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How Citizens’ Assemblies Can Rebuild the House of American Democracy—Before It’s Demolished
Jun 10, 2025
The house of the American republic is tottering. Once unthinkable, it’s now undeniable that our shared home has deteriorated the same way you go broke: gradually, then suddenly. At the time it was built, We the People gave our house a sound design, sturdy and innovative by the standards of the day. It’s stood strong over the generations, holding fast through many seasons and storms. But like all old homes, our house needs fixing: The roof leaks. The plumbing’s rusted. The wiring’s quite out of date. And most troublingly, it’s become apparent that the foundation—the federal Constitution—is no longer stable. Partisan warfare, institutional neglect, and systemic corruption have combined to crack its bedrock and put the entire structure at serious risk. Alarm bells are ringing, and if we don't act soon, our house may fall into ruins.
It may be even worse than that. For as much as the Constitution’s being weakened in this season of backsliding, it also carries structural flaws that have compromised its integrity from the start. Scholars like Steven Levitsky and Erwin Chemerinsky have published books in recent months diagnosing just how much the Constitution thwarts majority rule. Other thinkers such as Hélène Landemore, Terry Bouricius, and Alexander Guerrero have gone even further, arguing that elections themselves aren’t as democratic as we think and that we should explore incorporating more sortition into our governance to compensate.
The truth is, rather than provide equality for all its residents, the Constitution has long allowed a tiny few to decide how our house is managed from the seclusion of the best rooms on the top floors. And this unfairness hasn’t gone unnoticed: staggering majorities of Americans now agree that “most politicians are corrupt” and believe our political system either “needs major changes” or “needs to be completely reformed.”
Two Competing Plans for Renovating Our Democracy
Our house clearly needs serious renovations made. Unfortunately, the most organized effort to do so is being led by a group that will only exacerbate our situation. For nearly two decades, a well-funded far-right movement has worked to permanently entrench recent moves to dismantle public institutions—changes like those envisioned by the Project 2025 initiative and carried out by the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE)—by triggering a process called an Article V convention that allows states legislatures to amend the Constitution without Congress. Led by the Convention of States project, this effort has no intention of co-designing a new home with the rest of us. In fact, its leadership expressly endorses some of the main causes of our house’s dilapidation, like the Citizens United decision that unleashed a flood of money in politics that’s rotting its electoral pillars. This extremist agenda isn’t about reconstructing democracy; it’s about doing an end-run around it. We could call it “the penthouse plan” for constitutional remodeling. And with as many as 28 of the 34 state legislatures needed to trigger an Article V process already signed on, these corporate developers are closer than ever to starting their demolition.
But there’s still time to realize an alternative plan, one that meets the needs of more than just the penthouse elites. And those of us in the civic renewal movement—deliberative democracy practitioners, electoral reformers, political bridgers, and other change agents—are just the engineers for the job. Luckily, we don’t have to look far for a credible, coherent blueprint. Two years ago, Lawrence Lessig of Harvard offered a bold, yet practical strategy for a more democratic Article V convention—a “ground floor plan” for renovating the house of our republic. Rather than simply opposing an Article V convention, Lessig argues that democracy advocates should go on offense by organizing to use citizens’ assemblies to devise constitutional amendments in a way that can also shape the notoriously vague Article V process itself.
Here’s how the plan would work: in at least 13 states, legislatures would pass model legislation creating statewide citizens’ assemblies—large, lottery-selected, representative groups of residents supported by nonpartisan facilitators and expert information, akin to a courtroom jury. These assemblies would be tasked with deliberating toward a rough consensus and then recommending a set of constitutional amendments their state would support at a national convention. The same legislation would also require that when a state appoints its delegates to a national Article V convention, those delegates must follow the assembly’s recommendations—backing only the amendments it supported and opposing those it did not. These instructions would be legally binding, using enforcement mechanisms already upheld to govern the actions of presidential electors sent to the Electoral College.
Because 38 of 50 states are needed to ratify any constitutional changes, a coalition of just 13 states adopting this ground floor plan could block any amendment that lacks broad public support—serving as a democratic backstop to ensure the process can’t be hijacked. This strategy would not only block the penthouse plan but would also turn Article V into a process with popular legitimacy. It would root constitutional revision in the judgment of everyday Americans from all walks of life, rather than the agendas of party elites or a dark money minority.
A Galvanizing Strategy & Opportunity for Civic Renewal
What would it take to act on this blueprint? Practically, it entails our civic engineers working together on several coordinated projects. Policy wonks and political bridgers will need to mount a campaign to persuade at least 13 state legislatures to pass laws establishing citizens’ assemblies and binding convention delegates to follow their recommendations. It will require the deliberative democracy community to scale up its capacity to host, facilitate, and manage large, representative assemblies in those states and beyond. Our organizers and storytellers will need to launch a sophisticated media effort to create a new, positive narrative of democracy—one that moves the public’s Overton window toward a vision of government truly of, by, and for everyday people. And the philanthropy world will need to respond to the growing call to recognize that the “rainy day” their endowments have saved for is here: they must lift their 5% spending caps and infuse the civic renewal movement with the capital that major construction projects demand when time is short and stakes are high.
Reforming the Constitution is an ambitious goal, to say the least. Yet it’s one that our burgeoning movement not only can accomplish, but that it needs in order to reach its full maturity. It wouldn't require exhausting federal lobbying or overextending ourselves in a nationwide mobilization—just smart, coordinated organizing in 13 states. Doing so would thwart the partisan hijacking of our constitution and end the fear of a “runaway” convention. It would also create clarity, coherence, and momentum for our movement. Most importantly, it would provide popular legitimacy for constitutional renewal—advancing our country toward its founding ideals of liberty, equality, and justice for all.
Such a massive renovation requires many construction materials: experts to draft model legislation designing the assemblies; a movement to organize advocates and coalitions on the ground in key states; infrastructure to produce reliable sortition and effective deliberation at scale; and a cultural campaign to advance a shared vision for a new American house—one that makes democracy invigorating, tangible, and credible for citizens and public officials alike. The good news on this last front is that growing numbers of Americans are already calling for citizens’ assemblies on national issues. An uptick in local assemblies is meeting this demand, most recently in Fort Collins, CO, and Bend, OR. And we continue to see that when citizens’ assemblies are used to tackle our thorniest problems, their recommendations are more popular than the hyperpolarized “solutions” offered by the status quo.
Momentum is with us. The more that the public learns about deliberative democracy, the more they want it. That’s why our respective organizations, Assemble America and the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, are calling on all those working for America’s civic renewal—our movement of movements—to make this plan a cornerstone of our shared strategy to revitalize American democracy. Lessig has drafted a blueprint. We have the tools and the know-how. What we need now is the collective will to roll up our sleeves and start building. If we succeed, we won’t just safeguard our shared home from further erosion—we’ll install new steel that will last for generations. Instead of just tinkering around the edges of America’s house, or even getting trapped under its collapse, we’ll give it the massive renovation it needs and deserves.
Let’s study this blueprint in depth. Let’s open up the floor plan of democracy. Let’s rebuild our house, together.
Roshan Bliss is a Denver-based community organizer, facilitator, and Director of Democracy Innovations at the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation, where he leads efforts to combat democratic dysfunction through cultural and civic interventions. With 15 years of experience in coalition-building and public engagement, he’s helped launch participatory budgeting in Denver and supports organizations as a consultant and certified mediator.
Nick Coccoma is Executive Director of Assemble America, a grassroots organization with a mission to make democracy real by putting power in the hands of citizens’ assemblies. He develops comprehensive frameworks for building public understanding and support of citizens’ assemblies, while fostering partnerships across the field of deliberative democracy. His writing on politics, democracy, and culture has appeared in Boston Review, New Politics, and other publications.
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An ICE agent monitors hundreds of asylum seekers being processed.
(Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)
Growing Up Latina in Georgia, We Feared More Than ICE
Jun 10, 2025
Last month, about an hour north of where I grew up in suburban Georgia, 19-year-old Ximena Arias-Cristobal was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after a mistaken traffic stop. Though granted bond on May 21, Ximena Arias-Cristobal is still facing deportation despite residing in Georgia since she was four years old.
While supporters nationwide have rallied around Ximena Arias-Cristobal, raising nearly $100,000 for her legal defense, this case serves as a solemn reminder that Latinos, especially in the South, are being surveilled. As someone who grew up Latina in a predominantly white suburb of Georgia, I also know that this surveillance isn’t limited to that by the state but ingrained into the fabric of our everyday lives.
At the age of four, the same age as Ximena Arias-Cristobal when she arrived in the United States, I stopped speaking or wanting to hear Spanish, my parents’ native language. None of my classmates came from a Spanish-speaking family, and, already hyper aware of these differences, I told my mother while playing on a playground with white kids that “this isn’t Mexico,” and that she should speak only English to me in public. I don’t remember where I got this idea from, but my mother never spoke Spanish to me in public again.
Once I got to grade school, I realized I needed to change my name, Ana Carolina, which was too long, too Latina, and too difficult for my white teachers and classmates to pronounce. But that didn’t stop the teasing from the kids in my class, who called me “ugly” and “stupid,” who pointed out all the things about me that made me different despite my desperate attempts to dress, act, and look the same.
But it wasn’t just childhood teasing that made me feel small.
When I was 11 years old, my white public school teacher accused me, a student with no prior behavioral issues, of inappropriate sexual behavior. I was tearfully sent to the principal’s office and narrowly evaded out-of-school suspension, though I would be accused of the same behavior two more times. At only 11 years old, and from a conservative Catholic home, I didn’t even understand what I was being accused of or why, just that my classmates no longer wanted to be around me and that teachers had their eyes on me. These incidents, which I can now identify as racial trauma, were the beginning of a long battle of my own self-destructive behaviors; when you tell a child so many times that they are bad, they may start to believe it.
As part of the Latino community in the South, racial trauma can feel like an inevitable reality. Whether it occurs on the macro scale, like facing criminalization from the police or ICE, in everyday interactions, like through microaggressions, or even through witnessing the widespread treatment of Latinos on the news, the impact can be life-altering. Racial trauma, whether directly or vicariously experienced, can be associated with mental health conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, self-blame, and low self-esteem. The pressure of facing these after-effects of racial trauma, while trying to self-correct to avoid being perceived negatively again, is a form of surveillance on its own.
Latino immigrants, who in reality commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born population, deserve to live a life free of surveillance and racial trauma. We are college students, construction workers, restaurant cooks, scientists, engineers, family, and friends. We pay taxes and work hard. We, like anyone else, want the best lives possible for ourselves and our families.
A judge recently granted Ximena Arias-Cristobal bond after three weeks in detention. Arias-Cristobal will still face deportation proceedings, which the Department of Homeland Security has hinted may result in her deportation to Mexico. All the while, thousands of other Georgia college students are enjoying their summer break, maybe even vacationing in the same countries that our government so recklessly criminalizes.
If you are part of the Latino community living in the South, know that you do not deserve your pain. If you are a white ally, know that there are many stories we don’t tell you. If you’re applauding what’s happening, know that we wouldn’t do this to you if the roles were reversed.
Annie Romano is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project, The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, and the Every Page Foundation.
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Scams Targeting Immigrants Take Advantage of Fears of Immigration Status and Deportation
Jun 10, 2025
WASHINGTON–When my phone rang and I saw the familiar DC area code, I picked up, and a man with a slight Indian accent said: “Ma’am, this is the Indian Embassy.”
Expecting a response from the Indian Embassy for an article I was working on, I said, “Is this in regards to my media inquiry?” He said no. He was calling about a problem with my Indian passport. I asked who he called, and when he said a name I didn’t recognize, I informed him he had the wrong person and hung up, figuring it was a scam.
Just a few hours later, I received another call from an unknown number, this time with a New York area code. Curious to see if the previous caller was trying to reach me from another number, I picked up. An automated message, claiming to represent the Consulate General of India, informed me my Indian passport was “blacklisted due to unresolved legal issues,” and asked me to connect with a representative for more information. Then they called me again the next day and left the same message on my voicemail. The scammers knew I was Indian, but it was clear they didn’t think I was a U.S. citizen.
What I learned in the next few days was that I was targeted by a scam that was directed at Indians in the U.S., regardless of their legal status, and had already raised concerns at the Indian Embassy. In fact, the embassy’s website immediately opened to a pop-up announcement declaring that they were aware of the issue and directing people on how to report it. Callers to the Indian Embassy were greeted by an automated message about scam calls. The Indian embassy did not respond to my multiple requests for comment.
Scammers have long targeted immigrant communities in the U.S. However, federal law enforcement has seen a recent surge. Scammers pretending to be embassies or other foreign officials have “been happening for about three years now but [is] increasing in frequency in the last year,” hence a recent press release and podcast to warn the public of this growing scam, the FBI told the Fulcrum.
This increase coincides with the U.S. government’s crackdown on immigration, both in the tail end of the Biden administration, where asylum was halted at the Southern border, and throughout the Trump administration’s multipronged deportation campaign. This includes ICE raids, threats to international students’ legal status, and removing the protected legal status of multiple groups, including Venezuelans.
Juan Pedroza, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said uncertainty and rapid changes to immigration laws and regulations “opens up new opportunities for scam artists to get creative.”
“We do see anecdotal data that when you see rapid changes at the federal level in terms of immigration policies, there does seem to be these new incentives for scam artists to get creative,” Pedroza said. “It makes sense intuitively to me that in the absence of clear pathways to legalization, clear protections for asylum seekers, or something like amnesty, we're just going to keep seeing these scams come back again and again.”
Telemarketing scams in which people pose as embassy officials date back at least as far as 2011, Pedroza said. He conducted the first nationwide study on immigration scams that target noncitizens in 2023. He said immigration scams are underreported and therefore hard to quantify because “there are groups being targeted precisely because they're especially vulnerable and because they're very unlikely to come forward.”
The FBI concurred that such scams are underreported, in a statement responding to questions from the Fulcrum. In fact, the FBI recorded fewer than 100 cases through its Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, portal in the last three years.
“Though the FBI is aware of additional victims not reported to IC3. Some victims report the scam before they lose money, but around half of the victims reported financial losses,” the FBI statement said.
I posted about the scam on my professional social media. In just a week, 10 people in the Indian American community told me they had also been recipients of this scam call in recent months. Aneri Patel, a friend from my undergraduate college, UC Santa Barbara, got in touch with me via Instagram after seeing my post and said she also received the scam call.
“I laughed because I was born in Bakersfield, California, so I do not have a visa or a green card, but I'm curious how they knew I was of Indian descent,” Patel said.
According to the FBI, scammers can get intimate details such as the phone numbers of Indians in the U.S. via “a variety of sources, including data breaches, purchasing data on the dark web, purchasing commercial/advertising data, publicly available data, and social engineering.” Some scammers are using “spoofing” technology, which disguises the caller ID of scammers and masquerades the phone number as that of the embassy on the recipient’s end.
Another friend on a green card, kept anonymous so her immigration status wouldn't be threatened, also received the scam call from someone claiming to represent the Indian embassy. He stated her full name and asked if she was familiar with an Indian phone number that the New Delhi police had traced back to her. He said the number was associated with the perpetrator of scam calls in India, which 27 people reported.
“He was like … the New Delhi police are looking for you, and we've sent your identity to the embassy, and you have to call them and talk to them,” she said. “He was just going on and on about how they were going to come after me, how the embassy was going to come after me, how my immigration status was at risk.”
My friend, who grew up in the U.S., received immigration scam calls a few years prior when she was on a visa. Both previous experience and awareness that “you are basically never going to get a call that is regarding [immigration status]” quickly alerted her that the call was a scam. After she hung up, the scammer tried to contact her via WhatsApp, so she changed her profile photo and name.
“And then he texted me more, and he was like, ‘You changed your name and your profile photo. Why are you not responding to me?’”
Though she knew it was a scam quickly, she said the experience was still frightening.
“It was just the threat of deportation. Even if you know logically that something is not real, when you hear your stability being questioned like that,” she said. “Any sort of instability there can feel really scary. So even if you logically know it's not real, my heart races. My heart definitely started racing just because this guy was threatening me, living in America.”
Pedroza said in some states, like New York, there are stronger laws inhibiting scammers from advertising their services. In states with fewer protections and elected representatives unwelcoming to immigrants, victims may be less likely to come forward.
“[Immigration scam protections] might be less of a priority precisely where the context is turned against immigrants the most,” Pedroza said.
The FBI issued a press release on May 13 that Middle Eastern international students in the U.S. are being targeted by “scammers impersonat[ing] US and foreign government officials claiming there is an issue with the student's immigration status and exploit[ing] this for financial gain.” The FBI also released a podcast on May 19 about how scammers posing as Chinese law enforcement are targeting Chinese international students in the U.S., claiming they’re wanted by law enforcement for illegal activity and extracting large sums of money from their victims, claiming it will resolve the issue.
In a statement to the Fulcrum, the FBI said, “government impersonation scams include a variety of government agencies, and scammers have evolved based on current events to ensure their scams are relevant and convincing,” regarding scammers targeting international students while posing as the Department of Homeland Security. These scammers are attempting to capitalize on the fear that international students have regarding visa revocations.
And while some, such as Patel and I, figured the calls were a scam, we are both U.S. citizens. We are at less risk than people with Indian citizenship. For some immigrant communities, such calls can hold more legitimacy. As my anonymous friend said, especially immigrants new to the U.S. might be more likely to fall for such scams to secure their ability to stay.
“Even for me, it was definitely a little scary, even though I've been raised here, and even though I know exactly what to look out for and what the signs are,” she said. “Getting a call like this, they would definitely do anything that the person asked them to do just to ensure that they can stay in this country.”
Atmika Iyer is a graduate student in Northwestern Medill’s Politics, Policy, and Foreign Affairs reporting program. Atmika is also a journalism intern with the Fulcrum.
To read more of Atmika's work, click HERE.
The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists. Learn how by clicking HERE.
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Protesters confront National Guard soldiers and police outside of a federal building as protests continue in Los Angeles following three days of clashes with police after a series of immigration raids on June 09, 2025, in Los Angeles, California.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Marines Sent to Los Angeles “Presents a Significant Logistical and Operational Challenge”
Jun 10, 2025
LOS ANGELES, CA - An estimated 700 U.S. Marines are being mobilized from the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, approximately 140 miles east of Los Angeles, to Camp Pendleton in San Diego County. This mobilization will position the troops closer to Los Angeles, where they may potentially work alongside National Guard units to protect federal resources and personnel, according to NBC News.
The latest figures from police, nearly 70 individuals were arrested over the weekend during protests. This total includes 29 people arrested on Saturday for failure to disperse and 21 individuals arrested on Sunday on charges ranging from attempted murder involving a Molotov cocktail to looting and failure to disperse, as reported by the LAPD.
President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday: “Looking really bad in L.A. BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!”
In response to the Marines' deployment, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell expressed concerns, stating that the "arrival of federal military forces in Los Angeles -- absent clear coordination -- presents a significant logistical and operational challenge for those of us charged with safeguarding this city."
California Governor Gavin Newsom, who opposed Trump sending the state's National Guard, strongly criticized Trump's activation of Marines in the Los Angeles area. In a post on X, he says that Marines are "heroes" who "shouldn't be deployed on American soil facing their own countrymen to fulfill the deranged fantasy of a dictatorial president. This is un-American."
Gavin also posted that he was informed "Trump is deploying another 2,000 Guard troops to L.A."
Increasing tensions, California sued the Trump administration on Monday over its order to deploy National Guard troops without the governor’s consent. The lawsuit argues that the President overstepped his authority when he called up the National Guard in defiance of Newsom, invoking a law that allows the president to do so under specific conditions.
So, when can a president deploy the National Guard? Here is the answer and more in a recent edition of the Fulcrum series, Just the Facts:
Just the Facts: Standoff Between National Guard and L.A. Protesters
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum. He is the publisher of the Latino News Network and an accredited Solutions Journalism and Complicating the Narratives trainer with the Solutions Journalism Network.
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