On July 7th, in the Magnolia Park neighborhood of Houston, an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. He was an immigrant, a small-business owner who built his own construction company, a loving husband, a father of three American-born children. The government’s first story was that he was the target of an enforcement action, that he used his vehicle as a weapon, that the agent shot in self-defense. The FBI then reported that there were drugs in the vehicle. Then the District Attorney reported that the substance in his van was not drugs, and the story fell apart, and no one in Washington paused even long enough to revise it.

Magnolia Park is not just any neighborhood to us. LULAC Council 60 was chartered there in 1934. We have stood on those blocks for ninety-two years. And standing there this month, mourning a father whose children will grow up without him, I kept returning to a single thought: none of this is new. Not the profiling, not the impunity, not the official story that dissolves on contact with evidence. Black Americans have lived every chapter of this before us and beside us. They built the tools to fight it. And we would be foolish, historically, strategically, morally foolish, to pretend we are facing something unprecedented, when what we are facing is the oldest machinery in American life, retooled and pointed our way – directed at immigrants and the Latino community.

The debt we owe

Let me say plainly what our founders understood. In 1909, Black Americans and their allies answered lynching and disenfranchisement by building the NAACP, a national, membership-based, litigating, legislating, agitating civil rights organization. Twenty years later, in 1929, Mexican American veterans of the First World War gathered in Corpus Christi, Texas. They had bled for this country abroad and come home to “No Mexicans Allowed” signs, segregated schools, and segregated cemeteries. When they founded the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), they did not invent a model. They adopted one. LULAC was consciously patterned on the NAACP’s structure and its method: organize locally, litigate nationally, and never confuse patience with permission.

The two struggles have been intertwined ever since. When the Mendez family sued to desegregate California’s “Mexican schools” in 1947, Thurgood Marshall’s NAACP filed in support, and the road cleared by Mendez led, seven years later, to Brown v. Board of Education. In a single two-week stretch in May 1954, the Supreme Court decided Hernandez v. Texas, extending the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection to Mexican Americans, and then Brown itself. One amendment, written to secure the citizenship and equality of freed Black Americans, became the shelter for all of us. That is the pattern of American civil rights: rights won by Black Americans at the highest cost have never stayed confined to Black Americans. They became the architecture everyone else lives by.

Which is why the attacks on immigrant communities underway should terrify everyone in this country.

The language of 2026

Washington has always dressed its most divisive policies in its best words, and this administration has raised the practice to an art form. A brief translation guide for the current moment:

“Border security” means one hundred seventy billion dollars for masked agents and private prison contractors, the largest enforcement buildup in American history, and detention camps that fill faster than any courtroom can empty them.

“The worst of the worst” means a roofer, a landscaper, a mother on the school run. The majority of the people in those detention beds have never been convicted of anything at all.

“Alien enemies” means workers, men whose only invasion of this country was showing up early for their shift, borrowed from a wartime statute written in 1798.

“Due process” means whatever fits on a form handed to a man in a language he cannot read, on an airplane he never agreed to board.

“Election integrity” means making it harder for American citizens to vote.

Every generation of the civil rights struggle has had to fight the vocabulary before it could fight the policy. “States’ rights” once meant segregation. “Ballot security” once meant armed men at Black polling places. The words change; the work they do does not.

The machine

Strip away the language and look at the thing itself.

This administration has built the largest detention and deportation apparatus in the history of the republic, funded beyond most of the world’s armies, aimed not at cartels but at kitchens, construction sites, and church parking lots. It took Neiyerver Adrián León Rengel, a Venezuelan barber with protected legal status and no criminal conviction, and flew him without a hearing to a foreign mega-prison in El Salvador. LULAC has filed a federal claim on his behalf and is organizing claims for others, because a government that can disappear one man without process has claimed the power to disappear anyone without process. When Kilmar Abrego Garcia won in court, the government prosecuted him, and a federal judge called the prosecution what it was, in a published ruling: vindictive.

And there are the dead. In January, federal operations in Minneapolis left two American citizens killed: Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a nurse who spent his career caring for veterans. In July, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Two citizens and a taxpaying father, none of them a threat to anyone. If ICE can kill these three, ICE can kill anyone.

Black Americans will recognize every element of this: the roving patrols that a federal court in Los Angeles found were seizing people for their skin, their Spanish, and their labor, and that the Supreme Court allowed to continue anyway; the officials who respond to evidence of profiling not by ending it but by relabeling it; the agents whose masks ensure no one can ever identify the perpetrator. There was a time when the way to end racial profiling was to deny it existed. The current method is more efficient: define it as lawful and anonymize the profiler.

In Houston, we are not waiting for permission to respond. LULAC delivered 57,000 petitions to Mayor Whitmire, more than 20,000 signed by Houstonians themselves, and we have sat down with the mayor and Police Chief Diaz to demand a clear wall between local policing and federal immigration sweeps. Our discussions have been fruitful, and we will continue to work in partnership to find a remedy for the issues concerning our community. When communities believe their own police are an arm of ICE, they stop calling for help; 911 calls in Houston have already fallen sharply, and fear is the reason. A city where victims and witnesses are afraid of the police is less safe for every resident of every color. Black Houstonians learned that lesson generations before us. It is one struggle.

The thin line of the law

There is a reason we still believe in American courts: this summer they held.

When the president signed an order purporting to strip citizenship from babies born on American soil, to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment by executive order, LULAC went to court as an originating plaintiff alongside Democracy Defenders and the ACLU. On June 30th, in Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court affirmed what the Constitution has promised since Reconstruction and what Wong Kim Ark confirmed in 1898: every child born in this country and subject to its jurisdiction is a citizen. No asterisk. No executive order.

But mark the margin. Six justices said so. Three were prepared to create, for the first time since Dred Scott, a class of American-born children with no country. The clause at issue was written for the children of enslaved Black Americans; a century and a half later, it shielded the children of Honduran mothers and Venezuelan fathers. That is the inheritance I described above, working exactly as intended, and surviving by a margin as thin as an election.

Which brings me to the part of this story the headlines keep treating as separate. It is not separate. It is the point.

First the vote

Everything this administration does to our communities depends on one prior project: shrinking the electorate that could stop it.

On April 29th of this year, in Louisiana v. Callais, six justices struck down a congressional map because it contained a second majority-Black district, and rewrote Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act so narrowly that Justice Kagan, in dissent, warned the provision had been rendered all but a dead letter. Understand the sequence. In 2013, Shelby County gutted the Act’s preclearance shield. In 2021, Brnovich weakened Section 2. In 2026, Callais finished the job. Twelve years, three decisions, and the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, the law Black Americans marched, bled, and died for at Selma, has been hollowed out not by a mob with torches but by a majority with footnotes.

The decision fell first on Black voters in Louisiana. It will not stop there. It is an engraved invitation to every legislature in Texas, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico to crack and pack Latino communities without fear of the courthouse. LULAC knows this terrain intimately: in 2006 we won LULAC v. Perry, in which the Supreme Court held that Texas had diluted Latino voting strength in violation of the Act. Twenty years later Texas redrew its maps again, mid-decade, in the dark of summer, and we are back in court in LULAC v. Abbott, this time with the Court’s newest handiwork stacked against us. Districts drawn under the Voting Rights Act built the pipeline that carried leaders like Hilda Solis from a majority-minority district to Congress and the Cabinet. Close the districts and you close the pipeline. Close the pipeline and you close the door.

And the voters they cannot gerrymander away, they try to bury in paperwork. The SAVE Act, passed by the House in 2025, passed again this February by five votes, now waiting at the Senate door, would require every American to produce documentary proof of citizenship, a passport or birth certificate in hand, to register or even update a registration. More than twenty-one million American citizens lack ready access to those documents. Millions of married women carry birth certificates that no longer match their legal names. Volunteers who register their neighbors, at the church table, the quinceañera booth, the union hall, would face criminal exposure for paperwork errors. All of this to combat a fraud so rare that Utah audited two million registrations for a year and found twenty-seven cases. Meanwhile, fourteen states have enacted their own versions, and Texas is running the same play through the back office, purging registered citizens against an error-riddled federal database. LULAC is in court there too, with Common Cause and the Campaign Legal Center, because we have read this script before. They call it fraud. In Texas, they spell fraud with a Spanish surname.

Here is what a century of Black struggle teaches about suppression: it is not the strategy of the strong. It is the confession of the frightened. A party confident of your support does not hide your polling place or demand your grandmother’s birth certificate. If they are working this hard to devalue our votes, our votes must be the most valuable thing we own.

What we do now

LULAC is not a charity, and neither was the organization we modeled ourselves on. There are thousands of groups in America that deliver social service, and properly so. We exist to deliver social justice, because when our people have justice, they need far less charity. Discrimination is a tax collected from every paycheck, every mortgage, every classroom, and no food drive can refund it. Only justice can. That means courtrooms, and it means ballots.

Ninety-seven years ago, our founders faced exclusion and answered with organization, because they had watched Black Americans do exactly that twenty years earlier. The machinery we face in 2026 is old. So is the answer to it. Lorenzo’s three children will grow up in a country that either answers for their father’s death or is defined by it, and which one it will be gets decided, as it always has been, by who shows up.

Your vote is your voice.

This year, make America hear it.

On July 24th, Congress came to Houston, to the very community where Lorenzo Salgado Araujo lived, worked, and died. I sat before the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Forum on ICE, next to Lorenzo’s son and brother, and said out loud what millions of Latinos have been carrying silently for months: it could have been me. It could have been my father, my brother, my uncle. It could have been anyone in that room.

Lorenzo’s killing was not an aberration. In the eighteen months since this administration returned to power, federal immigration agents have shot and killed at least eight people and fired their weapons in at least 30 separate incidents. At least 52 people have died in ICE custody, a mortality rate now nearly four times what it was under the prior administration. And just last month, ICE quietly ended the policy requiring it to tell Congress about detainees who die within 30 days of release. The killing continues, and the accountability is disappearing.

I went to Houston to grieve with Lorenzo’s family. But I also went to demand action, and I laid out exactly what Congress can do, starting today: independent accountability, real reform of ICE, and the legal pathways that should have given a man like Lorenzo, after thirty-five years of building in Texas, a line to stand in.

This is my full testimony.

Chairman, Ranking Member, distinguished Members of the Committee and of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, thank you for bringing Congress to Houston — to the community where Lorenzo Salgado Araujo lived, worked, and died.

My name is Juan Proaño. I am the Chief Executive Officer of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization in America, founded in 1929 right here in Texas.

We are gathered here today to examine the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and the all-too-common deaths caused by federal immigration enforcement officials. Before I begin, I want to take this opportunity to recognize Lorenzo’s family. They have gone through heartbreak that no family should be forced to bear. Their courage and bravery in the wake of this tragedy has been inspiring, and, though surely difficult, has been vitally important. In that spirit, I commend Ronaldo’s and Lorenzo Jr.’s appearance before the Committee today. On behalf of LULAC, I want to express my deepest condolences, and also tell them, and everyone on this Committee and in this country: Lorenzo’s name, and life, will not be forgotten. He is and will remain an inspiration.

I will let Ronaldo and Lorenzo Jr., and District Attorney Teare, speak to the state of the investigation into Lorenzo’s death. Sadly, this killing is part of a broader trend: federal immigration agents have repeatedly shot and killed United States citizens during civilian encounters, and dozens more — citizens and immigrants alike — have died in federal immigration custody. This calamity cannot continue, and it is within Congress’s power to stop it from happening.

Members of this Committee: it could have been me. It could have been my father, my brother, my uncle. It could have been anyone gathered here or their families. In the eighteen months since the second Trump Administration began, at least eight people have been killed and dozens more shot in encounters with federal immigration agents.

That includes Ruben Ray Martinez, a 23 years old U.S. citizen from San Antonio who had just turned 23 and was planning to enroll in trade school to become a mechanic. Keith Porter Jr. was 43, a father of two daughters, and by all accounts of family and neighbors an outgoing, caring man. And, of course, in January of 2026, there were the shocking killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.

And the killing continues. Six days after Lorenzo, on July 13, 2026, an ICE officer shot and killed a 26-year-old Colombian man authorized to work in the United States, Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, in Biddeford, Maine — again during a vehicle stop, again described by DHS as a case of a driver “weaponizing” his car, and again involving agents who were not wearing body cameras.

Taken together, these are not isolated tragedies attributable to a single rogue officer or a single bad night. Public reporting has documented at least 30 separate incidents since mid-2025 in which federal immigration agents fired at people, killing at least eight and injuring at least 14, and at least 46 additional incidents in which agents held bystanders, protesters, or others at gunpoint under questionable circumstances. And these figures likely undercount the number of these instances.

And the danger does not end when someone survives an encounter on the street. It continues — and by some measures intensifies — once they are taken into ICE custody. In the first 500 days of the second Trump Administration, there have been at least 52 documented deaths in ICE custody. The mortality rate inside ICE detention is now at its highest level in more than two decades — nearly four times the rate under the prior administration, and more than two and a half times the rate during this Administration’s first term.

These increasingly dangerous conditions, with record numbers of detention, are increasingly hidden from public view. Last month, ICE ended a policy that had required it to notify Congress and investigate the deaths of detainees who die within 30 days of release from custody — precisely the population most likely to have died from conditions that began while they were detained.

The shootings and detention deaths described above are the most acute expression of a wider set of policies from the Trump Administration targeting Latinos, the overwhelming majority of whom are lawfully in this country — creating a dangerous fear within our community. In a Pew poll last year, half of U.S. Latino adults said they worried they or someone close to them might be deported, and a majority said they were personally aware of a recent nearby ICE arrest or raid.

So what can be done to end these cruel and inhumane policies and actions. LULAC offers three areas for this Committee to take action: accountability, reform, and creating legal pathways to citizenship.

First: Congress and DHS should support an independent investigation into Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death — as Houston’s Mayor and Police Chief, and Lorenzo’s own family have called for — with independent law enforcement officials given access to every video, radio transmission, and piece of physical evidence, and the officers involved identified to investigators. ICE should also reinstate the policy it rescinded last month, requiring the agency to report to Congress about the investigation of deaths of detainees that occur within 30 days of their release must also meet its existing legal duty to publicly report the circumstances of every death in custody within 30 days. We need more accountability, not less. In the longer term, Congress should establish an independent use-of-force review board for the Department of Homeland Security, empowered to refer cases for prosecution, so that no federal officer stands above the law he enforces.

Second: The time has come: Congress must reform ICE — the way this nation has reformed every institution that has lost the public’s trust. The Secretary of Homeland Security can act by directive right now: prohibiting agents from firing weapons at moving vehicles — this tactic has led to numerous tragic deaths, and it is one that American civilian policing has largely abandoned; requiring body-worn cameras on every officer in every operation, closing the gap that left investigators without footage in the Salgado Araujo, Durán Guerrero, and Porter shootings; and ending the practice of masked, unidentifiable agents operating in American neighborhoods. But we have seen no indication that the Trump Administration has any desire to take meaningful action. Therefore, Congress should write binding use-of-force standards into statute, require rigorous training and full background checks for every agent — including the thousands hired amid this Administration’s rapid hiring surge — and eliminate arrest quotas that reward volume of arrests over judgment in the field.

Finally: it is time for both parties to come together to legislate enduring legal pathways to citizenship. LULAC believes in the rule of law. We agree that America must have a secure and orderly border that responsibly and humanely manages unlawful entry. But a policy of enforcement alone has failed for forty years, under administrations of both parties. A man like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — who had for thirty-five years worked, paid taxes, and created jobs in this state Texas, with a pending permit application — should have had a line to stand in. So Congress must build one: earned legalization for long-term residents, Dreamers, farmworkers, and essential workers, paired with a modernized legal immigration system that matches the American economy Latino workers and business owners already anchor.

In fact, this has been done before, with support from both parties. We call on this Congress to build a bipartisan framework — border security, ICE reform, and earned legal pathways in one durable package — so that this issue is finally solved rather than perpetually exploited.

Together, we must take on this vital and necessary work, in honor of Lorenzo, Ruben, Keith, Renee, Alex, Joan, and countless others who should be alive today. Each of these individuals built something — a business, a career caring for veterans, a family, a future — that contributed to their communities and to our country. We must act now, so that no one else’s life is put in danger because of the way they look, and no other family has to mourn the needless death of a loved one. It is within our power to do so.

Thank you.

On Tuesday morning, July 7, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo walked out of the house he built with his own hands at about ten minutes to six. He had done this for 35 years. He picked up his crew, men who trusted him, including his own brother, and pointed his white work van toward another job site, another house to raise, another day of the work that put two sons through college with another on his way, and built hundreds of homes for Texas families.

Somewhere else in Houston that same morning, a federal officer also got up early. He kissed his family goodbye, or maybe he lives alone; we don’t know, because the government will not tell us his name. He put on a badge backed by the largest law enforcement budget in American history. He climbed into an unmarked SUV with good pay, federal benefits, and a pension waiting at the end of his career.

By 6:50 a.m., one of those two men had shot the other on Canal Street and left him bleeding on the pavement, handcuffed, crying out for help. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52 years old, a husband, a father of three U.S. born American citizens, a small-business owner days into his 35th year in this country, close to obtaining the legal status was weeks from his American dream, died at Ben Taub Hospital. The Harris County Medical Examiner has ruled his death a homicide.

The government first said it was a targeted operation and that Lorenzo weaponized the vehicle. The men who were sitting in that van say that is false, that agents in unmarked SUVs boxed them in, never identified themselves, shot Lorenzo, and pulled the passengers out. There is no body camera footage, because the agents were not wearing body cameras. We have heard this exact story before. ICE said the same thing about Ruben Ray Martinez in South Texas. ICE said the same thing about Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis. In both cases, video evidence and officials contradicted the government’s account. This is not the first time ICE has justified a shooting by claiming someone tried to run over officers, only for the evidence to tell a different story. That is why LULAC is demanding an independent investigation, why we have offered a reward for information, and why our community raised more than $500,000 for Lorenzo’s family within a day of his death. We do not believe this President and this administration. We do not believe DHS or ICE. We do not trust that the FBI will conduct a through independent investigation.

A Dichotomy Our Community Can No Longer Look Away From

Six months before Houston, it was Minneapolis. On January 24, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse who spent his career keeping strangers alive, was pepper-sprayed, wrestled to the ground by federal agents, and shot roughly ten times. He was a United States citizen. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner ruled his death a homicide too.

For a week, the government refused to name the agents who fired, withholding their identities even from Congress and from Minnesota law enforcement. When ProPublica identified them from government records, the names made my heart sink and landed with a blow to our community: Jesus Ochoa, a Border Patrol agent. Raymundo Gutierrez, a Customs and Border Protection officer.

Ochoa. Gutierrez. Names that could belong to any of our brothers, cousins, nuestro compadre, our neighbors.

This is the dichotomy tearing at the Latino community in America today. The most recent publicly available data show that roughly a quarter of ICE agents, and more than half of all Border Patrol agents, are Latino. Data ICE itself released under the Freedom of Information Act show Latino ICE agents outnumber Black agents two to one and Asian agents four to one. In some border cities, Latino representation runs far higher still: in El Paso, nearly eight in ten ICE employees have been Latino. Latinos are about eight percent of the federal workforce overall, yet we fill the ranks of the very agencies now tearing through our neighborhoods, agencies this administration has quickly expanded from roughly 10,000 officers and agents to 22,000 in a single year.

Professor David Cortez at Notre Dame spent years interviewing more than a hundred Latino ICE and Border Patrol agents, and what he found was not self-hatred and it was not ideology. It was economics. One agent told him he joined because he was, in his words, literally starving. In communities where poverty is generational and opportunity is scarce, a federal badge has meant a stable salary, health care for your kids, and a pension, the same economic stability Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was chasing with a hammer and a work van. Two men got up before dawn on July 7 to provide for their families. Only one of them came home that night.

For decades, that bargain was tolerable because the job was, at least on paper, about public safety. Under this administration, the job has changed. And every Latino man and woman wearing that uniform knows it.

The Numbers Do Not Lie: Latino Men Are The Target

I want to be precise here, because this administration counts on us being imprecise. The data below come from ICE’s own records, case-level government files obtained by UC Berkeley Law’s Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge and the Unseen initiative. This is not rhetoric. This is the government’s own paperwork.

Latinos accounted for roughly nine out of every ten interior ICE arrests in the first half of 2025. Compare the first eight months of this administration to the same months of the last one, and the machinery comes into focus:

The number of noncriminal Latinos, people with no conviction and no pending charge, classified by ICE itself as mere “immigration violators”, entering detention each month went from about 900 under President Biden to about 6,000 under President Trump. The number of working-age Latino men in detention exploded from 3,500 to more than 38,700, an elevenfold increase. Men went from 51 percent of noncriminal Latino detainees to 80 percent. The share transferred out of state, away from their families and their lawyers, tripled from 18 percent to 55 percent. And the share deported upon release rose from 57 percent to 88 percent, while releases back to the community collapsed from 42 percent to just 9 percent.

Look at who these men are, and what happens to them. Detained noncriminal Latinos came from 19 countries, but three quarters came from just five: Mexico (27 percent of the total), Guatemala (17 percent), Honduras, Venezuela, and Ecuador. Detentions of Mexicans and Guatemalans rose nearly eightfold in a single year; detentions of Venezuelans rose fourteenfold. Daily Latino arrests doubled from 276 under the prior administration to 558 during this administration’s first hundred days, then climbed to 785 a day once the White House imposed its quota of 3,000 arrests. And once inside, they stay longer making private sector contracts like Geo Group billions of dollars and are shipped farther: the median detention stay stretched from one to three days to more than 25, nearly seven in ten noncriminal Latino detainees are now held for 15 days or more, and the typical stay now involves three separate facility placements instead of one, each transfer pulling a man farther from his family and his lawyer, and burning through tens of billions of dollars of tax-payer money.

Step back and look at the whole system. ICE’s detention population hit roughly 73,000 in January, the highest in American history, an 84 percent increase in a single year. Roughly three out of four people in that system have never been convicted of any crime, by mid-November, that was 47,964 human beings out of 65,135 in custody. Only about 5 percent of those booked into ICE custody this fiscal year have a violent conviction. The Washington Post’s analysis of the government’s own data found that nine of every ten people removed since January 2025 are men, consistent with ICE’s own historical reporting, which showed men making up 85 to 94 percent of detainees before the agency stopped publishing gender breakdowns last year to hide this information from you and me. Put the citizenship and gender records together and the conclusion is unavoidable: an estimated 70 to 80 percent of everyone booked into ICE detention since 2024 is a Latin American man.

They said they would go after the worst of the worst. They went after the men on the 6 a.m. shift.

And the deaths are mounting. Lorenzo’s killing is at least the eighth during this administration’s enforcement campaign. Last year was the deadliest year in ICE custody in more than two decades. The government of Mexico reports that seventeen of its nationals have died in ICE custody or enforcement operations. Renée Nicole Good. Alex Pretti. Silverio Villegas González. Ruben Ray Martinez. And now Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Latino men are being targeted, hunted, and killed in our streets, and it is time to say so plainly, and time for it to stop.

A Weaponized Agency, Recruiting From Our Own Ranks

None of this is an accident. Congress handed this administration $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement, more than the annual budgets of every state and local police department in America combined. Seventy-five billion tax-payer dollars of it flows to ICE alone, on top of its base budget, with nearly $30 billion earmarked for hiring and enforcement operations. ICE is now the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government, with a budget larger than the FBI, DEA, and ATF combined.

That money is buying a hiring spree unlike anything in federal law enforcement history: $50,000 signing bonuses, salaries up to $90,000, student loan repayment up to $60,000. DHS boasts that ICE has more than doubled its force, adding over 12,000 officers and agents in a matter of months, while watchdogs warn that hiring standards, screening, and training have been gutted to hit the numbers. And history tells us exactly where many of those recruits will come from: the same Latino communities these agencies have always drawn from, where a federal paycheck is the surest path out of poverty and Spanish fluency is prized in the field. The agency profits twice, first from our labor, then from our pain.

So a generation of Latino agents who signed up for a career, a pension, and a way to provide now find themselves ordered to run down men like Lorenzo at dawn. Masked. In unmarked cars. Without body cameras. Under arrest quotas of 3,000 a day set by Stephen Miller and White House officials. This is the clash of values our community has never before faced at this scale: fathers arresting fathers, Latino agents deporting men who could be an uncle or tío.

To the Latino ICE Agents Wearing the Badge

I am not writing to tell you to abandon your livelihoods. I am writing to tell you that history is watching what you do with them.

You know the difference between an enforcement operation and a hunt. You know the man in the work van with the ladders on top is not a cartel boss. You know that when a supervisor tells you numbers matter more than names, something has gone deeply wrong. And you know, better than anyone in America, what it does to a family when the man who left before dawn never comes home.

So I am asking you, directly: de-escalate. In every confrontation, at every traffic stop, at every workplace, be the officer who slows it down, who identifies himself, who holsters the weapon, who calls the ambulance first. Refuse the mask. Demand your body camera. Document what you see. Report what is unlawful. This moment calls for acts of moral objection from the agents themselves, from those who know better. There is no pension worth a man’s life. There is no signing bonus worth becoming the reason a wife in Magnolia Park is inconsolable and three sons are burying their father.

Your oath is to the Constitution, not to a quota, not to an administration, not to a talking point. Due process, the presumption of innocence, the sanctity of life: these are not obstacles to your job. They are your job.

This administration will not protect. There will be no pardon for you, those are only for the rich and powerful. You might receive protection temporarily, but when the law arm of the law comes, justice and accountability will deny you the freedoms you take from another man.

What We Demand

LULAC was founded in 1929 by Latino veterans who came home from serving this country to find themselves treated as strangers in it. For nearly a century we have answered moments like this one with organization, with law, and with our vote. We will do so again, in greater numbers than ever before. We are working on that to. We are counting on it.

We demand a fully independent investigation into the killing of Lorenzo, with the evidence, including his van, released to the Harris County District Attorney. We demand the names of the agents involved, as basic accountability requires in every American police department. We demand body cameras on every immigration officer in the field now, not in 60 days. We demand an end to masked, unmarked, quota-driven enforcement in our neighborhoods. And we demand that Congress, which wrote the $170 billion check, exercise the oversight that check requires.

Lorenzo built hundreds of homes in the country he loved for 35 years. On the morning he was killed, he was doing what Latino men across America do every single day before the sun rises: going to work to provide for the people he loved. If this administration cannot tell the difference between that man and a threat, then the threat is not in the work van.

It is time to stop. It is time for accountability. And it is time for every Latino in this country, including the ones wearing the badge, to decide which side of history they are standing on.

Sources

ICE detention and arrest records via UC Berkeley Law's Deportation Data Project; UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge / Unseen, "Latino ICE Arrests Surge Under Trump" (Oct. 2025) and "Latino ICE Detentions Dramatically Reshaped Under Trump" (Jan. 2026); TRAC, Syracuse University; Cato Institute analysis of ICE book-in data (Nov. 2025); ICE FOIA data via Univision (2017); Washington Post analysis of ICE removal data (May 2026); ProPublica (Feb. 2026); Harris County Medical Examiner ruling; Hennepin County Medical Examiner ruling; American Immigration Council and Brennan Center for Justice analyses of H.R. 1; D. Cortez, University of Notre Dame, Political Research Quarterly; reporting by CNN, AP via PBS NewsHour, Houston Public Media, and NPR.

On the morning of July 7, 2026, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was taken from the people who loved him most. He was 52 years old. He was a husband, a father of three sons, a small business owner, and the heart of his family. This fund exists to carry his family through the impossible days ahead, and to let them grieve without the added weight of how they will get by.

Lorenzo built his life the honest way: with early mornings, long hours, and his own two hands. He ran his own construction business, building, with real work and real skill, the kind of life he wanted for his family. He was known for his work ethic, his fairness, and his willingness to help anyone who needed it. When people describe him, the first words are always the same, hardworking, dependable, kind. He was the kind of man who showed up: for his family, for his friends, for his neighbors, and on every job he ever took.

At the center of his world was his wife. Lorenzo and wife met when they were just teenagers and had been together ever since, building a life, a home, and a family side by side over 35 years in the United States together. Theirs was the kind of partnership people hope for their whole lives. Now his wife faces a future she never imagined, without the person she has loved since she was young.

Above everything, Lorenzo was a devoted father to his three sons. He worked as hard as he did so that his boys could have more than he had, so that their futures could be brighter than his own beginnings. Everything he built, he built for them. Now three young men must go forward without their father, and their mother must find a way to hold their family together.

The funds raised here will go directly to his wife and their three sons to help with funeral and burial costs, legal expenses, everyday living costs, and the wife’s needs, who has lost her lifelong companion and sole provider. No amount is too small, and every share helps this reach more people who can stand with them.

If you can give, please give. If you cannot, please share this page and keep Lorenzo’s family in your thoughts and prayers. In a moment of unbearable loss, your kindness tells this family they are not alone.

Please, say his name. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. And help us hold his wife and his three sons up when they cannot stand on their own.

With gratitude,

The Salgado Araujo Family and LULAC in support of the family.

This morning, in the Magnolia Park neighborhood of Houston’s East End, a man named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot by an agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He was carried to Ben Taub Hospital. He did not survive. According to his son, who spoke to Telemundo Houston, his father had been out looking to hire workers when the federal operation descended on the neighborhood.

Sit with that for a moment. A man went out in the early morning to find people to work. By the end of the morning he was dead, killed by ICE, and before his family had finished grieving, that same government agency that blamed Renee Good for her own murder, had already published the reason it wants you to accept.

We at the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) will not accept it. Not because we know exactly what happened on that street, we do not, and neither does anyone reading the press statement from ICE, but because we have learned, at a terrible cost, what ICE’s first story is worth.

We Have Read This Script Before

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Six months ago, in Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and a United States citizen, as she sat in her car. The federal government told us she had weaponized her vehicle, that she tried to run over an officer, that the agent fired in self-defense. It was a clean story. It was also, when the video emerged, not what happened. The footage showed the agent standing clear of the car when he opened fire. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner ruled her death a homicide. And when the state of Minnesota asked to see the evidence, the federal government refused, forcing the state, the county, and its own investigators to go to court to pry loose the truth about a killing on their own soil.

Now read what DHS said about Houston, and notice how little has changed. A “targeted enforcement operation.” A driver who “attempted to evade.” A man who “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over” an officer. An agent who fired “in self-defense.” Even the tell is the same: the statement admits, in its own words, that this account comes “from information we are receiving”, secondhand, unverified, assembled in the first frantic hours, and then, on top of that admitted uncertainty, it stamps down a conclusion of self-defense as though it were settled fact.

This is not a report. It is a template. And the template has one purpose: to name the dead man, to criminalize him, and to make him the aggressor in his own killing, all before a single independent fact is on the table.

Look at how the language works. The man who died is named twice, and both times his immigration status is placed ahead of the fact that he is a human being who is now gone. The agent who pulled the trigger, by contrast, disappears. “The driver was struck,” the statement says, struck by whom? “He passed away from his injuries”, a soft phrase doing hard work, because the plain words are he was shot and killed by a federal officer. The person who died is made vivid and guilty; the person who killed him is made invisible and blameless. That is not an accident of grammar. That is the whole design.

About the Photographs

The government has told you that Lorenzo Salgado Araujo “rammed” an ICE vehicle and “weaponized” his own, that he turned his car into a weapon, and that this is why an agent had to kill him. That claim is the load-bearing wall of the entire justification. Pull it out, and the whole story collapses.

So look at the photographs.

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The photographs show no such damage. There is no crushed bumper, no caved-in panel, no evidence of the violent collision the government has described. The physical proof, the very thing that either corroborates or destroys an account of “ramming”, does not corroborate it. You cannot ram a vehicle hard enough to justify a killing and leave nothing behind. The metal keeps a record even when the government revises one, and in this case the metal tells a different story than the press release.

This is Minneapolis all over again, except the contradiction has arrived even faster. There, the story of a weaponized vehicle survived until the video came out. Here, it does not survive a cursory inspection of a photograph of the vehicle. And it tells you exactly how much care went into the government’s account of a man’s death: they described a collision that the evidence says did not happen, and they did it to explain away a killing.

So let us be plain. If there was no ramming, there was no weapon. If there was no weapon, the central justification for shooting Lorenzo Salgado Araujo evaporates. A man who is looking for workers at dawn, whose car bears no mark of the assault the government invented, was owed the presumption of innocence in life and is owed the presumption of innocence now that he is dead. The evidence does not merely fail to convict him. It begins to clear him.

Where This Happened Matters

Magnolia Park is not a random dot on a map. It is one of the oldest Mexican American neighborhoods in Houston, settled by Mexican families beginning in 1911, the men laying railroad track and dredging Buffalo Bayou and building the ship channel, the women working the jute mills. By 1929 it was the largest Mexican settlement in the city. People once called it “Little Mexico.” Today, in the East End, roughly 97 percent of its residents are Hispanic, and the overwhelming majority speak Spanish at home. It is a working neighborhood, blue-collar and service-sector, where parents labor so their children can go further than they did.

And here is a fact: LULAC organized a council in Magnolia Park in 1934. A Ladies LULAC council followed in 1935. For more than ninety years, our organization has stood in that community, through discrimination, through the oil bust that shuttered its factories, through waves of displacement. We have been in Magnolia Park longer than most of the agents who raided it this morning have been alive. This is not a neighborhood federal agents were sent to protect. It is a neighborhood they were sent to hunt through, a community whose entire history is one of hard work, mutual aid, and faith, treated this morning as a target.

What We Are Demanding

We are not asking for special treatment. We are asking for the ordinary machinery of accountability that any American would expect if the government killed one of their neighbors.

1. Preserve and release every piece of evidence, body-camera footage, dash-camera footage, bystander video, dispatch logs, and every photograph of every vehicle involved. The images we have already seen contradict the government’s account; the footage the government is still holding will tell the rest. What Minnesota had to sue to see, Texas should not have to sue to see.

2. An independent investigation. The agency whose officer fired cannot be the agency that controls the evidence and writes the conclusion. State and local authorities in Texas must not be locked out of a death that happened on Texas streets.

3. The dignity of a name. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was a person. He had a family who learned of his death the way the public did. Whatever his immigration status, he was owed the presumption of innocence, the intervention of due process, and the simple decency of not being killed while looking for a day’s work. He received none of it.

This Is the Assault, and It Is Not Slowing Down

Let us be honest about what is happening in this country. Immigration agents have opened fire again and again over the past year, killing and wounding people, and each time the pattern repeats: a confident story, a hidden shooter, an evidence file slammed shut, and a community left to bury someone and fight for the truth at the same time. The people paying for this with their lives are, overwhelmingly, ours, hard-working immigrants and citizens alike, people who cook and clean and build and harvest and hire, people whose only provocation was to be Latino in a neighborhood the government decided to raid.

LULAC has stood in Magnolia Park since 1934, and we will stand there now. We will support the family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. We will demand the footage and the files. And we will not, not today, not ever, accept a press release as a substitute for the truth.

Say his name. Then help us make the government prove, with evidence and not with adjectives, exactly how and why he died.

As the United States marks its 250th birthday, we tell ourselves a familiar story: a nation of immigrants, a country built by newcomers who arrived with little and made a home. That story is true, and it is beautiful, and I believe in it with my whole heart. But it is incomplete. Because tucked inside the phrase “a country of immigrants” is a truth we too rarely say out loud on the Fourth of July, some of us did not immigrate to America at all. America came to us.

Before the Republic, We Were Already Home

Long before 1776, long before the Declaration was read aloud in Philadelphia, Spanish-speaking families had built towns, dug irrigation canals, raised churches, and buried their dead in the soil of what we now call the American Southwest. Santa Fe was founded in 1610, a full decade before the Pilgrims stepped onto Plymouth Rock. San Antonio, Tucson, Los Angeles, El Paso: these were not frontier outposts waiting to be discovered. They were living communities with names, with families, with histories already generations deep.

So when we say Latinos are part of the American story, understand that we are not a footnote added late. We were among the first authors.

Texas, the Alamo, and a War That Redrew a Continent

The story of how these communities became “American” is not a gentle one. It runs through conflict, conquest, and a treaty most Americans have never heard of.

In the 1830s, Texas was Mexican territory. In March of 1836, at a mission in San Antonio, a small garrison held out against the Mexican army in a siege that would become legend, the Battle of the Alamo. Its defenders were overwhelmed. But “Remember the Alamo” became the rallying cry that fueled the Texan fight for independence, and later that same year the Republic of Texas was born, an independent nation that would exist for nearly a decade before joining the United States in 1845.

That annexation lit the fuse. Disputes over the border erupted into the Mexican-American War in 1846, a war driven by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the conviction that the United States was ordained to stretch from ocean to ocean. American forces marched all the way to Mexico City. And when the fighting stopped, the map of North America had been rewritten.

1848: The Year a Border Crossed a People

On February 2, 1848, the two nations signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Its terms were staggering. Mexico ceded roughly 55 percent of its territory, some 525,000 square miles, to the United States. In a single stroke, the land that would become California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming passed into American hands.

And with that land came people. The Mexican families living in those territories, an estimated eighty to one hundred thousand men, women, and children, woke up one morning as citizens of a country that had not existed for them the night before. They had not moved. They had not crossed an ocean or signed a ledger at Ellis Island. The border had simply been dragged over their heads.

The treaty promised them something precious: their property, their language, their culture, and the full rights of American citizenship. It was a promise the nation would spend the next century and a half breaking.

The Long Betrayal

Here is the part of the story that rarely makes it into the fireworks and the parades.

The land grants that families had held for generations were tied up in courts they could not afford and stripped away through legal maneuvers designed to dispossess them. Poll taxes and English-only literacy requirements locked Mexican Americans out of the ballot box. “White primaries” and gerrymandered districts silenced their political voice. Children were pushed into segregated, underfunded “Mexican schools,” punished for speaking Spanish, and told in a hundred small ways that they did not belong in a country their families had helped build.

The violence was not only bureaucratic. In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, Mexican Americans were lynched, terrorized, and driven from their homes. During the Great Depression, as many as a million people of Mexican descent, many of them U.S. citizens, were rounded up and expelled in the so-called “repatriation” campaigns. Economic policy, education policy, and public policy braided together into a single message repeated across generations: you are here on the grace of our mercy, not by right.

It was against exactly this machinery of disenfranchisement that our movement was born. In 1929, in Corpus Christi, Texas, a group of Latino leaders founded LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens, to fight poll taxes, school segregation, and the daily indignities of second-class citizenship. Nearly a century later, that fight is not finished. But neither are we.

The Assault We Are Living Through Now

I wish I could tell you these were only chapters from a closed history book. They are not. The machinery of that long betrayal has been switched back on, and in this moment it is running at full speed.

Across the country, immigration enforcement has taken on a scale and a cruelty that should trouble every American. Raids sweep through workplaces, courthouses, schools, and neighborhoods. People with deep roots, parents, workers, longtime residents, some of them citizens, have been detained, held far from their families in overcrowded facilities, and pushed toward deportation with little regard for due process. Federal courts have had to step in again and again; more than 450 district judges and multiple appeals courts have ordered the release of immigrants who were being held without meaningful review. When it takes hundreds of judges to slow a policy down, that policy is not about safety. It is about fear.

And fear is the point. Families are keeping children home from school. Workers are afraid to report wage theft or crimes committed against them. U.S. citizens are being asked to prove they belong in the only country they have ever known. This is what it looks like when the machinery of dehumanization is aimed at a community, not just detention and deportation, but the daily message that you and yours are provisional, disposable, unwelcome.

When it takes hundreds of judges to slow a policy down, that policy is not about safety. It is about fear.

The Attack on the Right to Vote

A democracy that wants to silence a people rarely does it in a single stroke. It does it by making their vote count for less. And in 2026, the tools for exactly that have been sharpened.

In April, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court reworked how courts judge racial vote dilution and, in the words of Justice Kagan’s dissent, left Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act “all but a dead letter.” Section 2 has been, for two generations, the single most important tool voters of color had to challenge maps drawn to dilute their power. The decision did not repeal it outright. It simply made it so much harder to enforce that, in state after state, legislatures rushed to redraw district lines within hours and days, carving up communities of color under the cover of “partisan” advantage, which the Court has now said is a permissible excuse for maps with racially discriminatory results.

This is racial and partisan gerrymandering working hand in glove. When mapmakers can dilute Black and brown voting power and simply call it politics, the wall between the two collapses, and the people who lose their voice are, overwhelmingly, the same communities who were locked out by poll taxes and white primaries a century ago. The names of the tools change. The target does not.

The Attack on Birthright Citizenship, and a Victory Worth Naming

On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship, the constitutional guarantee, enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment after the Civil War, that virtually every child born on American soil is an American citizen. The order sought to deny citizenship to babies born to undocumented parents and to many here on temporary visas.

Think about what that would have meant: a permanent underclass of children, born here, raised here, belonging nowhere else, stripped of the birthright that has defined American citizenship for more than 150 years. It was, as one court put it, blatantly unconstitutional. And on June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court agreed. In a 6-to-3 decision, the Court struck the order down and reaffirmed that a child born on American soil, subject to American law, is an American citizen. It was written by the Chief Justice, and joined even by justices whom this President appointed.

That victory belongs to a coalition of civil rights organizations, Democracy Defenders, and brave immigrant women who refused to let the promise be broken, and it is worth naming as a victory, because our people need to know that this machinery can be stopped. But the fight is not over. Some in Congress have already vowed to pursue the same goal by statute or constitutional amendment. The order was defeated. The intent behind it is still very much alive.

What We Built, and What We Are Still Building

For all of it, the betrayals, the barriers, the broken promises, the assault we are living through right now, Latinos never stopped building this country.

We built the railroads and worked the fields that fed the nation. We fought and died in every American war, earning more Medals of Honor per capita than any other ethnic group. We founded businesses, filled classrooms, staffed hospitals, and served in Congress and on the Supreme Court. Our language, our music, our food, and our faith are woven so deeply into American life that the country is unimaginable without them.

And the numbers tell a story of extraordinary contribution. Latinos are one of the largest engines of the American economy: the U.S. Latino community’s economic output has been measured at roughly $3.7 trillion, a figure that, if it stood alone, would rank among the largest economies on earth, and one that has been growing faster than the overall U.S. economy. We start new businesses at a higher rate than any other group. We are younger, on average, than the country as a whole, which means that for decades to come, a growing share of America’s workers, taxpayers, teachers, nurses, and entrepreneurs will be Latino.

We are not a threat to the American future. We are the American future, as we have always been part of the American past.

The Largest Minority at the Ballot Box

Here is a fact that should reshape how this country thinks about power. As of 2024, roughly 36 million Latinos were eligible to vote, making us the second-largest group of eligible voters in the entire nation, behind only white voters and ahead of every other group. Every year, about 1.4 million more Latinos reach voting age or become citizens. In recent cycles, Latinos have accounted for roughly half of all the growth in America’s eligible electorate.

Let that sink in. The community this country has spent generations trying to silence is now the largest minority bloc of voters in America, and growing faster than almost any other. That is not a vulnerability. That is power. But power that is not exercised is power surrendered. Our turnout has historically lagged behind other groups, and every unregistered voter, every ballot left uncast, is a gift to those who would prefer we stay quiet.

So let me say this as plainly as I know how: to earn power, and to keep it, we must register and we must vote. In a year when the maps are being redrawn to dilute our voice and the courts have narrowed our protections, the ballot is not a formality, it is the front line. No gerrymander can fully silence a community that shows up in overwhelming numbers. Registration is resistance. Turnout is power. And both are entirely within our hands.

A Generation of Leaders, Rising

And we are not only voting, we are governing. The growth in Latino political leadership over the last generation is one of the great untold success stories of American democracy.

The number of Latino elected officials in the United States has grown to more than 7,000, nearly doubling in two decades. They serve on school boards and city councils, in statehouses and governor’s mansions. After the 2024 elections, a record number of Latinos entered Congress, around 45 members, including a record seven Latino United States senators, from both parties. Latino candidates won in states and districts far beyond the traditional strongholds, many of them the first Latinos ever to represent their states in Washington.

These leaders come from both parties, from every region, from every national origin, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central and South American, and more. That diversity is not a weakness to be papered over; it is a sign of a community that has arrived fully in American public life, on its own terms. Each of them stands on the shoulders of the organizers who fought poll taxes, the parents who marched against segregated schools, and the ordinary people who kept showing up when the country told them not to bother. And each of them is a promise to the young Latinos watching: this government is yours, too.

A Fragile Democracy at 250

I write this at a moment when it does not feel like a celebration everywhere. Anti-immigrant hate and rhetoric are running at a fever pitch not seen in generations. Human beings are being described in language meant to strip them of their dignity. Families are living in fear. Voting protections are being rolled back, and the machinery of enforcement is being aimed at our communities with a coldness that should shame us all.

It would be easy, in a moment like this, to feel that the American promise was never meant for us. But I have spent more than half my life in this work, and I have learned something: this democracy has never been finished, and it has never been guaranteed. It is not a monument. It is a work in progress. Every generation is handed the tools of our democracy and asked to keep building a more perfect union.

Two hundred and fifty years in, our democracy is still fragile. It requires investment, real investment, in the right to vote, in equal education, in economic opportunity, in the simple recognition that every person within these borders is fully human and fully deserving of dignity. If we want this republic to survive another 250 years, we cannot coast on the myths of the founding. We have to do the harder, quieter work of living up to them.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, For All of Us

The founders wrote that we are endowed with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They did not fully mean it for everyone in 1776. The genius and the tragedy of America is that its ideals have always been larger than its practice, and that every generation of Americans, especially those left out of the original promise, has had to fight to make the words true.

That is what this anniversary asks of us. Not just to remember, but to recommit. To look honestly at the whole story, the founding and the conquest, the promise and the betrayal, the pride and the pain, and to choose, again, to build a democracy worthy of all its people.

We were always here. We helped write the first chapters, and we intend to write the next ones too. Register. Vote. Run. Lead. Refuse to be erased. Happy birthday, America, now let’s get back to work.

There is a version of today’s ruling that reads like a clean victory, and you will hear it told that way for the next several news cycles. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s attempt to abolish birthright citizenship by executive order. It affirmed, in plain language, that a child born on American soil is an American citizen. The lower court that blocked the order was upheld. The Constitution held. If you stop reading the headline at the word upheld,you can almost convince yourself that the system worked the way it is supposed to work.

I would gently encourage you to keep reading.

Because the number that matters in Trump v. Barbara is not in the headline. It is buried one layer down, in the line that lists who agreed with whom. The decision was 6–3. And to anyone who has been watching this Court, that “6” is doing a tremendous amount of quiet work to make a five-alarm fire look like a controlled burn.

I want to talk about why this case should frighten you more, not less, than the coverage suggests, and I want to start with a constitutional law professor who said it more bluntly than I would have dared.

“It should have been unanimous”

Shortly after the opinion came down, Noah Feldman, who teaches constitutional law at Harvard and is, by any measure, a sober and institutionalist voice, recorded a short video that has been circulating widely. He did not lead with the good news. He led with the bad.

His point was devastating in its simplicity. This case should have been unanimous. It should have been 9–0. The question presented was whether a child born in the United States is a citizen of the United States, a question the Court answered, definitively, in 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. That precedent is one hundred and twenty-seven years old. It has been the settled, unquestioned foundation of American citizenship for longer than any person alive has been breathing. Generations of Americans, including a great many of us, including a great many of our parents and grandparents, are citizens because of it.

And four justices of the Supreme Court of the United States voted to take it away.

Read that sentence again, because the comfortable framing of “the Court upheld birthright citizenship” is specifically designed to keep you from sitting with it. Four members of the highest court in the country looked at a constitutional guarantee that has stood since the nineteenth century, looked at the plain words of the Fourteenth Amendment, and concluded that the President of the United States could erase it with the stroke of a pen.

The only reason they did not succeed is that they could not find a fifth vote.

The fragile architecture of the majority

Look closely at how the majority was actually built, because it is not the comfortable bipartisan coalition that the 6–3 tally implies.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion. He was joined by the Court’s three liberal justices, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, and by Justice Barrett. That is the entire majority. Three of those six votes are the liberal bloc, who were never in doubt. The case for birthright citizenship, in other words, did not win because a broad cross-section of the Court agreed it was obvious. It won because exactly two conservative justices were willing to follow the text and the history where they actually lead.

Two. If either Roberts or Barrett had gone the other way, the most fundamental promise in the Fourteenth Amendment, the principle that you cannot be born in this country and be treated as a stranger to it, would have been gutted by a single executive order. The guarantee that has defined American belonging since Reconstruction would have survived or fallen on the conscience of one additional person.

That is not a margin of safety. That is a coin balanced on its edge.

Feldman drew the distinction that I think matters most here. Roberts and Barrett, whatever you think of them, followed their own conservative jurisprudential principles to the conclusion that Donald Trump was wrong, not politically wrong, but constitutionally wrong. They are, as Feldman put it, profoundly conservative people. They are not liberals in disguise. They simply did the work that the judicial role requires: they read the words, they traced the history, and they let those things constrain the outcome even when the outcome was not the one their political side wanted.

The other four did not.

The Four Horsemen

Feldman reached back into history for a name, and it is worth understanding why the name lands as hard as it does.

In the 1930s, a bloc of four arch-conservative justices (Justices Pierce Butler, James Clark McReynolds, George Sutherland, and Willis Van Devanter.) became known as the “Four Horsemen.” Their project was to strike down the New Deal and the broader wave of progressive legislation that an elected government was trying to enact to pull the country out of the Great Depression. They were not interpreting the Constitution so much as wielding it, reading their own economic and political preferences into the document and calling the result law. The name stuck because it captured something true: these were not neutral umpires calling balls and strikes. They were a faction.

To call the four dissenters in Barbara a new set of Four Horsemen is not a casual insult. It is a specific and serious historical charge, and the dissents themselves supply the evidence for it.

Here is the thing that should stop you cold. These four justices market themselves as originalists and textualists. Their entire judicial brand, the thing they say distinguishes them from the activist judges they spent decades denouncing, is fidelity to the text of the Constitution and the original understanding of its words. They claim to be bound by what the document says, not by what they wish it said.

So look at what the Fourteenth Amendment actually says:

The operative phrase is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” And to any lawyer, to anyone who has been near a law school, “subject to the jurisdiction” means subject to the laws. If the laws of the United States apply to you, you are subject to its jurisdiction. An undocumented immigrant who can be arrested, tried, taxed, and deported is, self-evidently, subject to American jurisdiction. The government claims that power over them every single day.

The text is not ambiguous. The history is not ambiguous. The 1898 precedent is not ambiguous. And yet four self-described originalists went looking for a way to read the plain words off the page, to say that “subject to the jurisdiction” somehow secretly means “born to a parent the President approves of.” When justices who have built their reputations on the supremacy of text suddenly abandon the text the moment it produces a result their political movement dislikes, you are entitled to draw a conclusion. Feldman drew it, and so should we: they are not being driven by their stated jurisprudence. They are being driven by something else.

What the dissents were really arguing

It would be a mistake to wave the dissents away as cranks shouting from the corner. They were serious, lengthy, and, this is the frightening part, they were building something. A dissent is not just a complaint. In our system, a dissent is a blueprint. It is a set of arguments laid down in the official record so that some future Court, with one more vote, can pick them up and turn them into law.

Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, wrote the principal dissent. His theory was that the Fourteenth Amendment never guaranteed citizenship by birth alone, that it required not just birth on American soil but domicile, a permanent legal home here. On that reading, the children of “temporary visitors” and the undocumented were never really covered at all. He cast the centuries-old common-law rule of citizenship-by-soil as a feudal relic, a medieval inheritance unworthy of a free republic, and he suggested that the majority’s decision “devalues” American citizenship and may not “stand the test of time.” That last phrase is not idle. It is an invitation. It tells every future litigant exactly where to push.

Justice Alito wrote separately, and his dissent is in some ways more dangerous precisely because it is more reasonable in tone. He opened with sympathy for the millions of American-born children of undocumented parents, acknowledged they bear no fault, allowed that they have a strong moral claim to belong. And then he spent the rest of his opinion explaining why the Constitution does not protect them, why the majority’s reading was, in his words, a “serious mistake” that produces “grotesque results.” He reached for the language of consequence: birth tourism, national security, a comparison to other nations that have abandoned birthright citizenship. He attacked the 1898 precedent as sloppy, dismissed its central reasoning as mere dicta, and offered a competing framework under which the executive order could survive. “The Court has made a serious mistake,” he wrote, and he meant it as a promise to revisit.

Notice what these dissents have in common. They do not merely lose. They lay track. They take a result the Court rejected today and dress it in enough originalist-sounding history and consequentialist worry that, with one personnel change, it becomes a viable majority opinion. The arguments are now in the United States Reports, citable, ready. That is how constitutional law actually moves, not in a single thunderclap, but through dissents that wait patiently to become holdings.

How the dissenters rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment

It is worth slowing down on exactly how Thomas and Alito read the Citizenship Clause, because their interpretations are the load-bearing wall of everything that follows. The whole case turns on six words: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The majority reads those words the way they have been read for more than a century, if you are physically here and American law governs you, you are subject to the jurisdiction, full stop. The dissenters need those words to mean something narrower, and watching them try is instructive.

Thomas: jurisdiction means the jurisdiction of your domicile.

For Justice Thomas, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship only to those who are born here and legally at home here, “born and domiciled in the United States.” His reasoning runs through a nineteenth-century idea: a person can have one and only one domicile, one true country, one allegiance. “No one,” he writes, quoting the era’s law of nations, “can have two countries.” On that logic, a temporary visitor remains tied to her homeland; her allegiance to the United States is, at most, “local and temporary.” So when the Amendment asks whether a person is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, Thomas answers that a person is subject to the jurisdiction of the government of his domicile, and a temporary visitor’s domicile is somewhere else. Her child, in his view, is therefore “as much a stranger to the country as his father.”

The tell is what this framing requires Thomas to do with the freed slaves at the heart of the Amendment. He argues that Black Americans were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans, they “had no other homeland,” “owed no allegiance to any foreign power,” and “called America home.” That is a moving sentence and a revealing one. It converts the Fourteenth Amendment from a broad guarantee of birthright citizenship into a narrow, status-based remedy: citizenship for people with sufficient attachment, sufficient permanence, sufficient belonging, as judged, presumably, by the government. Even the majority noticed the move, observing that Thomas, the Court’s most prominent champion of a “colorblind” Constitution, had suddenly recast the Citizenship Clause as a race-conscious, tie-to-the-country measure that conveniently excludes the children of today’s immigrants.

Alito: jurisdiction must be exclusive.

Justice Alito gets to the same destination by a different road. His reading hinges on the word “exclusive.” In his telling, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” does not mean merely subject to American law; it means subject to a jurisdiction “that is not in any way limited by any power possessed by any foreign country.” A person is a citizen by birth, he writes, only if his “allegiance to the United States is unimpaired by any obligations to a foreign power.” If any other nation can also claim you, if you are, in the words of the 1866 Civil Rights Act he leans on, “subject to any foreign power,” then you fail the test, because your allegiance is divided.

This is the reading that lets Alito wave away a child born here to undocumented or temporary-visitor parents: that child, he reasons, is automatically claimed as a national by the parents’ home country, so American jurisdiction over her is not “exclusive,” so she falls outside the Clause. He points to the naturalization oath, in which new citizens “renounce and abjure” all foreign allegiance, as proof that the Constitution demands undivided loyalty. And he frames the whole thing as a vindication of the Declaration of Independence, which “deriv[es] just powers from the consent of the governed” rather than from the “feudal” English rule of birthright subjecthood that the majority, he says, mistakes for a guarantee of freedom.

Strip away the historical scaffolding and here is what both dissents actually propose. They take a clause that says citizenship turns on two simple, verifiable facts, were you born here, and does American law govern you, and they smuggle a third requirement into it: the right kind of allegiance. Thomas calls it domicile. Alito calls it exclusivity. Either way, the practical effect is identical and unmistakable. Birthright citizenship would no longer attach automatically to every child born on American soil. It would attach only to children whose parents have the immigration status the government prefers. The words “mother,” “father,” “lawful,” and “temporary”, the words that appear all over Trump’s executive order, would be read back into a constitutional provision that, as the majority pointedly noted, does not contain a single one of them.

That is the interpretation four justices (Justice Kavanaugh included) were prepared to adopt. Not a fringe theory scrawled in a footnote, a fully developed, citation-laden reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, signed by a third of the Court, holding that the guarantee of birthright citizenship was never as broad as the country has understood it to be for a hundred and twenty-seven years. They lost the case. They did not lose the argument. The argument is now sitting in the United States Reports, waiting.

Why “we won” is the wrong lesson

There is a comforting story available here, and I understand the temptation to tell it, especially to a community that is exhausted and frightened and badly in need of a win. The story goes: the Constitution worked, the Court held the line, the rule of law constrained a lawless act. Go home, rest, the system is sound.

I do not believe we can afford to tell ourselves that story, because it draws precisely the wrong lesson from a 5-vote escape.

The right lesson is the one Feldman ended on, and it is a warning, not a celebration. The win was real, but it was contingent. It depended on two specific people choosing principle over faction on one specific day. It is historically important that birthright citizenship was upheld. But it will also be historically remembered that four justices of the Supreme Court were prepared to repudiate one of the most fundamental constitutional principles we have, a principle written in plain words into the Fourteenth Amendment, a principle that is the very definition of who belongs to this country, and that they were one vote short.

One vote. Courts change. Justices retire, justices die, justices are replaced, and the arithmetic that saved us yesterday is not guaranteed to save us tomorrow. The same four who dissented in Barbara are still on the Court. Their blueprint is still on the page. And the movement that produced the executive order in the first place is not going to stop because it lost once by a single vote, the President has already announced he intends to pursue the same end through Congress.

For our community, the stakes here are not abstract, and they are not historical. Birthright citizenship is not a legal technicality; it is the floor under millions of American families. It is the principle that says a child born in a hospital in Texas or California or New York is as fully American as anyone whose family arrived on the Mayflower, that you cannot inherit second-class status, that the circumstances of your parents cannot be visited upon you as a permanent legal stain. That floor held today. But we now know, with certainty rather than speculation, that four people with lifetime appointments wanted to tear it out, and that they have written down exactly how a fifth vote could finish the job.

What the warning asks of us

So what do we do with a victory this fragile?

We refuse the anesthetic of the headline. We tell the truth about the margin, because a community that believes it is safe will not do the work required to actually become safe. The proper response to a 5-vote escape is not relief; it is mobilization. The dissents told us where the next attack will come from. We should believe them.

That means the fight does not move from the courts to the filing cabinet. It means we treat the composition of the federal judiciary as the existential issue it has revealed itself to be, because the difference between citizenship and statelessness for millions of children now rests on which individuals occupy nine chairs. It means we build the legal record, the public record, and the political power to ensure that the next time this question reaches the Court, the answer is not 5–4 but the 9–0 it always should have been. And it means we say clearly, to our families and our councils and our neighbors, that the thing we thought was bedrock turned out to be a vote.

I am glad we won. I want to be honest that we won. But I would be failing you if I let the relief of winning obscure the lesson of how we won.

Four votes. That is how close we came to losing the principle that defines us. Remember the number. Then get to work.

^{Photo: Left to Right: Bryan Fair, Interim President and CEO, SPLC; Dr. Alveda King, Chair of the American Dream, America First Policy Institute; Mr. Ryan Bangert, Senior Vice President for Strategic Initiatives and Special Counsel to the President, Alliance Defending Freedom; Ms. Mary McCord Executive Director, Institute for Constitutional Advocacy Protection; Visiting Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. Photo Credit: Juan Proaño.}

Today I Witnessed True Bravery

Three weeks ago, I sat in the Rayburn House Office Building and watched the House Judiciary Committee put the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on trial without a courtroom. I wrote then that We Are All SPLC Now. Today I went back, and I am here to tell you that I unequivocally stand by my initial statement.

That first hearing, on May 20, belonged to Maya Wiley. The president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the daughter of civil rights leaders, speaking for the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights coalition, founded in 1950 and now more than 240 organizations strong, sat in the same chair Bryan Fair occupied today and testified honestly and without fear of reprisal. We are living through a coordinated attack on civil rights nonprofits, she testified, and it has unfolded in sequence: first the law firms that provide pro bono counsel to civil rights and civil liberties groups, then the foundations that fund the work, and now the organizations themselves, the ones that make sure voters can vote, children can learn their own history, and unions can protect workers. SPLC was chosen, in her words, “not because it is dangerous, but because it is effective.” And she distilled the absurdity of the committee’s entire premise into a single sentence I have thought about every day since: “The SPLC is far too busy fighting hate to manufacture it.”

Bryan Fair, a constitutional law professor who took a one-year leave from teaching to lead SPLC through the hardest chapter in its fifty-five-year history, sat at the witness table for a hearing the Majority titled “Manufacturing Hate, Part II.” Think about that title for a moment. Before a single question was asked, before he was permitted a word in his own defense, the committee had already printed its verdict on the hearing notice.

What I witnessed over the next four hours that followed was true bravery. Not the loud kind. The steady kind. Bryan sat under unrelenting attack from Chairman Jim Jordan and a procession of members who came not to learn but to perform, to twist facts, rewrite history, and turn a civil rights institution into a prop for a campaign performance. They interrupted him. They demanded answers to questions they knew he was legally barred from answering, then feigned outrage at his silence. They insinuated that the man whose organization bankrupted the United Klans of America was somehow in business with the Klan.

And through all of it, Bryan did not flinch. He did not raise his voice. He did not trade insult for insult. He answered what he could answer, declined what the courts require him to decline, and when the moment called for moral clarity, he delivered it without apology. He told the committee plainly that SPLC has never lost its north star: a fair and just society for every person.

I have spent my career around people who talk about values. Today I watched a man demonstrate them, with unquestionable morals, compassion, and a compass that did not waver under pressure most of us will never face. We should all learn from it. I believe we just witnessed a turning point in this fight.

This Is Not a Prosecution. It Is a Targeting.

Let us be honest about what is happening, because the facts speak with one voice.

On April 21, a grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama returned an eleven-count indictment against SPLC. Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee injected itself into a pending criminal case, announcing hearings and subpoenas. When SPLC asked for the reasonable thing, a delay until the case is resolved so its leader could testify freely, the Majority refused. They wanted Bryan constrained. A witness who cannot answer is a witness who can be portrayed as evasive. That was the plan.

On May 26, SPLC’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the indictment as vindictive prosecution, political retaliation for the organization’s research on extremism and its criticism of this administration. That motion does not stand alone. It stands in a pattern that any honest observer can now recite from memory: the investigations of James Comey, of New York Attorney General Letitia James, of Federal Reserve officials, of universities, of law firms, of foundations. Congressman Jerry Nadler named that pattern out loud in today’s hearing, and he was right to.

And the courts are beginning to say it too. Earlier this year, a federal judge found that the Justice Department’s prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was driven by a vindictive motive, that the second-highest official at DOJ (at the time), Todd Blanche, and now the nominee for Attorney General, launched a criminal case to punish a man for winning a lawsuit against the government. That finding exists. It is on the record. So when SPLC tells a federal court that its indictment is retaliation dressed up as law enforcement, it is not speculating. It is describing a documented practice of this Department of Justice.

Ranking Member Raskin put the obscene contrast on the record in his opening statement, and I took careful note. This is the same Justice Department that “moved to vacate the convictions of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders for seditious conspiracy.” The same department behind what Raskin called a “$1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to turn January 6 foot soldiers into mega-millionaires.” The same department that staffed itself with figures like Jared Wise, “who urged rioters to kill police officers on January 6.” Sit with the full picture: an administration that pardoned more than 1,600 January 6 defendants, that is moving to enrich them with taxpayer money, has criminally indicted a civil rights organization for paying informants to report on violent extremists. The people who freed the seditious conspirators are prosecuting the people who track them. That is not law enforcement. That is the protection of a constituency.

I do not write this as an outside observer. LULAC knows this playbook because LULAC lived it. Thirty-Four days after this administration was sworn in, the Department of Justice opened an investigation into our organization. For eleven months, February 2025 to January 2026, we carried that weight while continuing our work. We are still here. But I will never forget what it felt like, and I will never pretend it was about justice. It was about pressure. What SPLC is enduring now is the same pressure, scaled up, with criminal exposure attached.

The objective was never hidden, and the lawyers and coalition defending SPLC has named it precisely: the administration does not need a conviction to win. It needs donors frightened, resources drained, and watchdogs muzzled. The indictment is the message. The hearing was the megaphone.

Fifty-Five Years on the Front Line

^{Phone: The four girls killed during the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Clockwise from top left: Addie Mae Collins (aged 14), Cynthia Wesley (aged 14), Carole Robertson (aged 14) and Denise McNair (aged 11). Photo Credit: Wikipedia}

To understand why this organization was chosen as the target, you have to understand what it SPLC actually done, because the history the committee tried to rewrite today is one of the proudest in American civil rights.

The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in Montgomery, Alabama in 1971, in the cradle of both the Confederacy and the Civil Rights Movement. When the United Klans of America, the same Klan organization whose violence murdered four little girls in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, terrorized Black families across the South, SPLC took them to court and sued them out of existence. That is not a metaphor. The largest Klan faction in America was dismantled not by a government agency, but by this nonprofit and its lawyers.

The work never stopped, and neither did the danger. SPLC’s headquarters was firebombed by Klansmen. Its founders appeared on assassination lists. Its staff have absorbed decades of death threats for the offense of telling the truth about organized hate. Bryan reminded the committee of all of this today, not as grievance, but as context: this organization knows political violence intimately, condemns it unequivocally, and has paid for its work in ways its congressional accusers never have.

And the work is not abstract. Bryan brought the proof into the hearing room. Sitting behind him was Tanya Gersh, a Jewish mother from Montana who was buried under a campaign of antisemitic terror by white nationalists, phone calls in which all she could hear was the sound of gunshots. SPLC stood with her and won a $14 million judgment against the neo-Nazi who orchestrated it. Beside her sat Karen Finn and her son Eron, a young man with autism who faced expulsion from school for behavior connected to his disability, until SPLC sued, and Eron graduated. That is who this organization fights for: the targeted, the disabled, the poor, the immigrant, the outcast. That is who the Majority spent this morning attacking.

For the communities LULAC serves, Latino families who know what it means to be scapegoated, surveilled, and threatened, SPLC’s research and litigation have been a shield for decades. When they tell you SPLC manufactures hate, remember who manufactured the bomb at 16th Street Baptist, and who shut down the organization that built it.

The Hypocrisy Was the Point

^{Photo: Rep. Brandon Gill (TX-26) holding photograph of Sec. Pete Hegseth, Department of War. Photo Credit: Juan Proaño.}

I want to walk through what the attacks actually looked like, because the double standards were not incidental to this hearing. They were its architecture.

Start with the committee itself. House Judiciary Republicans have spent years telling America that the gravest threat to liberty is the “weaponization of the federal government”, that prosecutions must never be political and that Congress must never put its thumb on the scale of justice. Today, that same committee used its power to amplify a pending federal prosecution of a civil rights organization that criticizes the President, after refusing to let the courts go first. They did not merely tolerate weaponization. They performed it, on camera, under their own banner.

Then there is the informant program. Members spent the morning insinuating that SPLC’s confidential informants inside hate groups amounted to “funding the Klan.” When Chairman Jordan demanded to know whether it was “all about the money,” Bryan’s answer was seven words: we did it to protect our staff and to protect the public. Pressed later by Congresswoman Hageman, he was just as plain: “We don’t fund the KKK.” Congressman Joe Neguse made it more clear by pointing out that the FBI itself has long collaborated with SPLC, even listing the organization as a partner. A North Carolina Democrat gave the indictment’s legal theory its proper name: an “Alice in Wonderland theory,” under which paying an informant to infiltrate an extremist group is treated as supporting it, even though, as she put it, “the FBI pays informants all the time.” And Mary McCord, who spent two decades at the Justice Department, including leading its National Security Division, confirmed under oath that paid informants are standard, longstanding practice in terrorism, trafficking, and child-exploitation prosecutions, and that informant-derived evidence routinely appears in federal indictments and trial testimony. If SPLC’s program is a crime, so is half of federal law enforcement.

And the program’s record is not theoretical. Maya Wiley testified three weeks ago that SPLC delivered a forty-five-page threat assessment to the FBI before the Unite the Right rally, warning of the violence to come, and at today’s hearing, Bryan confirmed it under oath, along with something more: intelligence from SPLC’s informants, shared with the FBI, helped prevent a planned 2019 attack on a synagogue and a gay bar in Las Vegas. It is in the public filings. Sit with that. The organization this committee accuses of fueling Charlottesville is the organization that tried to warn the government about Charlottesville, and the program it calls a fraud has saved countless of innocent lives. The technique becomes a crime, apparently, only when civil rights lawyers use it to protect the public.

Chairman Jordan’s signature insinuation, that it was all about the money, deserves forensic analysis, which I will get to shortly. But note the inversion: members of a political party whose leader has raised hundreds of millions of dollars stoking division and hate accused SPLC of fraud because Americans donated after a deadly white supremacist rally.

Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett put the selective outrage in its starkest terms, more than three hours into the hearing, and the room went quiet when she did: “We’re so upset about Charlottesville all of a sudden, I’d be interested to know which one of you had something to say about Charlottesville when it happened, because your fearless leader said there were ‘very fine people on both sides.’” Then she named the other silence: the Oversight Committee has shut down hearings to avoid the Epstein files, “yet still no indictment of a single Epstein defendant, but we have one for SPLC.”

Another Democratic member distilled the entire enterprise into one unanswerable question: “Republicans haven’t had any of these [neo-Nazi] groups come before this committee to prove they’re not spreading hate. Where are those hearings?” Count it: two hearings for the watchdog. Zero for the watched. The committee charged with protecting Americans from extremism has subpoenaed the trackers of the Klan and never the Klan.

And then came the moment I will remember longest. Congressman Tiffany tried to corner Bryan over SPLC’s designation of Moms for Liberty, expecting a defensive crouch. Instead, Bryan, speaking as a father, turned the frame inside out: an organization claiming to champion parental rights is in fact overriding them, deciding for him and for millions of other parents that their children may not learn the full history of this country, including its history of hate. His closing line was three words long: that’s not liberty. It was the cleanest exchange of the day, and the Majority had no answer for it.

The lesson of the day: when your case requires this many double standards to stand up, you do not have a case. You have a campaign.

The Period in Question: What America Was Actually Living Through

^{Photo: Unite the Right Rally, Charlottesville. Alt-right members preparing to enter Emancipation Park holding Nazi, Confederate, and Gadsden flags. Photo Credit: Wikipedia.}

The indictment and the committee fixate on a window of time, 2016 through 2017, as if SPLC’s growth in those months were inexplicable absent fraud. So let us remember what that period actually was, for everyone, on every side.

Donald Trump was elected in November 2016 after a campaign that called Mexican immigrants rapists and promised a Muslim ban. Within days of his inauguration, the travel ban triggered chaos at airports and spontaneous mass protests. In August 2017, hundreds of torch-bearing white nationalists marched through Charlottesville chanting Nazi slogans, and one of them drove his car into a crowd and murdered Heather Heyer. The President responded that there were very fine people on both sides.

Americans across the political spectrum reacted to this era the way Americans always react to moments of perceived crisis: they organized, and they donated.

On the right, donors poured money into organizations warning that a radical left was seizing the culture, campus groups, legal foundations, think tanks promising to fight back. Conservative media built audiences on the threat of antifa and “the mob.” That mobilization was real, it was lucrative, and it was their right.

On the progressive and pro-democracy side, donors poured money into organizations promising to defend civil rights, civil liberties, immigrants, and the rule of law. The ACLU, voting rights groups, legal defense funds, and yes, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the country’s most recognized tracker of the white supremacist movement that had just marched openly through an American city.

Both responses were rational. Both were sincere. Both were protected by the First Amendment. People give money to causes when they are afraid for their country, and in 2017, nearly everyone, on every side, was afraid for the country for one reason or another. That is the context the committee erased today, because the context destroys the theory. SPLC’s donors were not deceived into believing organized hate was resurgent. They watched it on live television.

Follow the Money, All of It

Now to Chairman Jordan’s favorite number. Yes: SPLC’s contributions rose from roughly $51 million in 2016 to roughly $132 million in the fiscal year ending October 2017, about a 160 percent increase, in a fiscal year that contained both Trump’s election and Charlottesville. Apple’s CEO gave a million dollars. So did George Clooney’s foundation. JPMorgan gave half a million. These were not victims of a con. They were Americans responding to what they had just seen.

If a revenue surge in that period is evidence of “manufacturing” a threat, then the standard must apply to everyone. So apply it.

Turning Point USA, one of the conservative organizations whose hate-map designation Republicans spent these hearings protesting, took in $4.3 million in contributions in 2016. By fiscal 2022, its annual revenue was over $80 million: a 1,775% increase, averaging more than 50 percent growth every single year, raised on warnings about a leftist threat to America’s youth. Roughly half its money in one recent year came from just ten anonymous donors. Has the Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Turning Point’s communications? Indicted it for elevating a threat to mislead donors? You know the answer.

The ACLU saw nearly $80 million in online contributions pour in after the 2016 election, including $24 million in a single weekend after the travel ban, and watched its membership double to 1.2 million. Same period. Same dynamic. Same fear-driven generosity, from the other side of the aisle’s perspective. No indictment, because there is nothing to indict. Crisis-responsive giving is not fraud. It is citizenship.

And then there is the President himself, the most prolific monetizer of legal crisis in American political history. Federal filings show that two of his best fundraising days of the entire 2024 campaign were the day of his New York arraignment and the day after his Georgia mugshot. The mugshot alone produced $4.18 million in twenty-four hours; within hours of leaving the Fulton County jail, his campaign was selling the booking photo on t-shirts, mugs, and posters, over $2.9 million in merchandise. After his conviction on thirty-four felony counts, his campaign reported $52.8 million in a single day.

Hold these facts side by side. A civil rights organization’s donations rose after a white supremacist murdered a woman in the street, and that, says Chairman Jordan, is fraud. The President’s donations spiked, by deliberate design, on each of his own indictments, and that, says the same party, is a movement. They built a business model on legal jeopardy and then criminalized a nonprofit for receiving donations after a tragedy. The hypocrisy is not a footnote to this story. It is the story.

Justice Runs Through a Courtroom, Not a Hearing Room

Here is something the Majority and I should be able to agree on, because they have said it themselves a thousand times: in America, guilt is decided by courts, not by Congress, and the accused are presumed innocent.

SPLC has pleaded not guilty. It has answered the indictment publicly and in its filings: it did not lie to its donors, and it did not fund hate groups, it infiltrated them, as law enforcement does, to expose and dismantle them. Its motion to dismiss for vindictive prosecution is before a federal judge. A trial is tentatively set for October 5 in Montgomery, fittingly, the city where SPLC has been winning courtroom fights against organized hate for half a century.

And the government’s fraud theory has a hole at its center that Ranking Member Raskin exposed at the first hearing: not a single SPLC donor has come forward claiming to have been defrauded. Not one. Compare that to Trump University, the fraud case the President settled for $25 million after more than 8,000 plaintiffs joined the litigation. Real fraud produces real victims who say so. This indictment has produced press releases.

That courtroom is where this belongs. SPLC deserves what every American deserves and what this administration demands so loudly for its own allies: the opportunity to confront the evidence, cross-examine the accusers, and lay out its defense before a neutral judge under rules that do not permit five-minute speeches disguised as questions. Bryan could not fully answer the committee today because the law and his lawyers forbid it, a constraint the Majority deliberately engineered and then exploited. In court, there will be no such trap. The full record of SPLC’s work, honestly examined, will stand on its own. I said that in April. After watching Bryan testify, I believe it more today.

Until then, every hearing, every subpoena, every attempt to pressure the financial institutions that handle SPLC’s donations, pressure serious enough that Representatives Maxine Waters and Jamie Raskin formally warned Fidelity, Vanguard, and Charles Schwab not to restrict their customers’ giving, should be seen for what it is: an attempt to win outside the courtroom a case the government may well fear losing inside one.

We Are Still All SPLC

^{Photo: From Left to Right: Juan Proaño, CEO, LULAC; Bryan Fair, Interim President and CEO, SPLC; Maya Wiley, President and CEO, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Virginia Case Solomon, CEO, Common Cause; and Meredith Sumpter, President and CEO, Fair Vote.}

When Bryan closed his testimony, he reached for Fannie Lou Hamer: nobody’s free until everybody’s free. He chose those words knowing exactly where he was sitting, in a committee room of a Congress where some members would rewrite the history Mrs. Hamer bled for, facing an indictment from a Justice Department whose own conduct is under judicial scrutiny, just weeks before he returns to the classroom to teach the Constitution he had spent the morning defending.

That is what bravery looked like today. Not defiance for its own sake. Fidelity, to the truth, to the law, to the people sitting behind him whose lives his organization changed, and to a fifty-five-year-old promise that hate in America will be named, tracked, and confronted no matter who finds it inconvenient.

Three weeks ago I wrote that We Are All SPLC Now. Today I watched a brave man carrying that burden on his shoulders so we won’t have to. LULAC’s 575,000 members stand with Bryan and SPLC. We stand with the professional staff at SPLC who keep doing this work under threat. We stand with Tanya Gersh and with Eron Finn and with every person who has ever needed someone unafraid to take the haters to court. We have been investigated by this Justice Department ourselves, and we are still here, still loud, and still unafraid.

They believe that if they can break the Southern Poverty Law Center, the rest of us will fall quietly in line. They have made a serious miscalculation. The civil rights community has survived firebombs, assassination lists, and a hundred years of men in powerful rooms insisting that the real problem is the people fighting hate rather than the hate itself. We outlasted all of them.

We will outlast this too. See you in Montgomery.

The White House has launched an official government website called “Aliens.” Not a legal brief, not a fact sheet, a horror-movie production, complete with an X-Files theme, a glowing “TOP SECRET” banner, and the words THEY WALK AMONG US stamped across the screen. Scroll down and the reveal arrives: these “aliens,” it announces, are “the millions of “ILLEGALS” who invaded our country under the cover of darkness.” There is a live map of arrests. There is a button urging you to report “suspicious aliens” to an ICE tip line. There is a joke about “abductions,” promising the “alien” will be “returned safely to its place of origin.”

This is the federal government of the United States calling human beings extraterrestrials. And it is doing it on purpose.

Strip away the ridiculous branding and look at the intention of how they used the word. “Alien” does not mean criminal. It means not one of us, not human, not a neighbor, not a person. That is not a slip of bureaucratic vocabulary; it is the entire point. You cannot rally a country to round up fathers and grandmothers and coworkers. But you can rally a country to hunt creatures. Every regime that has ever set out to do terrible things to a group of people has started exactly here: by renaming them into something less than human. We have seen where this language leads. We do not get to pretend we don’t know.

And the danger does not stop at the people without papers. A government that deputizes its own citizens to report “suspicious aliens” is asking them to make a snap judgment about who belongs, and we all know what that judgment looks like in practice. Does the person have brown skin? Does the person have a Spanish surname? It looks like overhearing two people speak Spanish in a grocery store. There is no badge that says “citizen.” There is no glow that distinguishes the naturalized from the native-born from the undocumented. There is only suspicion, and suspicion in this country has always fallen along a color line.

So understand who this actually threatens. The U.S. citizen born in El Paso. The woman who took her naturalization oath thirty years ago and has voted in every election since. The teenager whose family has farmed the same land for generations. The veteran. The nurse. The millions of hardworking, law-abiding Latinos and immigrants who built their lives here and now must wonder whether a stranger’s phone call or an agent’s hunch will be enough to put them in a cell. We have already watched citizens get detained, interrogated, and swept into raids because of how they look. A tip line built on the word “alien” doesn’t reduce that risk. It manufactures it.

This is what our government has chosen to put its seal on: not safety, not law, but a campaign to convince you and me that your neighbors are an infestation. It is a betrayal of the most basic promise this country makes: that you stand equal before the law, judged by what you’ve done and not by what you look like or what language your mother spoke to you as a child.

Call it what it is. Not edgy. Not funny. Not patriotic. It is an official act of dehumanization, and history is unambiguous about what follows when a state decides that some people aren’t people at all.

We name it. We reject it. And we refuse to let anyone, least of all our own government, turn our neighbors into monsters.

There is a photograph I keep coming back to. Five of us, fists raised, standing on the steps of the State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, the primary hub of the American slave trade and the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement.

Cliff Albright of Black Voters Matter. Maya Wiley of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Me. Virginia Kase Solomón of Common Cause. Damon Hewitt of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. And in the days around that gathering, the steady presence of leaders like Janai Nelson of the Legal Defense Fund, Derrick Johnson of the NAACP, Melanie Campbell of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, Bryan Fair of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Lauren Groh-Wargo of Fair Fight, Ebonie Riley of the National Action Network, Norman Eisen of Democracy Defenders Fund, and so many more leaders from across the country who came in solidarity.

We were there with dozens of state and national leaders, elected officials, and over 6,000 activists for All Roads Lead to the South, a gathering on the very ground where the Voting Rights Act was born. We did not come to commemorate. We came to fight.

A few weeks earlier, on April 29, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Louisiana v. Callais. In a 6-3 ruling, the Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that had created a second majority-Black district, and it imposed a new and nearly impossible test for voters of color seeking fair representation. It did not formally overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It did something quieter and almost as cruel. It made Section 2 so hard to use that, as Justice Kagan wrote in dissent, the provision is now “all but a dead letter”.

I want to be honest about what that felt like. It felt like a door closing. For sixty years, Section 2 has been one of the few effective tools ordinary people have had to force a state to stop racial gerrymandering and ensure fair and equal representation. To watch Section 2 gutted, at a time when so many other protections are under assault, is to understand that we are living through one of the most challenging periods our movement has faced in generations.

And yet.

The people beside me

Here is what that photograph and so many others hold that a court decision cannot take away.

When I look at these images, I see a community. I see people who pick up the phone when things fall apart. I see a Black organizer and a Latino advocate and a civil rights lawyer standing shoulder to shoulder, because they have come to understand something that our opponents are betting we will forget.

This community is not only the leaders whose names you already know. It is a new and diverse generation taking shape alongside them, young and experienced, men and women, Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, and immigrant, ready to carry this fight forward for the next generation and the years to come. That is what gives me the most hope of all. The work will not end with us, because it does not begin and end with any one of us.

We are stronger together.

For too long, the forces that would dilute our power have counted on a particular kind of division. They count on Black communities and brown communities seeing each other as competitors for the same scarce sliver of representation, the same crumbs of attention, the same thin slice of the pie. They count on us guarding our own corners. They count on our isolation. It is the oldest play in the book, and it works only when we let it.

Montgomery was a refusal to play by the same old rules.

Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, put it better than I can:

The decision in Louisiana v. Callais dealt a devastating blow to our multi-racial democracy. But in the weeks since, I have been fortified by the resolve of our coalition and our collective commitment to righting this wrong and protecting the political power of Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American voters. The breadth and depth of our leadership was on full display just a few weeks ago in Alabama, where we mobilized communities at the birthplace of the Voting Rights Act to demand justice and declare that this fight is far from over.

The breadth and depth of our leadership. Read that line again. Black, Latino, Asian, Native American. Not one community speaking for itself, but a chorus refusing to be separated.

Why we have to do this honestly

I will not pretend that the work of the coalition is easy. It is not. Anyone who tells you that Black and brown communities always agree, always trust, always move in lockstep, is selling you something. We carry different histories. We carry different lived experiences. Sometimes our interests genuinely sit in tension, and the people who want us divided know exactly which buttons to press.

That is precisely why we cannot afford to do this work in half measures.

The only way through is honesty. The only way through is transparency. We have to be willing to say the hard things to one another in the same room, so that we never give our opponents the satisfaction of speaking for us. We have to share our plans, our resources, our fears, and our credit. We have to resist the quiet temptation to protect our own organization at the expense of the whole. When one of us is targeted, like SPLC, all of us have to show up, by name, without hedging.

That is what I felt in Montgomery. Not the performance of unity, but the practice of it. Cliff and Maya and Virginia and Damon and Janai are not allies of convenience. We are partners who have chosen, again and again, to tell each other the truth and to keep showing up anyway. In a season designed to break us apart, that choice is its own kind of resistance.

What comes next

Photo credit: Melissa Bender

I came home from Alabama clearer than I went in.

The Callais decision was meant to discourage us. To make us feel that the legal road is closed and the fight is lost. It is not. The courtroom is one front, and we will keep fighting there. But democracy was never built only in courtrooms. It was built on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in church basements, at kitchen tables, on the steps where a community stood with our fists in the air. It is built by people who organize, who register voters, who show up to the hearings and the marches and the long, unglamorous meetings where coalitions are actually forged.

So here is my vow, on behalf of LULAC and on behalf of my community.

I will keep breaking down the walls that others have spent generations building between Black and brown communities. I will keep choosing partnership over territory, and transparency over self-protection. I will keep saying the names of the leaders in these photographs and the organizations they lead, because our strength has always been in being seen together. And I will keep returning to the South, and to every place where this fight is being waged, for as long as it takes.

The fight is not over.

It never was. And standing beside a community of fearless advocates, I have never been more certain that we will see it through, together.

Yesterday, the steps of the U.S. Capitol looked different than they have in a long time.

Not because of the cameras. Not because of the lawmakers. Because of who stood shoulder to shoulder in front of them.

LULAC members who flew in from Texas, California, Arizona, Florida, New Mexico, Illinois, and beyond. UnidosUS leaders and affiliates representing its civil rights and advocacy network. Mi Familia en Acción constituents, mothers, fathers, organizers, voters, who traveled to Washington because their families are the ones living the consequences of what Congress is about to vote on.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus convened the press conference. Rep. Chuy Garcia (IL-04), Rep. Raul Ruiz (CA-25), Rep. Emily Randall (WA-06), and Rep. Juan Vargas (CA-52) spoke on behalf of their constituents and Latino community. All three organizations spoke with one voice.

That kind of unity is not symbolic. It is strategic.

What we came to say

Congressional Republicans are advancing a partisan reconciliation bill that would funnel more than $70 billion to the Department of Homeland Security in unchecked immigration enforcement funding. No guardrails. No accountability. No statutory restrictions on how the money is spent or who it targets.

It is a blank check for ICE and CBP. It doubles down on the same failed and unlawful mass deportation operation that has brought chaos and terror to communities from El Paso to Charlotte to Minneapolis.

We are urging every Senator and every Representative to vote no.

The economy Congress is choosing to ignore

Here is what Congressional Republicans are not doing while they fast-track this bill.

They are not addressing why gas prices are up more than 50 percent since the end of February. They are not addressing inflation that is now outpacing wage growth. They are not addressing why working families cannot afford groceries or health care.

Instead, they are routing tens of billions of dollars to the same agencies that have targeted Latino communities across the country, depressed local economies, and left people afraid to leave their homes to go to work, to school, or to church.

The priorities are clear. So is the math.

145,000 children

This week, the Brookings Institution published an analysis estimating that more than 145,000 U.S. citizen children have likely experienced the detention of a parent since this administration began its mass enforcement campaign. More than 22,000 of those children have had every parent in their household taken. More than a third are under the age of six.

145,000 American children. Separated from their parents. Many of them too young to understand why.

This is unconscionable. And Congress is about to write the check that pays for more of it.

What guardrails actually look like

Any new DHS funding must come with enforceable conditions written into the bill text. Not aspirational language. Not a press release from the Secretary. Statutory requirements, enforceable in court. We demand the following:

• Clear agent identification.

• Body cameras with public access.

• Protections for sensitive locations — schools, churches, hospitals.

• An end to racial profiling.

These are not radical demands. Every other federal law enforcement agency in the country already operates under standards like these. The question is whether Congress is willing to apply the same baseline to ICE and CBP.

The record we are keeping

If Congress approves another mass deportation blank check without reform, our communities will demand accountability. We will demand leaders who put the safety and well-being of their constituents first.

575,000 LULAC members, 421 councils in 32 states and 196 cities are organized. UnidosUS affiliates reach every major Latino population center in the country. Mi Familia en Acción has organizers in the communities feeling this most acutely.

We are keeping a record. Of who votes to fund agents without identification. Of who votes to fund raids on schools and churches. Of who chooses a blank check over a child’s constitutional rights.

That record will matter in 2026. It will matter in 2028. It will matter every time a member of Congress asks our communities for a vote.

What follows are my remarks as delivered yesterday at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus press briefing, presented unedited.

Remarks of Juan Proaño

CEO, League of United Latin American Citizens

Congressional Hispanic Caucus Press Briefing | U.S. Capitol | May 19, 2026

Thank you, Janet. And thank you, distinguished members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Rep. Chuy Garcia, Rep. Raul Ruiz, Rep. Emily Randall, and Rep. Juan Vargas.

My name is Juan Proaño, CEO, of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, the country’s oldest Latino civil rights organization.

Janet just laid out the policy stakes.

Now, let’s talk briefly about the constitutional provisions that DHS and ICE have violated with this funding:

The First Amendment, through retaliation against peaceful protestors, the use of tear gas, pepper spray, flashbangs, and arrests of journalists covering federal operations.

The Fourth Amendment, through warrantless arrests, racial profiling stops, and unreasonable seizures.

The Fifth Amendment, through the detention of U.S. citizens, the denial of due process, and the targeting of legal residents and asylum seekers with valid pending status.

The Tenth Amendment, through the federal commandeering of state and local police resources and disruption of local governance.

The Equal Protection guarantee, through the targeting of Black, Brown, Somali, and Latino communities based on appearance and language.

And the Administrative Procedure Act, through arbitrary and capricious action with no rulemaking, no public notice, and no oversight.

The minimum standards Janet outlined are not radical. They are directives every other federal law enforcement agency operates under. What we are asking for is:

• Clear agent identification.

• Body cameras with public access.

• Protections for sensitive locations.

• Judicial warrant requirements for home entry.

• An end to racial profiling.

Now, Let’s talk about the consequences. Not here on the steps of the Capital but in our communities.

LULAC councils are reporting record call volume. A mother in Texas told one of our council presidents last week that she packed an emergency bag for her eight-year-old daughter. Not for a storm. For the possibility that mom does not come home from work.

Jose Hermosillo, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen, wrongfully incarcerated by immigration authorities in Arizona, who claimed he was undocumented. He was held for 10 days at Florence Correctional Center, because of how he looked and how he spoke.

Geraldo Campos, Heber Domínguez, Victor Díaz. Three men, three families, three funerals in one month, in facilities funded by the dollars Congress is about to appropriate more of.

And there are many more: Denny Gonzalez, Damien Betancourt, Alejandro Clemente, José Ramos-Solano, and Royer Perez-Jimenez, just to name a few.

LULAC is calling on every member of the United States Senate and House of Representatives to do four things.

One. Vote no on this reconciliation bill. No additional dollars for ICE or CBP without the statutory guardrails, written into the bill text, enforceable in court.

Two. Rescind the unobligated slush funds from the One Big Beautiful Bill. DHS is sitting on tens of billions of dollars with no statutory restrictions. Congress wrote that check. Congress can claw it back.

Three. Pass standalone legislation, not reconciliation, restoring judicial warrant requirements, mandating body cameras with public release, ending the masking of federal agents, and codifying sensitive-location protections.

Four. Use the oversight authority you already have. Subpoena the DHS Inspector General materials. Subpoena the use-of-force records. Compel testimony from the agents involved in the Good and Pretti killings. Investigate the 96 court order violations in Minnesota.

Our councils are organized. Our members are watching. We are keeping a record. Of who voted to fund agents without identification. Who voted to fund raids on schools and churches. Who chose a blank check over a child’s constitutional rights. That record will matter.

Gracias.

There is a particular quiet that settles over a congressional hearing room when everyone knows the proceeding is not really about what it claims to be about. I sat in that quiet for hours today, May 20, in Room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building, watching the House Judiciary Committee hold a hearing on the Southern Poverty Law Center. The hearing came days after the Department of Justice indicted SPLC on charges that legal experts across the political spectrum have already called factually and legally deficient. The framing was oversight. The reality was something else.

I went to bear witness. These are words the civil rights community use carefully, because it means more than showing up. It means looking directly at what is happening, refusing to flinch, and carrying what you saw back out into the world so that others know it too. By the end of the five hours, what I had seen was not really a hearing about SPLC. It was a hearing about whether the civil rights movement itself is still permitted to exist in this country.

The witness in the chair

Maya Wiley President and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a former federal prosecutor, a woman who has spent her professional life using the law to advocate for the civil and human rights for all of us, sat alone as the only affirmative witness in support of SPLC. She testified for more than four hours. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to.

Within the first minutes, she named what was happening in the room. “The attack on SPLC is nothing more than part of a larger, broader coordinated attack on civil rights organizations, not-for-profits, ones that work to ensure voters can vote, that children can learn, and people can live without fear.” She said it the way you say something you have already had to say too many times.

Then Maya went further. “SPLC has been targeted by extremists and their supporters for years, not because it is dangerous, but because it is effective.” And then the line that has not left me since: “Today, it is SPLC, but in a sense, we are all SPLC.”

That sentence is why I am writing this. Because it is true, and because I felt the truth of it in my chest as she said it.

What the hearing actually was

Let me describe what I watched, because it matters.

The majority’s case against SPLC, distilled to its essentials, is that SPLC paid confidential informants to infiltrate hate groups and that this practice somehow defrauded the organization’s donors. Rep. Jamie Raskin laid out, with the precision of a constitutional law professor, what is missing from that theory. Where are the defrauded donors. Where are the civil complaints that always follow a real scam. Where is any evidence at all. He pointed out, plainly, that the federal government has spent over half a billion dollars on the very same practice, the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, and that for decades SPLC shared the intelligence its informants gathered with the FBI itself, intelligence that disrupted plots against synagogues, against churches, against Black Americans, against Jewish Americans.

“If anyone has flipped sides to join the racist extremists,” Raskin said, “it’s not the SPLC. It is the FBI itself.”

That line hung in the air. Nobody on the majority side rebutted it. They could not. Because the indictment is not an evidentiary document. It is a political instrument. Even, as Rep. Deborah Ross said, the amateur hour Trump lackeys at DOJ know that. They don’t believe these cynical charges. They know it’s wrong.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal walked Maya through the record in a sequence I will not forget. Did an informant produce information that led to the arrest of a neo-Nazi seeking a security clearance at the Philadelphia Navy Yard? Yes. Did an informant produce information SPLC used to tip off the FBI about the 2017 Charlottesville rally? Yes. So the center was using informants to root out hate and help the FBI prosecute that hate, not manufacture it? Yes.

“This seems to be a trumped-up case,” Jayapal said. “Literally.”

And then, to underline what kind of proceeding this really was, the GOP’s own witness, Tony Perkins, said the quiet part out loud. The inquiry, he told the committee, “should not stop with SPLC.” There are “many spokes”on this wheel. He named Christians and conservatives as the targets, but anyone watching closely understood what he was describing: a coordinated effort to use the machinery of government to label, isolate, and financially cripple civil society organizations that hold power accountable. He called it political targeting by proxy. He was not warning against it. He was endorsing it as a model.

That is the moment, more than any other, when the room came into focus for me. The majority was not pretending to investigate fraud. They were executing a play from their playbook.

What Maya said about the country

Maya answered Rep. Hank Johnson with words I am going to carry into every meeting, every convening, every podium for the rest of this year. She said we have just seen an outright attack on all the gains of the civil rights movement for the past 60 years, and she said she could not explain it. She said hate crimes have doubled in this country since 2015. She said antisemitism is rising. She said hate against transgender people is rising. She said Black people remain the single largest racial group targeted by hate crimes in America. She said we have to talk about racism and transphobia and the violence that too many communities are living through. And then she said something that should stop every American cold.

She said that at the very moment when the data tells us hate is metastasizing, this administration cut funds to prevent gun violence, cut funds to track violent white supremacist and neo-Nazi attacks, and cut public safety funding, all while the White House is directing the Department of Justice on whom to prosecute. As someone who used to work for the Legal Defense Fund, ACLU, and U.S. Attorney Office for the Southern District of New York Department of Justice, she said, that is unheard of.

She said it the way you say it when you have run out of euphemisms. Because she had.

She also said this, which I want to put in front of every concerned citizen, every non-profit board member, every general counsel reading this: “Prosecution should never be tolerated as a weapon to silence disagreement or stop lawful activities that this administration dislikes.” She listed what we have already watched happen in the last year. Law firms. Universities. Media companies. Advocates branded as domestic terrorists. Nonprofits stripped of grants. Protesters met with violence. “It doesn’t appear that conviction is the goal,” she said. “Starving the SPLC of resources, tarnishing its reputation, and ultimately bullying it into compliance is more likely the point.”

That is what we are watching. Not a prosecution. A starvation campaign dressed in a prosecutor’s clothing.

Why I went

I went because I have learned, in this work, that you do not get to look away from history while it is happening to your neighbors. SPLC is our neighbor. For more than 50 years, SPLC has tracked hate groups, infiltrated extremist networks, and dismantled violent white supremacist organizations through patient, lawful, often dangerous work. They sued the United Klans of America after the lynching of Michael Donald and won a $7 million verdict that bankrupted the Klan in Alabama. They forwarded intelligence to the FBI before Charlottesville. They have been a thorn in the side of organized racism in this country for half a century. That is the record. That is what is being criminalized.

And I went because Maya was right. Today it is SPLC. Tomorrow it is another civil rights organization. The day after that it is one more. The point of the playbook is not to win the case. The point is to make every civil rights organization in America calculate whether the work is worth the cost.

My vow

I am the CEO of the oldest and largest Latino civil rights organization in the United States. LULAC has been in this fight since 1929. We have buried members. We have outlasted administrations. We have seen this playbook before, in different decades, with different costumes, and we have outlived it every time.

So here is what I want you to know.

I will not stop saying SPLC’s name. I will not let this committee or this DOJ or this White House make it dangerous to defend an organization that has spent five decades defending the rest of us. I will keep showing up to hearings where civil rights organizations are put on trial, and I will keep bearing witness in writing, on camera, on the Capitol steps, and at every podium I am offered. I will continue to organize with our coalition partners, Black, Latino, Jewish, Asian American, Native, LGBTQ+, immigrant, labor, faith, because the people designing this playbook are betting on our isolation. I refuse to give them an inch.

And I will say plainly what Maya said plainly. Dissent is not a crime. Civil rights work is not fraud. Tracking neo-Nazis is not extremism. The FBI used to do it. The DOJ used to support it. And the country was safer for it.

We are all SPLC now. That is not a slogan. That is a description of where we stand. The only question left is whether enough of us will stand there together.

I will. LULAC will. It is incumbent upon us to do what is right.

I want to start by recognizing a debt.

Every Latino member of Congress sworn in this decade. Every Latina state legislator in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Every Latino school board member elected from a single-member district in California’s Central Valley. Every Spanish-language ballot printed in Miami-Dade, Bexar County, and the Bronx. Every one of those facts of American political life rests on a foundation that Latinos did not build alone. We built part of it. We fought for part of it. But the load-bearing structure underneath all of it was built by Black Americans who marched, organized, sued, were beaten, were jailed, and in too many cases were killed so that this country could become, for the first time in its history, a real multiracial democracy.

I want to name that debt directly, because the Supreme Court’s ruling this week in Louisiana v. Callais is, more than anything else, an attack on what they built. And the Latino community cannot understand what we just lost, or fight back effectively, without first understanding whose shoulders we have been standing on.

So let me start there.

The Foundation That Black America Built

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was not given to this country. It was won.

It was won in Selma, where John Lewis had his skull fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was won in Mississippi, where Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten so badly in a county jail that she walked with pain for the rest of her life. It was won by the four little girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. It was won by Medgar Evers, shot in his own driveway. It was won by the three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, murdered and buried in an earthen dam in Neshoba County, Mississippi, because they were registering Black voters.

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, he was signing a law written in that blood.

I am the CEO of the oldest Latino civil rights organization in this country. LULAC was founded in 1929, 36 years before the VRA. Our founders fought their own battles in those decades: against segregated schools in Texas, against literacy tests aimed at Mexican American voters, against signs that read “No Dogs, Negroes, Mexicans” in restaurant windows from San Antonio to Los Angeles. Hernandez v. Texas, decided two weeks before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, established that Mexican Americans were a protected class under the 14th Amendment. The lawyers who argued that case, Gus García and Carlos Cadena, were turned away from the “whites only” bathrooms in the Supreme Court building on the day they argued before the justices.

So yes, we have our own civil rights tradition. We have our own martyrs and our own architects. Willie Velasquez. Dr. Hector P. Garcia. Cesar Chávez and Dolores Huerta. The activists who marched from Rio Grande City to Austin in 1966.

But I will not let this moment pass without saying clearly what every honest Latino civil rights leader knows in their bones: the Voting Rights Act was a gift to our community that Black Americans paid for with their lives. When Congress extended the VRA to “language minorities” in 1975, explicitly including Hispanic Americans, we were welcomed into a structure that the Black freedom movement had already built, fought for, and bled for. Section 2 of the VRA, the section the Supreme Court just gutted, has been used by Latinos to win school board elections in California, congressional districts in Texas, and city council seats in Florida. Every one of those victories carries a debt to the Black activists who made the law possible in the first place.

We owe them. And right now, this week, with their core legal protection under attack, the Latino community has to show up for them, and for ourselves, in a way we have not been called to show up for a very long time.

What the Court Actually Did

Let me be precise about the ruling, because there is a lot of imprecision in the coverage.

The Supreme Court did not formally strike Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act from the books. Six justices, appointed by a single political party, three of them by President Trump, did something more clever and more cynical. They reinterpreted Section 2 in a way that requires plaintiffs challenging discriminatory maps to prove intentional, present-day racial discrimination. They abandoned the “results test” that Congress wrote into the law in 1982, a test Congress wrote precisely because intent is nearly impossible to prove. The majority kept the law on the books. They just made it functionally unenforceable.

Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent, was clear about what happened. She wrote that the decision renders Section 2 “all but a dead letter” in the vast majority of cases.

She is right. And I will say something sharper than that: This was not constitutional interpretation. This was partisan engineering wearing a robe. Six justices, appointed by a single political party, three by President Trump, conspired to rig the next decade of American elections in favor of one political party and to disenfranchise voters of color. That is what happened. We should say it plainly.

This ruling sits at the end of a 12-year campaign by this Court to dismantle the Voting Rights Act piece by piece. Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 took out the preclearance system, the prevention mechanism. Brnovich v. DNC in 2021 made it harder to challenge voter suppression laws. Callais now removes the last remedy. To put it plainly: Shelby took away the burglar alarm. Callais took away the right to call the police after the burglary.

That is the legal architecture we are now living under.

What This Means for Latino Voters

There are 36.2 million Latino eligible voters in the United States today. We are 14.7% of the American electorate, the largest share in our history. We are the fastest-growing voter bloc in the country. And we are, right now, the demographic that this ruling is most strategically positioned to suppress over the next decade.

Here’s why.

Texas is the canary in the coal mine. Latinos drove 95% of Texas’s population growth after the 2020 Census. The state earned two new congressional seats because of that growth. Texas lawmakers responded by reducing the number of Latino-majority congressional districts from eight to seven and eliminating the state’s only Black-majority district. LULAC and our partners sued under Section 2 to challenge that map. That lawsuit was the legal foundation we were standing on. After Callais, that foundation is gone. Texas lawmakers can now further fragment the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio, and Houston-area Latino communities into Anglo-dominated districts for partisan gain, with little fear of meaningful federal court review.

Florida, where I was born and raised, is the state to watch next. The Puerto Rican community in Central Florida, every single one of them American citizens by birth, citizens of the same country whose Court just ruled against them, has been systematically fragmented across districts to dilute their political voice. Florida’s “Fair Districts” amendment, written into the state constitution in 2010, was designed to be a backstop. Callais now invites federal court challenges to those state-level protections. The state-law firewall is itself now exposed to attack.

Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico are all states where Latino voters have built durable political power over the last 20 years. Arizona is a swing state today in significant part because Latino voters made it one. Callais gives the Arizona legislature a path to undo that without meaningful federal court review.

California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey — states that lean Democratic, also lose a critical layer of protection. State voting rights laws in California and other states remain important, but they too may now face federal court challenges arguing that any race-conscious districting is impermissible.

The bottom line: 36 million Latino voters had federal legal protection on Monday morning. By Tuesday afternoon, that protection was effectively gone.

What This Means for Latino Elected Officials

This is the part of the story I have been saying loudly all week, because almost no one else in the news cycle is saying it: the most durable damage from this ruling is not measured in a single election. It is measured in a generation of Latino leadership that never gets the chance to be elected.

The Center for American Progress projects that the Congressional Hispanic Caucus could lose roughly 11% of its members through aggressive gerrymandering of Latino-opportunity districts. The Congressional Black Caucus could lose up to 30%. Across the country, as many as 19 minority-held congressional seats are at risk of being eliminated.

But the congressional numbers, devastating as they are, are not where the deepest damage lies. Two-thirds of historic Section 2 cases were brought at the local level, city councils, county commissions, and school boards. That is where the Latino political pipeline begins.

Think about how Latino political power actually gets built in this country. Hilda Solis began her career on the Rio Hondo Community College Board of Trustees in Southern California in 1985, a local seat in a heavily Latino district that existed in the form it did because of Section 2 enforcement. From that community college board, she ran for the California State Assembly. From the Assembly, the State Senate. From the State Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives. From Congress, she was confirmed as President Obama’s Secretary of Labor, the first Latina to serve in a presidential cabinet. From the Cabinet, she was elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, where she serves today. That pipeline, built brick by brick, lawsuit by lawsuit, over six decades, is exactly what Callais puts at risk. When cities and counties revert to at-large schemes that dilute Latino votes, you don’t just lose one local seat. You eliminate the bench from which the next Hilda Solis would have come.

This is why I keep saying this ruling is not about one election. It is about a generation.

The school board members who would have become state legislators. The state legislators who would have become members of Congress. The members of Congress who would have become governors and senators and cabinet secretaries. That pipeline has just been condemned, not formally, not all at once, but quietly, court by court, district by district, over the next decade.

This is exactly the kind of damage that does not show up in next year’s headlines. It shows up in the leadership that this country never gets to have.

What Comes Next: The Work Ahead

I want to be honest with you. The work ahead of us is harder than the work behind us.

For 60 years, Latino civil rights organizations had a federal statute we could rely on. We could file a Section 2 case and have a reasonable expectation that, if the facts supported us, a federal judge would order a discriminatory map to be redrawn. That backstop is gone. What replaces it is going to require more organizing, more litigation, more legislation, and more voter mobilization than any of us have done in our careers. But LULAC was built for this. We were founded in 1929, before the VRA, before Brown v. Board, before Hernandez v. Texas. Our founders did this work without a Voting Rights Act. We can do it again.

Here is the five-track plan I am taking to our 400+ LULAC councils and 575,000 members nationwide:

Federal legislation. Congress must pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. We know the political environment. We know the votes are not there today. But the bills must be live, on the floor, and forcing every member of Congress on the record. That is itself a mobilization tool, and the political environment will not stay the same forever.

State Voting Rights Acts. Eight states already have their own voting rights acts that go further than the federal VRA. We need them in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and every state with a meaningful Latino population. LULAC is mobilizing our councils to push for State Voting Rights Acts state by state. This is the work of the next 24 months.

State courts and state constitutions. Callais gutted the federal pathway. State constitutions and state supreme courts remain. Florida’s Fair Districts amendment, California’s Voting Rights Act, the New Mexico and Arizona state-level protections, these are now the front lines. We will litigate aggressively in state court, and we will defend state-level protections from federal court challenges that are coming.

Voter mobilization. This is where LULAC lives, and this is the work that matters most right now. We will accelerate our voter registration program. We will train Spanish-language poll workers and election observers. We are building the largest Latino voter protection infrastructure the country has ever seen to challenge in real time the suppression measures that will follow this ruling. Callais makes our turnout work more important, not less. The single most powerful response any Latino voter can give to this Court is to register, to vote, and to bring three others with them. We turned out in record numbers in 2020 and 2024. We will turn out in record numbers again.

Coalition. This week’s media briefing, convened by the National Urban League — featuring LDF, the NAACP, UnidosUS, AAJC, the Lawyers’ Committee, the National Action Network, the Leadership Conference, and other organizing partners, is the model. What you saw on that call was a multiracial civil rights coalition refusing to be divided. That coalition is the answer. The attack from this Court is on multiracial democracy itself, and the response has to come from a coalition that reflects what multiracial democracy actually looks like.

A Closing Word

I started this post with a debt. I want to close it with one too.

When the Supreme Court issued this ruling, the people I thought of first were not the politicians or the pundits. I thought of the elders. The 80-year-old woman in McAllen who voted for the first time in 1966 because LULAC and a Black-led civil rights coalition went door to door explaining the new law. The 90-year-old man in Selma who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and is still alive to see what this Court just did to the law his friends died for. The mothers and fathers and grandparents who marched and organized and risked everything because they believed this country could one day live up to its promise.

This Court told them, this week, that their life’s work was a constitutional mistake.

I do not accept that. LULAC does not accept that. The civil rights movement does not accept that. And 36 million Latino voters, joined with the Black, Native, Asian American, and white allies who built this democracy alongside us, do not accept that either.

Six justices made a choice this week. Now 36 million Latino voters get to make ours. And we will make it, in every state, every county, every precinct, with the full weight of a movement that has been doing this work for nearly a century, and with full gratitude to the Black freedom movement that made our work possible.

The Voting Rights Act was the answer that 1965 America gave to the question of whether this country could be a multiracial democracy. Callais is the answer this Supreme Court is trying to give to the same question.

But this Court does not get the last word. We do.

We always have.

I am writing in full and unequivocal support of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), its interim President and CEO Bryan Fair, its board, and the staff and lawyers who have given years of their lives to the fight against hate and extremism in this country.

I have had the privilege of working closely with SPLC over the course of my tenure at LULAC, with Bryan, with members of the board, and with the extraordinary attorneys and advocates who carry out the organization's mission day in and day out. What I have seen, consistently, is an institution that operates with integrity, that takes on work almost no one else is willing to take on, and that has paid a real price for doing so. SPLC's Montgomery headquarters was firebombed. Its leaders and staff have lived for decades under the weight of death threats, intimidation campaigns, and the constant knowledge that the people they monitor would do them harm if given the chance. You do not do this work because it is safe or easy. You do it because it is necessary.

Rooting out organized extremism is among the hardest and most dangerous work in American civil society. The Ku Klux Klan, the National Alliance, the Aryan Nations, and the networks that organized the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 do not open their doors to outside scrutiny. Understanding them, who leads them, how they recruit, how they plan events that end in bloodshed, requires patient, careful, and often risky work from inside those circles. For decades, SPLC has done that work, and the information it has produced has saved lives, informed law enforcement (including the FBI), warned communities, and helped win civil judgments that have bankrupted violent organizations including the Klan. That is a public good.

The allegations announced this week attempt to invert that record. They take the hard, necessary reality of infiltrating hate groups, which requires confidential sources inside those groups, and reframe it as though SPLC was somehow underwriting the very extremists it has spent fifty-five years fighting. That framing distorts the facts. Payments to confidential informants were not used to prop up violent movements; they were used to dismantle them, to gather the evidence needed to expose them, and to protect the communities those movements target, Black, Jewish, Latino communities, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and anyone else in the crosshairs of white nationalist violence. To describe that work as defrauding donors is to miscontrue, deliberately, what it actually takes to confront organized hate in this country.

At LULAC, we know something about standing in the path of that hate. Our community has lived through a record surge in anti-Latino hate crimes, through political rhetoric that dehumanizes immigrant families, and through the downstream consequences of movements that SPLC has been tracking and exposing for decades. The intelligence, the reporting, and the legal work SPLC has produced has been a resource for our community and for the entire civil rights coalition. We are worse off if that work is silenced.

It is not lost on me, or on anyone watching carefully, that this indictment arrives at a moment when civil rights organizations, law firms, universities, and foundations are being targeted in ways that appear designed to chill advocacy and punish dissent. That context matters. It should matter to every American who believes that the answer to hate is more speech, more transparency, and more accountability, not less.

SPLC will have its day in court, and I am confident that the full record of its work, honestly examined, will stand on its own. In the meantime, LULAC stands with SPLC. I stand with Bryan Fair, with the board, and with every member of the staff and legal team who will keep showing up to do this work despite the pressure being brought to bear on them. I have supported this organization in the past, I support it now, and I will always continue to do so.

The fight against hate in America does not stop because it becomes inconvenient to a few powerful people. Neither will we.

Juan Proaño

Chief Executive Officer
League of United Latin American Citizens

The story of the farmworker movement did not begin with monuments, school names, or holidays. It began in the fields, in the dust, the heat, and the long days of exhausting labor endured by men and women whose work fed this country even as their humanity was too often ignored. It was built by Filipino and Mexican farmworkers in Delano who came together in common cause, by families who sacrificed paychecks and security, by organizers who turned a local strike into a national boycott, and by workers whose courage helped win contracts and lay the foundation for legal protections for collective bargaining and the right to organize. That history was never the achievement of one man alone. It belongs to the thousands of farmworkers, mothers, fathers, elders, and young people who gave their labor, their bodies, and their dignity to a movement for justice.

That is why what has now come to light is so devastating. The conduct that has been described is horrifying, reprehensible, and beyond excuse. There is no moral achievement, no political legacy, and no place in our history grand enough to conceal abuse, coercion, or violence. A movement that asked the nation to confront injustice cannot ask us now to look away from it. If we believe in justice, then we must be willing to tell the truth even when that truth is painful, disillusioning, and deeply unsettling.

And in telling that truth, we must begin where we should always begin: with the victims and survivors. We stand with them completely. We stand with those who have spoken publicly, those who shared their pain privately, and those who may never choose to speak at all. Their suffering is not a footnote to history. Their pain is not secondary to anyone’s reputation. Their courage deserves our respect, our compassion, and our unwavering support. They are owed not only belief, but dignity, care, and a community willing to meet this moment with honesty and moral clarity.

We must also say clearly that Dolores Huerta’s legacy stands on its own. Dolores Huerta is one of the great civil rights leaders in our nation’s history. Her work helped build the farmworker movement, mobilize communities, lead boycotts, expand the cause of labor justice, and advance the rights of women and working families across generations. What she gave to this country cannot and should not be diminished. Her voice, her sacrifice, and her leadership have always mattered, and they matter even more now. In this moment, we should uplift Dolores Huerta not only for what she built, but for the courage and moral seriousness she continues to show.

And yes, this moment demands a swift and deserved public reckoning. Murals, schools, streets, scholarships, buildings, and holidays that bear César Chávez’s name should be renamed or reassigned. That is not an attempt to erase history. It is a refusal to celebrate harm. History should be taught fully and truthfully, but public honor must be reserved for those whose lives reflect the values we claim to uphold. A community that believes in accountability cannot continue to enshrine a name without confronting what that name now represents.

But even in this reckoning, we must not allow the legacy of one man to overshadow the sacrifice of millions of farmworkers. The people who rise before dawn, who bend their backs in the fields, who endure heat, uncertainty, and hardship to feed our families and millions of Americans every single day, they remain worthy of our deepest respect. Their labor is honorable. Their struggle for dignity is real. Their movement was larger than any one figure, and its meaning cannot be reduced to the failures and betrayals of one person.

The truth is that the histories of longstanding civil rights organizations are often complicated. As leaders in this community, we are always looking toward the future. Even now, we are thinking about LULAC’s upcoming centennial and what the next hundred years must look like. But we also know that leadership requires us to carry history honestly, not just its triumphs, but also its failures, its blind spots, and its harms. We do not strengthen our institutions by hiding from hard truths. We strengthen them by confronting them, learning from them, and building something more worthy of the people we serve.

And part of that honesty requires us to look inward as a community. The Latino community is full of resilience, generosity, faith, and pride. But we are not free of flaws. We know that colorism exists in our communities. We know prejudice can take root through class, economic status, skin tone, language, accent, education, and immigration story. And we know that those prejudices can also shape how we relate to other communities of color. These may be minority views, but they are real, and they must be addressed more directly and more courageously now than ever before.

Above all, we stand with our sisters, our mothers, our daughters, and all women in this moment. We stand with every person who was ever told to stay quiet for the sake of a movement, an institution, a family, or a man’s legacy. And to the victims and survivors in this case, I want to say this directly: we see you, we believe you, and you are not alone. Your pain matters more than any symbol, any slogan, or any monument. Your truth matters. Your dignity matters. And as a community, we owe you not silence, not defensiveness, and not delay, but compassion, accountability, and care. May you find strength in being heard, peace in being believed, and comfort in knowing that there are people who will stand beside you now and in the days ahead.

In Community and in Solidarity.

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