Think Immigration: You Know Who Warned Us About Trump Hundreds of Years Ago? Alexander Hamilton

I’ve been an immigration lawyer for 29 years. It can feel like a thankless job sometimes but far more often it is the most rewarding vocation and one I am privileged to be a part of.

The recent attacks on due process, the lack of humanity when you knowingly upend and destroy someone’s life…it feels unprecedented.

It is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime for certain.  However, as a history buff and avid reader of revolutionary era books and letters, one thing I have realized is that everything this administration is doing and trying to do was foreseen by our amazing forefathers.  Project 2025, their executive orders, their casual cruelty and rampant disregard for our system of liberty and justice…all foreseen.

As we see international students left stranded as visas and status are revoked with no warning, as we see people with valid status (withholding of removal) forced out of the country and dumped in a prison as the government admits an error but says they can’t bring him back, as they non-jokingly say they are looking into deporting U.S. Citizens, our backbone cannot waver. We must stand against the threats to liberty and heed the warning that Alexander Hamilton himself left us (emphasis added):

A Letter from Phocion to the Considerate Citizens of New York [1–27 January 1784]

“Nothing is more common than for a free people, in times of heat and violence, to gratify momentary passions, by letting into the government, principles and precedents which afterwards prove fatal to themselves. Of this kind is the doctrine of disqualification, disfranchisement and banishment by acts of legislature. The dangerous consequences of this power are manifest. If the legislature can disfranchise any number of citizens at pleasure by general descriptions, it may soon confine all the votes to a small number of partizans, and establish an aristocracy or an oligarchy; if it may banish at discretion all those whom particular circumstances render obnoxious, without hearing or trial, no man can be safe, nor know when he may be the innocent victim of a prevailing faction. The name of liberty applied to such a government would be a mockery of common sense.”

Whether or not the tower our forefathers built is strong enough to withstand a tyrant supported by Congress we shall see together. But in the meantime, Rise UP!