction: although the Trump Administration is so concerned about falling birth rates that it is prepared to offer financial incentives for childbirth (for example, a $5,000 “baby bonus” and expanded child tax credit), it continues to demonize birthright citizenship for the one population segment that is actually having babies.
Yet this brazenly hypocritical double standard is just a distraction, part of the political theater designed to pit Americans against each other while the power brokers rewrite the rules behind closed doors.
The real power play rests in the Trump Administration’s efforts to gut the Fourteenth Amendment, sidestep the courts, and redefine who qualifies as American—all by executive fiat.
Redefining citizenship by executive order is not governance. It is a bloodless coup—one that overthrows a constitutional republic founded on the rule of law—to reconfigure the face of the nation in the image of the unelected Deep State and its machinery of control.
Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure that all persons born on U.S. soil would be recognized as full citizens—a direct rebuke to the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that Black Americans could not be citizens. Its language is unambiguous: all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens.
The ruling in Wong Kim Ark came during an era of rampant anti-Chinese sentiment, reinforcing that even in times of national xenophobia, the Constitution prevailed in affirming equality under the law.
The Court’s ruling was unequivocal: the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship to all born on American soil, regardless of parentage.
That precedent still stands.
Yet that legacy—of constitutional protections prevailing over prejudice—is now at risk.
After all, if the government—not the Constitution—gets to decide who qualifies as a citizen, then no one’s status is secure.
If your citizenship depends on government approval, your rights aren’t inalienable—they’re transitory privileges.
Likewise, this is not a return to “originalism.” It’s a retreat from constitutional rule altogether. It suggests that citizenship is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution, but a privilege bestowed by those in power.
That’s not just bad law. It’s tyranny in the making.
The notion that a sitting president can erase a constitutional guarantee with the stroke of a pen is not only absurd—it is dangerous. Such an action would be flatly unconstitutional, lacking any legal authority and in direct contradiction to more than a century of settled law.
Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat and executive order, presidents cannot pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they will honor.
Yet perhaps even more concerning than Trump’s war on birthright citizenship itself is the administration’s underlying legal strategy to test the limits of judicial authority—specifically, to restrict the power of federal district courts to issue nationwide injunctions against unconstitutional actions.
You see, this is not just an immigration battle, nor is it only a challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment.
It is a calculated attempt to strip the judiciary of its ability to check executive abuse and a full-frontal assault on the role of the judiciary as a co-equal branch of government entrusted with interpreting the law and defending individual rights against majoritarian overreach.
If successful, it would mark a seismic shift in the balance of powers, subordinating the courts to the whims of the executive branch.
Revoking birthright citizenship would create a stateless class of people born on U.S. soil who are denied recognition by their own country. These children would be cast into legal limbo, denied the rights and protections afforded to every other citizen.
Such a move would not only be cruel—it would be profoundly un-American.
Don’t be fooled: the same unchecked power used to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants today could just as easily be turned against you to strip you of your citizenship—based on your political beliefs, religious views, or failure to toe the party line.
This is the danger the Founders warned against: a government that grants rights only to the loyal, the favored, or the compliant.
And make no mistake: what we’re witnessing is another point along the slippery slope of the effort to recast birthright citizenship—not as a right—but as a privilege, subject to political approval and ideological purity tests.
Increasingly, the government is creating a hierarchy of so-called “deserving” citizens, where access to constitutional rights is predicated on compliance, productivity, and perceived loyalty to the state. This shift toward merit-based citizenship is in direct contradiction to the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence, which affirms that rights are inalienable, not contingent.
We see it in efforts to strip dissenters of their legal protections, deny free speech to the unpopular, surveil certain communities more than others, and criminalize poverty, protest, or association with disfavored political movements.
In this emerging framework, being born in America is no longer enough—you must also prove your worth, your allegiance, and your compliance.
Worse still, this would set a precedent that constitutional rights can be rewritten by executive whim, paving the way for even greater erosions of liberty.
We have seen this before.
History shows how easily rights can be suspended when fear rules and power goes unchecked.
Consider the use of emergency powers to suspend habeas corpus protections, the unilateral authorization of surveillance programs that violate the Fourth Amendment, and the declaration of national emergencies to justify military deployments or detentions without trial.
These are not hypothetical scenarios.
They have occurred under multiple administrations and show how executive power, once unrestrained, expands at the expense of individual rights.
Redefining who qualifies as an American citizen is not the end of the story—it is the beginning of a slippery slope.
If the government can deny citizenship to those born on U.S. soil, what is to stop it from stripping citizenship from naturalized citizens? Or from declaring certain classes of people—based on ideology, ethnicity, or ancestry—as unworthy of constitutional protection?
What’s at stake is not merely a policy dispute—it is the foundational principle that rights cannot be granted or revoked at the pleasure of a single ruler.
If we do not hold the line here, this erosion of liberty will only accelerate.
These power grabs rarely come without a manufactured crisis.
That’s how the Deep State operates: inflame the public, declare an emergency, and then consolidate control.
Every time the people are told to trade liberty for security, we lose both.
This is a line that must not be crossed.
Birthright citizenship is more than a legal technicality. It is a cornerstone of American democracy and equality. The attempt to destroy it through executive power is a direct threat to the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the future of liberty in America.
This is exactly why the Founders drafted a Constitution that limits power and protects individuals—not just the popular or the powerful.
Once we allow the government to decide who is “deserving” of rights, we’ve already surrendered the rule of law. What remains is not a constitutional republic—but an empire of arbitrary rule.
If Donald Trump is remembered for anything, it may be his unintentional role in reviving public interest in the U.S. Constitution.
Indeed, few modern political figures have done more to prompt spontaneous national discussions about the Bill of Rights and constitutional limits on government power—if only because Trump tramples on them so frequently.
Through his routine disregard for due process, free speech, separation of powers, and the rule of law, President Trump has become a walking civics lesson.
From the First and Fourth Amendments to the Emoluments Clause, the Constitution has never had such regular airtime.
Ironically, this might be Trump’s greatest legacy: forcing Americans to learn what the Constitution actually says—by violating it.
Days after issuing an executive order that openly hints at martial law, Trump made a mockery of his oath of office by confessing his complete ignorance about the Constitution on national television. When asked if he needs to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president, Trump replied, “I don’t know.”
His presidency has become a full-frontal assault on the rule of law.
The good news is that Trump’s constitutional ignorance has turned millions of Americans into more alert and informed citizens. In fighting off Trump’s excesses, the nation has reawakened to the rights and principles that many had taken for granted.
Consider some of the constitutional principles that Trump can be credited with bringing into the spotlight unintentionally during his time in office.
First Amendment (free speech, press, religion, protest and assembly): Trump’s repeated confrontations with the First Amendment have transformed free expression into a battleground, making it impossible to ignore the protections it guarantees. From branding the press as “the enemy of the people” and threatening to revoke media licenses to blacklisting law firms, threatening universities with funding cuts for not complying with the government’s ideological agenda, and detaining foreign students for their political views, Trump has treated constitutional protections not as guarantees, but as obstacles. Deportations and detentions based solely on political speech have shown the fragility of these freedoms when power goes unchecked. Even when Trump claims to be championing religious freedom for Christians, he skates close to violating the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from favoring one religion over another.
Second Amendment (right to bear arms): Although often portrayed as a defender of the Second Amendment, Trump has shown an inconsistent and, at times, authoritarian approach to gun rights. He has publicly suggested confiscating firearms from individuals deemed dangerous—without prior due process—summed up in his infamous 2018 statement: “Take the guns first, go through due process second.” This disregard for constitutional procedure alarmed even staunch Second Amendment advocates. At the same time, Trump has encouraged the militarization of domestic police forces, blurring the line between civilian law enforcement and standing armies—a contradiction that cuts against the very spirit of the amendment, which was rooted in distrust of centralized power and standing militaries.
Fourth Amendment (protection against unreasonable searches and seizures): Under Trump, the Fourth Amendment’s shield against unreasonable searches and seizures has likewise become a focal point of concern. His expansion of no-knock raids, endorsement of sweeping surveillance tactics, sanctioning of police brutality and greater immunity for police misconduct, and the use of masked, plainclothes federal agents to seize demonstrators off the streets have revived conversations about privacy, unlawful searches, and the right to be secure in one’s person and property. Executive orders have embedded DHS agents in local policing. All of this under the guise of “law and order”—but without lawful justification.
Fifth & Fourteenth Amendments (due process and equal protection): Perhaps nowhere has Trump’s disregard been more dangerous than in his approach to due process and equal protection under the law. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee that neither citizens nor non-citizens can be deprived of liberty without fair procedures. Yet Trump’s Administration has repeatedly floated or enacted policies that sidestep due process, from the suggestion that he could suspend habeas corpus to the indefinite detention of individuals without trial, and openly questioned whether non-citizens deserve any constitutional protections at all. His immigration policies targeting lawful visa holders for dissent have pushed these rights to the edge of collapse. When asked if non-citizens deserve due process, Trump said, “I don’t know.” That chilling admission sums up his approach to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments: treat them as optional.
Sixth (right to a fair and speedy trial) and Eighth Amendments (protection against cruel and unusual punishment): Even the Sixth and Eighth Amendments have found new urgency. Trump has promoted indefinite pretrial detention for protesters and immigrants alike, while presiding over family separations, inhumane detention centers, and support for enhanced interrogation techniques. Trump has also doubled down on his administration’s commitment to carrying out more executions, including a push to impose the death penalty for crimes other than murder. What once seemed like settled moral and legal territory is now back up for debate.
Tenth Amendment (states’ rights): The Tenth Amendment, which preserves state sovereignty against federal overreach, has been tested by Trump’s threats to defund sanctuary cities, override state public health measures, and interfere in local policing and elections. His efforts to federalize domestic law enforcement have exposed the limits of decentralized power in the face of executive ambition.
Fourteenth Amendment (birthright citizenship): No clause has been more aggressively misunderstood by Trump than the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. His push to strip citizenship from children born on U.S. soil to immigrant parents (birthright citizenship) ignores over a century of legal precedent affirming that citizenship cannot be denied by executive whim.
Article I, Section 8 (commerce and tariffs): Trump’s use of tariff authority provides another example of executive power run amok. Although the Constitution assigns Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on allies and used them as political leverage. These actions not only undermine the constitutional balance between the branches but also weaponize trade policy for political ends.
Article I, Section 9 (Emoluments Clause): Trump’s disregard for the Emoluments Clause—a safeguard against presidential profiteering—brought this obscure constitutional provision back into the public eye. By continuing to profit from his private businesses while in office, including his newly launched crypto companies, hosting foreign dignitaries at Trump-branded properties, and his reported willingness to accept extravagant gifts, such as a $400 million luxury plane from the Qatari government, he has raised urgent ethical and legal concerns about self-dealing, corruption and backdoor arrangements by which foreign and domestic governments can funnel money into Trump’s personal coffers.
Article I, Section 9 (power of the purse): Trump has also trampled on Congress’s exclusive power over federal spending, attempting to redirect funds by executive fiat rather than operating within Congress’ approved budgetary plan. Within the first months of his second term, Trump empowered Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to unilaterally slash government spending by reducing the federal workforce and dismantling whole programs. He has also threatened to withhold federal aid from states, cities, and universities deemed insufficiently loyal. These efforts to bypass congressional appropriations not only violate the Constitution’s clear separation of powers but set a dangerous precedent for future administrations to govern by fiscal coercion.
Article II (executive powers): At the heart of Trump’s governance is a dangerous misreading of Article II, which vests executive power in the president, to justify executive overreach and the concept of an all-powerful unitary executive. He has repeatedly claimed “total authority” over state matters, wielded executive orders like royal decrees in order to bypass Congress, and sought to bend the Department of Justice to his personal and political will. Trump’s use of executive orders—both in his first term and now again in 2025—reflects a belief in unchecked presidential power. He has declared “total authority,” fired independent watchdogs, pardoned political allies, and weaponized the DOJ. Such behavior undermines the balance of powers laid out by the framers.
Separation of Powers / Checks and Balances: This has also meant a sustained attack on the separation of powers. Trump has defied congressional subpoenas, pardoned loyalists implicated in wrongdoing, and threatened to jail political enemies. In doing so, he has tested—and often breached—the guardrails that prevent any one branch from overpowering the others.
Historical Emergency Powers and Legal Precedents: Beyond these standard constitutional provisions, Trump has also breathed new life into archaic emergency powers—tools that most Americans associate with authoritarian regimes, not a constitutional republic. His rhetoric and executive orders have invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify rounding up, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants without due process. He has also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops domestically in order to deal with civil unrest, raising the specter of martial law cloaked in patriotic language.
In routinely violating the Constitution and crossing legal lines that were once unthinkable, Trump—who appears to have no real understanding of or regard for the Constitution—is forcing Americans to confront what the Constitution truly protects, and what it doesn’t.
So where does that leave us?
Thomas Jefferson recognized that a citizenry educated on “their rights, interests, and duties” is the only real assurance that freedom will survive. As Jefferson wrote in 1820: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
Still, what good is a knowledgeable citizenry if their elected officials are woefully ignorant about the Constitution or willfully disregard their sworn duty to uphold and protect it?
For starters, anyone taking public office, from the president on down, should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts.
One way to ensure this? Require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution—and pass a thorough examination—before being allowed to take office. And if they violate their contractual obligations to uphold and defend the Constitution, vote them out—throw them out—or impeach them.
“We the people” have the power, but we must use it, or we’ll lose it.
BURLINGTON, Vt. — In the wake of a string of court challenges over its arrests, detentions and deportations of university students engaged in political protests, the Trump Administration is threatening to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, a constitutional principle with roots in British law that assures everyone in the United States, including noncitizens, of the right to challenge a detention in court.
The White House’s admission that it is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus came on the same day that the U.S. District Court for Vermont ordered the immediate release of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student who was seized on the street near her apartment by masked, plainclothes ICE agents; shoved into an unmarked car; and transported out of state to a detention center pending deportation. Although never charged with a crime, Öztürk was targeted by government officials for co-authoring an op-ed in a student paper a year earlier expressing support for Palestinian civilians during a time of heightened international conflict. The Rutherford Institute joined a coalition of civil liberties organizations (including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the National Coalition Against Censorship, PEN America, Cato Institute, and the First Amendment Lawyers Association) to file an amicus brief in Öztürk v. Trump challenging the legality of Öztürk’s arrest and detention through her petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
“This is not about public safety. This is about silencing dissent. The U.S. government is weaponizing immigration enforcement to punish political dissent,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “If the government can silence, detain, and deport individuals simply for speaking out on political issues, then no one’s speech is truly safe and we’re no longer operating under the Constitution. We’re living under a system of political policing.”
Öztürk, a Turkish national lawfully present in the U.S. on a student visa, is pursuing a doctorate in the Child Study and Human Development program at Tufts University. Unbeknownst to Öztürk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked her visa as part of a campaign by the Trump Administration to retaliate against those who publicly criticize Israel. Öztürk was detained without warning by masked, plainclothes agents on March 25, 2025, and transferred more than 1,500 miles away from her home in Massachusetts to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center. In its amicus brief challenging Öztürk’s detention as unconstitutional, the legal coalition contends that the government’s actions set a dangerous precedent in which political speech can be treated as evidence of threat, opening the door for officials to selectively punish individuals based on the content and viewpoint of their expression.
The implications reach far beyond Öztürk’s case. Since returning to office, the Trump Administration has increasingly targeted immigrants and legal visa holders for arrest, deportation, or visa revocation based solely on their political expression. In one case, a legal aid attorney had her visa canceled after attending a peaceful protest. In another, a university lecturer was denied re-entry to the U.S. over critical social media posts. Such tactics, the coalition contends, create a sweeping chilling effect for anyone who dares to speak out against government policy.
Ronnie London, Conor Fitzpatrick, Colin McDonell, Will Creeley, and others at FIRE advanced the arguments in the Öztürk v. Trump amicus brief.
The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.
“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”—James Madison
We are being frog-marched into tyranny at the end of a loaded gun. Or rather, hundreds of thousands of loaded guns.
Let’s not mince words: President Trump’s April 28 executive order is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: martial law masquerading as law and order.
The order doesn’t merely expand policing—it institutionalizes repression.
It sets us squarely on the road to martial law.
If allowed to stand, Trump’s executive order completes our shift from a nation of laws—where even the least among us had the right to due process—to a nation of enforcers: vigilantes with badges who treat “we the people” as suspects and subordinates.
Without invoking the Insurrection Act or deploying active-duty military forces, Trump has accelerated the transformation of domestic police into his own paramilitary force.
Authorizing the DOJ to defend officers accused of civil rights violations;
Increasing the transfer of military equipment to local police;
Shielding law enforcement from judicial oversight;
Prioritizing law enforcement protection over civil liberties;
Embedding DHS and federal agents more deeply into local policing.
Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has moved systematically to dismantle what little accountability remains:
Terminating the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database;
Halting DOJ investigations into abusive police departments;
Expanding immigration enforcement while eliminating oversight;
Dismissing internal watchdogs at DOJ and DHS;
Weakening civil rights tools and body camera requirements;
Suspending or eliminating consent decrees nationwide.
All of this has occurred without congressional debate, judicial review, or constitutional scrutiny.
Through it all, Trump has emboldened police forces to act with near impunity, reinforcing a trend long embraced by powerful police unions, bureaucratic cronyism, and laws providing for qualified immunity that shield misconduct from public consequence.
For years, we have watched as the government transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military: outfitted with military hardware and trained in battlefield tactics.
However, this executive order goes one step further—creating not just a de facto standing army but Trump’s own army: loyal not to the Constitution or the people, but to the president.
This is the very danger the Founders feared: a militarized police force answerable to a powerful executive, operating outside the bounds of the law.
While the Posse Comitatus Act was intended to prevent the military from becoming a domestic police force, this administration has found a workaround: transforming civilian police into a paramilitary force armed and trained like the military, but without the legal constraints.
In doing so, the federal government has effectively sidestepped both constitutional checks and statutory prohibitions meant to guard against military rule on American soil.
This is martial law without a declaration.
The battlefield is here.
Law enforcement today is equipped like the military, trained in battlefield tactics, and given broad discretion over who to target and how to respond. But these are not soldiers bound by the laws of war. They are civilian enforcers, wielding unchecked power with minimal oversight.
And they are everywhere.
Armored vehicles on neighborhood streets. Flashbang raids on family homes. Riot police in small towns. SWAT-style teams deployed by federal agencies. Drones overhead. Mass surveillance below.
We are fast approaching a reality where constitutional rights exist in name only.
In practice, we are ruled by a quasi-military bureaucracy empowered to:
Detain without trial;
Punish political dissent;
Seize property under civil asset forfeiture;
Classify critics as extremists or terrorists;
Conduct mass surveillance on the populace;
Raid homes in the name of “public safety”;
Use deadly force at the slightest provocation.
In other words, we’ve got freedom in name only.
It’s the same scenario nationwide: in big cities and small towns alike, militarized “warrior” cops—hyped up on power—ride roughshod over individual rights by exercising almost absolute discretion over who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
This nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence has already ensured that unarmed Americans—many of them mentally ill, elderly, disabled, or simply noncompliant—will continue to die at the hands of militarized police.
From individuals shot for holding garden hoses, to those killed after calling 911 for help, these tragedies underscore a chilling truth: in a police state, the only truly “safe” person is one who offers no resistance at all.
These killings are the inevitable result of a system that rewards vigilante aggression by warrior cops and punishes accountability.
These so-called warrior cops, trained to act as judge, jury and executioner, increasingly outnumber those who still honor their oath to uphold the Constitution and serve the public.
Now, under the cover of executive orders and nationalist rhetoric, that warrior mentality is being redirected toward a more dangerous mission: silencing political dissent.
Emboldened by Trump’s call to reopen Alcatraz and target so-called “homegrown” threats, these forces are no longer going to be tasked with enforcing the law—they will be deployed to enforce political obedience.
Backed by the full power of the state and unbound by meaningful accountability, these police state enforcers operate with the tactics of a military force but without its legal constraints. They are not soldiers governed by the rules of war. They are the foot soldiers of the police state.
And their numbers are growing.
This is not a theory. It is a reality unfolding before our eyes.
Battlefield tactics. Camouflage gear. Mass arrests. Tear gas. Strip searches. Drones. Water cannons. Rubber bullets. Concussion grenades. Intimidation. Laws abandoned at will.
We are living in a creeping state of undeclared martial law.
The militarization of police and federal agencies over recent decades has only accelerated the timeline toward authoritarianism.
The groundwork was laid long ago: the NDAA’s indefinite detention powers; court rulings that excuse shootings of unarmed citizens; the normalization of asset forfeiture, round-the-clock surveillance, and militarized drills in American cities.
This regime of lawless enforcement has been built over time—by legislators, courts, and a public too willing to look the other way.
Don’t be fooled: this is not law and order. This is constitutional demolition under the color of authority.
We are being trained to accept militarized policing, normalized surveillance, and injustice disguised as safety.
This is how freedom ends—not with a loud decree, but with the quiet, calculated erosion of every principle we once held sacred.
We’ve come full circle—from resisting British redcoats to submitting to American forces with the same disdain for liberty.
Our constitutional foundation is crumbling, and with it, any illusion that those in power still serve the public good.
Congress, for its part, has abdicated its role as a constitutional check on executive power—passing sweeping authorizations with little scrutiny and failing to rein in executive overreach. The courts, too, have in the past sanctioned many of these abuses in the name of national security, public order, or qualified immunity. Instead of acting as constitutional safeguards, these institutions have largely become rubber stamps.
Indeed, the president, Congress, the courts, and the police have come to embody the very abuse the Founders fought to resist. Only now are the courts beginning to show glimmers of allegiance to the Constitution.
This is not about partisanship. This is about power without restraint.
As tempting as it is to place full blame on Trump for this full-throttle shift into martial law, he is not the architect of this police state. He is its most shameless enabler—a useful frontman for the Deep State in its ongoing war on the American people.
BURLINGTON, Vt. — Warning that the U.S. government is weaponizing immigration enforcement to punish political dissent, The Rutherford Institute has joined a coalition of civil liberties organizations in challenging the arrest and detention of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student whose only alleged offense was expressing support for Palestinian civilians during a time of heightened international conflict.
In a joint amicus brief filed before the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont in Öztürk v. Trump, the coalition—including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the National Coalition Against Censorship, PEN America, Cato Institute, First Amendment Lawyers Association, and The Rutherford Institute—argues that Öztürk’s arrest by federal agents and the attempt to deport her represent a dangerous abuse of power rooted in viewpoint discrimination and retaliation against protected political speech.
“This is not about public safety. This is about silencing dissent,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “If the government can silence, detain, and deport individuals simply for speaking out on political issues, then no one’s speech is truly safe and we’re no longer operating under a Constitution. We’re living under a system of political policing.”
Öztürk, a Turkish national lawfully present in the U.S. on a student visa, is pursuing a doctorate in the Child Study and Human Development program at Tufts University. She was seized on the street near her apartment on March 25, 2025, by masked, plainclothes agents who grabbed her as she screamed, handcuffed her, and took her away in an unmarked vehicle. Unbeknownst to Öztürk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had revoked her visa, apparently in response to an op-ed she co-wrote a year earlier in which she criticized her university’s administration for dismissing student government resolutions which aimed to hold Israel accountable for alleged violations of international law in Palestine—views that diverge sharply from the Trump Administration’s. She was detained without warning and transferred more than 1,500 miles away from her home in Massachusetts to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center.
According to the brief, there are no allegations that Öztürk engaged in violence or illegal activity. The coalition contends that the government’s effort to suppress disfavored political views is flatly prohibited by the Constitution. Moreover, the government’s actions set a dangerous precedent in which political speech can be treated as evidence of threat or disloyalty. This, the coalition warns, opens the door for officials to selectively punish individuals based on the content and viewpoint of their expression. The implications reach far beyond Öztürk’s case. Since returning to office in 2025, the Trump Administration has increasingly targeted immigrants and legal visa holders for arrest, deportation, or visa revocation based solely on their political expression. In one case, a legal aid attorney had her visa canceled after attending a peaceful protest. In another, a university lecturer was denied re-entry to the U.S. over critical social media posts. Such tactics, the coalition contends, create a sweeping chilling effect—not only for immigrants, but for anyone who dares to speak out against government policy.
Ronnie London, Conor Fitzpatrick, Colin McDonell, Will Creeley, and others at FIRE advanced the arguments in the Ozturk v. Trumpamicus brief.
The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.
“One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house. A man’s house is his castle.”—James Otis, Revolutionary War activist, on the Writs of Assistance, 1761
What the Founders rebelled against—armed government agents invading homes without cause—we are now being told to accept in the so-called name of law and order.
Imagine it: it’s the middle of the night. Your neighborhood is asleep. Suddenly, your front door is splintered by battering rams. Shadowy figures flood your home, screaming orders, pointing guns, threatening violence. You and your children are dragged out into the night—barefoot, in your underwear, in the rain.
Your home is torn apart. Your valuables seized. Your sense of safety, demolished.
But this isn’t a robbery by lawless criminals.
This is what terror policing looks like in Trump’s America: raids by night, flashbangs at dawn, mistaken identities, and shattered lives.
On April 24, 2025, in Oklahoma City, 20 heavily armed federal agents from ICE, the FBI, and DHS kicked in the door of a home where a woman and her three daughters—all American citizens—were sleeping. They were forced out of bed at gunpoint and made to wait in the rain while agents ransacked the house, confiscating their belongings.
It was the wrong house. The wrong family.
There were no apologies. No compensation. No accountability.
This is the new face of American policing, and it’s about to get so much worse thanks to the President Trump’s latest executive order, which aims to eliminate federal oversight and empower local law enforcement to act with impunity.
Trump’s supporters have long praised his efforts to deregulate business and government under the slogan of “no handcuffs.” But when that logic is applied to law enforcement, the result isn’t freedom—it’s unchecked power.
What it really means is no restraints on police power—while the rest of us are left with fewer rights, less recourse, and a Constitution increasingly ignored behind the barrel of a gun.
This isn’t just a political shift. It’s a constitutional unraveling.
These aren’t abstract freedoms—they’re the bedrock of the Bill of Rights: the Fourth Amendment’s shield against warrantless searches, the Fifth Amendment’s promise of due process, and the First Amendment’s guarantee that we may speak, protest, and petition without fear of state retaliation.
Yet the build-up of the police state didn’t begin with Trump. What he has done is seize upon decades of bipartisan failure—and strip away the last remaining restraints.
For years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, policing in America has grown more militarized, aggressive, and unaccountable. At times, there were modest attempts to rein in the worst excesses—like curbing the flow of military surplus equipment to local police—but these efforts were short-lived, inconsistent, and easily undone.
Trump’s executive order doesn’t just abandon those reforms. It bulldozes the guardrails. It hands law enforcement a blank check: more weapons, more power, and fewer consequences.
The result is not safety. It’s state-sanctioned violence.
It’s a future in which no home is safe, no knock is required, and no officer is ever held accountable.
That future is already here.
Just a few days before Trump signed the order, that reality played out in Oklahoma City when ICE, FBI, and DHS agents stormed the wrong home and terrorized a mother and her daughters.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident.
In the 30 years since the first federal Crime Bill helped militarize local police forces, the use of SWAT teams has exploded. What was once a rare tactic for hostage situations is now used tens of thousands of times a year, often for nonviolent offenses or mere suspicion. These raids leave behind broken doors, traumatized children, and, too often, dead bodies. And yet, when families seek justice, they’re met with a legal wall called qualified immunity.
Under this doctrine, courts excuse even blatant misconduct by law enforcement unless an almost identical case has already been ruled unconstitutional. It’s legal sleight of hand—a get-out-of-jail-free card for government agents who trample on the Constitution.
We’ve entered an era in which federal agents can destroy your home, traumatize your family, and violate the Fourth Amendment with impunity. And the courts have said: that’s just how it works.
More than 80,000 SWAT raids now occur annually in the United States, most of them for nonviolent offenses like drug possession or administrative code violations.
Many are botched. Few are ever investigated.
In Martin v. United States, now before the Supreme Court, a heavily armed FBI SWAT team mistakenly stormed a Georgia home—armed with rifles, clad in tactical gear, and deploying a flashbang grenade—causing the family inside, with a 7-year-old son, to fear they were being burglarized.
Only after detaining the family—forcing one family member onto the bedroom floor at gunpoint, and then pointing a gun in the mother’s face—did the officers realize their mistake.
The Rutherford Institute, alongside the National Police Accountability Project, filed an amicus brief urging the Court to deny qualified immunity for the agents. But if history is any guide, justice may prove elusive.
Just last year, the Court refused to hold a SWAT team leader accountable for raiding the wrong house, wrecking the wrong home, and terrorizing an innocent family.
In Jimerson v. Lewis, the SWAT team ignored clear differences between the actual target house and the Jimerson residence—missing house numbers, architectural mismatches, a wheelchair ramp where none should have been—and still received qualified immunity.
These rulings aren’t exceptions—they reflect a growing doctrine of unaccountability enshrined by the courts and now supercharged by the Trump administration.
Trump wants to give police even more immunity.
Brace yourselves for a new era of lawless policing.
President Trump’s call for a new crime bill that would further insulate police from liability, accountability and charges of official misconduct could usher in a new era of police brutality, lawlessness and the reckless deployment of lethal force on unarmed civilians.
This is how the rights of ordinary Americans get trampled under the boots of unchecked power.
Even when SWAT commanders disregard warrants, ignore addresses, and terrorize innocent families, the courts shield them from consequences.
These SWAT raids have become a thinly veiled, court-sanctioned excuse to let heavily armed police crash through doors in the dead of night. Too often, they’re marked by incompetence, devastation, and death—leaving a trail of broken homes and broken lives, while law enforcement escapes accountability.
There was a time in America when a person’s home was a sanctuary, protected by the Fourth Amendment from unlawful searches and seizures.
That promise is dead.
We have returned to the era of the King’s Writ—blanket search powers once used by British soldiers to invade colonial homes without cause. As James Otis warned in 1761, such writs “annihilate the privilege” of privacy and due process, allowing agents of the state to enter homes “when they please.”
Trump’s new executive order revives this tyranny in modern form: armored vehicles, night raids, no-knock warrants, federal immunity. It empowers police to act without restraint, and it rewards those who brutalize with impunity.
Even more alarming, the order sets the stage for future legislation that could effectively codify qualified immunity into federal law, making it nearly impossible for victims of police violence to sue.
This is how constitutional protections are dismantled—not in one dramatic blow, but in a thousand raids, a thousand broken doors, a thousand courts that look the other way.
Let’s not pretend we’re safe. Who will protect us from the police when the police have become the law unto themselves?
The war on the American people is no longer metaphorical.
Government agents can now kick in your door without warning, shoot your dog, point a gun at your children, and suffer no legal consequences—so long as they claim it was a “reasonable” mistake. They are judge, jury, and executioner.
With Trump’s new order, the architecture of a police state is no longer theoretical. It is being built in real time. It is being normalized.
It’s not just the poor, the marginalized, or the criminalized who should be afraid. It’s every homeowner, every parent, every citizen who still believes in the Bill of Rights.
Nowhere is this threat more visible than in the unholy alliance between ICE and militarized police forces.
This is where the danger deepens: when ICE and SWAT join forces, no one is safe.
This is more than just a problem of policing—it’s the convergence of two of the most dangerous arms of the modern security state: the merging of federal immigration enforcement with militarized domestic operations, creating a volatile blend of ICE lawlessness and militarized SWAT-style brute force.
Together, they’ve created a government apparatus that acts first and justifies itself later, if at all.
What used to be separate spheres—immigration enforcement and local policing—have now, under the pretense of national security, merged into a seamless operation of nighttime raids, heavy weaponry, blacked-out uniforms, and unmarked vehicles.
Armed federal agents, often operating in plainclothes and without clearly presented warrants, storm homes in the dead of night.
The distinction between a SWAT raid and an ICE operation has disappeared.
ICE agents—often masked, plainclothes, and operating without judicial oversight—are executing aggressive home invasions indistinguishable from SWAT team raids. These officers operate in secret, detaining individuals without clear warrants, sometimes without charges, and often without informing families of where their loved ones have been taken.
This alliance of ICE and SWAT has turned the American home into a battlefield, especially for those deemed politically inconvenient or “suspect” by the state.
These raids aren’t limited to those suspected of crimes.
Legal residents, asylum seekers, and even U.S. citizens have found themselves disappeared under vague claims of national security or immigration violations.
It is policing by fear and disappearance. And it runs counter to everything the Bill of Rights was designed to prevent: punishment without trial, surveillance without suspicion, and power without accountability.
When ICE agents armed with military-grade equipment conduct predawn raids alongside SWAT teams, with little to no accountability, the result is not public safety. It is state terror. And it’s exactly the kind of unchecked power the Constitution was written to prevent.
The Constitution is supposed to be a shield—especially the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. But in this new reality, the government has nullified that shield.
All of America is fast becoming a Constitution-free zone.
What started as an exception—the so-called Constitution-free zone at the border—is fast becoming the norm across America, where due process is optional, and law enforcement acts more like a domestic army than a public servant.
The government no longer needs to prove its authority in court before violating your rights. It only needs to assert it on your doorstep—with flashbangs and rifles at the ready.
The only castle left may be the one you’re willing to defend.
The Founders knew the dangers of unchecked power. That’s why they gave us the Fourth Amendment. But rights are only as strong as the public’s willingness to defend them.
If we allow the government to turn our homes into war zones—if we continue to reward police for lawless raids, ignore the courts for rubber-stamping abuse, and cheer political leaders who promise “no more handcuffs”—we will lose the last refuge of freedom: the right to be left alone.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A broad coalition of legal and civil liberties organizations is once again challenging President Trump’s use of executive orders to retaliate against law firms that he perceives as political opponents, suppress opposition and chill lawful First Amendment activity.
The coalition, which includes the ACLU, ACLU of DC, CATO, Electronic Frontier Foundation, FIRE, the Institute for Justice, the Knight First Amendment Institute, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, the Society for the Rule of Law, and The Rutherford Institute, filed two more amicus briefs (Jenner & Block and WilmerHale) asking a federal court to strike down as illegal and unconstitutional the president’s executive orders targeting the law firms of Jenner & Block and WilmerHale. The coalition filed a similar amicus brief in Perkins Coie LLP v. U.S. Department of Justice challenging the president’s executive order as a violation of the separation of powers and an unconstitutional infringement on the rights to free speech, advocacy and due process.
“That President Trump is weaponizing the government in order to wage a war against dissent, against due process, and against the very foundations of our constitutional republic should be a warning to all Americans,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “History shows that when governments claim the power to silence dissent—whether in the name of national security, border protection, or law and order—that power rarely remains limited. These threats against the legal community are just the beginning.”
In an effort to punish a number of major law firms and discourage others from challenging the Trump Administration’s ongoing efforts to sidestep the Constitution, President Trump issued Executive Orders directing the federal government to suspend the firms’ security clearances, cease providing all goods and services, terminate any contracts with the firms and those who do business with them, limit the firms’ access to federal buildings and employees, and refrain from hiring employees of the firms. The intent behind the president’s actions, per former advisor Steve Bannon, is to “put those law firms out of business” in response to the firms using the system of checks and balances to prevent the Administration from violating the Constitution.
Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale each challenged Trump’s Orders on grounds that they violate the separation of powers and the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. Warning that Trump’s actions constitute a brazen attack on the independence of the legal profession and the judicial branch, the legal coalition’s amicus briefs in support of the law firms argue that Trump’s Executive Orders not only infringe the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and petitioning the government, but also essentially give the government an unfettered veto over a person’s right to choice of counsel due to the government pushing for a cancel culture and creating a blacklist of firms, similar to what the NRA previously claimed was done to it by a New York state official. Moreover, if the executive orders are allowed to stand, they could set a precedent for future Administrations of either political party to suppress challenges to a president’s unconstitutional policies and actions and to deter lawyers from representing the president’s political opponents or any clients adverse to the Administration.
Cecillia D. Wang, Ben Wizner, Brian Hauss, and Arthur B. Spitzer at ACLU advanced the arguments in the Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale amicus briefs.
The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.
WASHINGTON, DC — The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that could determine whether FBI agents can be held accountable for a botched SWAT raid that terrorized an innocent family in the middle of the night.
As detailed in Martin v. United States, a heavily armed FBI SWAT team mistakenly stormed a Georgia home—armed with rifles, clad in tactical gear, and deploying a flashbang grenade—causing the family inside, with a 7-year-old son, to fear they were being burglarized. In an amicus brief filed jointly with the National Police Accountability Project, The Rutherford Institute urged the Court to hold federal agents accountable under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) for recklessly invading the wrong residence, located a block away from the intended target: a suspected violent gang member. Fearing they were being burglarized, Ms. Martin tried to get to her 7-year-old son before officers forced one family member onto the bedroom floor at gunpoint, and then pointed a gun in Ms. Martin’s face.
“These SWAT raids have become a thinly veiled, court-sanctioned excuse to let heavily armed police crash through doors in the dead of night,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Too often, they’re marked by incompetence, devastation, and death—leaving a trail of broken homes and broken lives, while law enforcement escapes accountability.”
As part of the FBI’s “Operation Red Tape” to address violent gang activity in Georgia, an FBI SWAT team was deployed to execute an arrest warrant at the home of a suspected gang member. Although the team leader had previously conducted a site survey and received a photograph, map, and directions to the correct location, he relied on his personal GPS during a pre-raid drive-by. That GPS led him instead to the home of Curtrina Martin, which looked similar to the target residence. Critically, he failed to verify the street number. During the predawn hours, the SWAT leader led a caravan of vehicles with FBI SWAT team agents and members of the Atlanta Police Department to Martin’s house, thinking it was the target house. SWAT team members surrounded the home, breached the front door, and deployed a flashbang. Fearing they were under attack, Martin tried to reach her 7-year-old son. Only after detaining the family did the agents realize they had the wrong man—he lacked the gang suspect’s identifying face and neck tattoos—and that the house number did not match their intended destination.
The family subsequently filed a lawsuit for negligence, infliction of emotional distress, trespass, false arrest and imprisonment, and assault and battery under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows plaintiffs to bring state-law torts against the United States. However, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the lawsuit, citing the FBI’s lack of any formal policy for verifying target locations during warrant executions. Although the Supreme Court previously refused to hear Jimerson v. Lewis, a similar case involving a local SWAT team raid on the wrong home, it has agreed to take up Martin, which involves federal agents and the scope of the Federal Tort Claims Act.
Eugene R. Fidell with the Yale Law School Supreme Court Clinic, along with Charles A. Rothfeld of Mayer Brown LLP and Paul W. Hughes of McDermott Will & Emery LLP, advanced the arguments in the Martin amicus brief.
The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.
John W. Whitehead, Constitutional Attorney 