Imagine this: You are 16 years old. You flee your home country because gang members are extorting your family, threatening to kill you and rape your sisters if you don't pay up. You escape legally to the United States. Along the way, you cross paths with a police officer who mistakes you for a gang member because of your Chicago Bulls hat. Despite this, you build a life—gaining legal status, finding steady employment, marrying a U.S. citizen, and starting a family. Then, seven years after that brief encounter, without warning, you're torn from your home, deported without charges, and sent to a maximum-security prison filled with the very gang members who once threatened your family—despite a judge explicitly ruling you cannot be deported, let alone to your home country. This shouldn’t have happened—the government even admits you were wrongly deported due to an “administrative error.” But when the Supreme Court rules unanimously that you must be returned to your legal home in the United States, the executive branch just says no. So you continue to rot in a third world prison without even being charged.

This is what happened to Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Now imagine this: You are a student in America. While you immigrated from another country, you are a permanent legal resident. You hold strong views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While some in your movement resort to violence and hate speech, you advocate for peace. You articulate your disagreements eloquently. You build friendships across political divides. Then suddenly, you're rounded up and deported without due process—your crime nothing more than holding the "wrong" political opinion. Your education, your future, your voice—all silenced in an instant.

This is what happened to Mohsen Mahdawi.

Legal residents jailed without charges. Students disappeared off the street for their opinions. These aren't works of dystopian fiction—they are happening now, in America, today.

Where men were free.

Ronald Reagan once laid out the mandate for lovers of liberty across the world:

What we're witnessing isn't a future threat to democracy—it's its active dismantling. When government authorities can defy judicial orders, jail legal residents without charges in foreign prisons, and target individuals based solely on their political expression, we have already crossed the Rubicon.

The machinery of authoritarian control doesn't arrive announced with tanks and soldiers. It creeps in through "exceptional cases," through targeting those with the least political protection, through actions justified as necessary for security while fundamentally undermining the constitutional protections that truly keep us secure.

Martin Niemöller was a prominent Lutheran pastor during the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. A staunch nationalist conservative, Niemöller sympathized with the Nazis for much of the 1920s and early 30s. After Hitler gained power, however, Niemöller became a staunch critic of the regime within the church and in public. For this crime, he spent the last eight years of the war in Nazi prisons and concentration camps.

You may not know Niemöller’s name, but you likely know this quote from him in 1946:

History has taught us this terrible lesson repeatedly: the persecution of less powerful groups—immigrants, students, activists—is rarely the end goal. No, it is the testing ground. First come those whose suffering provokes the least public outrage. Then, emboldened by success and public indifference, the circle widens.

Think it couldn't happen to you? How about this quote from the president himself?

How about this headline?

The suggestion that even American citizens could face deportation and imprisonment without charges is no longer unthinkable—it's been openly discussed by those in power. When the executive branch believes can simply ignore court rulings without being held accountable by Congress, what protection remains for any of us?

Imagine waking up to discover that your government views your political opinions as grounds for punishment. Imagine facing exile without charges, without a hearing, without the opportunity to defend yourself. Imagine being sent to a country where your life is in danger—not for any crime, but for how you think.

You are not safe.

When the Trump administration and its supporters argue that immigrants—or even criminals—are not entitled to due process, they saying that you aren’t either. Our Bill of Rights ensures that even those who commit the most heinous crimes are entitled to their day in court. This is not for the protection of the criminal, but the defense of the wrongly accused.

The English jurist William Blackstone wrote numerous texts throughout his career; many of these provided the intellectual foundation for the Founding Fathers’ understanding of human rights. In 1760, Blackstone wrote that “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This is known as Blackstone’s ratio, and it is the most succinct explanation of our legal system that I know of.

Blackstone’s touch can be seen in the Declaration of Independence, among other foundational documents. Among the many reasons for American Revolution, the founders list a few of note:

Due process isn't a legal technicality—it's the bedrock protection against tyranny. The right to express political opinions without government retribution isn't a luxury—it's the essential prerequisite for democratic governance. When these protections are denied to anyone within our borders, they are weakened for everyone—including you.

The founders understood this well. The Constitution intentionally extends its protections to all "persons"—not just citizens—because the Founders understood that a government powerful enough to violate the rights of some will eventually violate the rights of all. The targeting of non-citizens and foreign students today creates the precedent that could lead to your persecution tomorrow.

Are you prepared?

In 2016, Trump’s election spurred numerous bouts of doomsaying from the left. “He’s a threat to democracy,” they would say. “He’ll become a dictator,” they would cry.

It was very easy to see these as hyperbolic at the time. Sure, Trump was an obviously immoral person and a narcissistic dunce, but the institutions that upheld our democracy for centuries would continue to do so.

Even after his first term, and his attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power on January 6th, these cries still seemed a bit much. After all, the guy tried to undermine our institutions and lost—at the ballot box, in court, and in the halls of Congress thanks to the Capitol Police.

But this is hyperbole no more. Our moderating institutions either refuse to do their jobs or are ignored. The crisis isn't approaching—it's here:

• A legal resident, a father of three, and the husband of a U.S. citizen has been sent to rot in a third-world prison without being charged with a crime.

• Students are disappeared and face deportation without a hearing for peaceful political expression.

• The administration is looking for ways to do these same things to U.S. citizens.

• Judicial authority is being ignored by the executive branch.

• Constitutional protections are treated as optional rather than binding.

Every day we normalize these violations, we move further from constitutional governance and closer to the rule of tyrants and mad kings. It is this normalization that made way for the end of the Roman Republic and gave rise to the era of Caesars. It is this callous indifference which enabled the rise of the Nazis. It is this cold, cynical refusal to act from elite institutions that has allowed petty tyrant after petty tyrant to take hold of the levers of unchecked power.

You stand at a moment of profound choice. Will you defend the constitutional order that has preserved American liberty for generations? Or will you watch silently as it's dismantled piece by piece, case by case, person by person—until the day it's your rights that are violated?

The time is now.

This is perhaps the moment of moments—one which will define a generation. You and I can choose to:

1. Demand immediate accountability for officials who defy court orders,

2. Make the protection of due process and free speech absolute requirements for any candidate seeking your vote, and

3. Support organizations fighting these constitutional violations on the frontlines,

or we can choose to watch our democracy erode with our liberties in tow. Our constitutional republic won't collapse in a dramatic moment but through the accumulated weight of violations we failed to confront. The threat isn't theoretical—it's embodied in people like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in students silenced through deportation, in each case where constitutional protections are treated as inconvenient obstacles rather than sacred obligations.

History will judge us not by our words but by our willingness to stand against these fundamental threats to American liberty before the mechanisms to do so are dismantled completely.

If you want to act, here is a list of non-partisan organizations worth supporting:

• The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

• The National Coalition Against Censorship

• The Institute for Free Speech

There are surely more, but these are a few that I know are good. It is important that this is not a partisan issue, and to support non-partisan groups. Trump’s assault on the Constitution is not partisan; it is personal. Resistance to this slow coup must be a united front. I do not care about whether you want higher or lower taxes.

I do not care about your stance on defense spending. I care about whether you will take the risk and support the system that has allowed us to be the freest and most prosperous country in the history of the world. And I care that you will have a spine and act when the die is cast.

The time is now. Tomorrow may be too late.