The redrawing of legislative district boundaries. A 1967 federal law requires House members be elected from single-member districts that (within each state) have nearly identical populations. House maps must be redrawn after reapportionment but before the first congressional election of each decade, based on population changes in each state revealed by the census.
The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act stands as the direct antithesis of our founders' aspirations for the American Experiment, eroding the core principles of popular sovereignty and individual liberty. Rather than cultivating a government that derives its "just powers from the consent of the governed," this legislative measure inverts that relationship. It transforms a natural right into a government-administered privilege, erecting bureaucratic barriers that conflict with the expansive, participatory democratic republic the Framers sought to construct.
Subverting the Consent of the Governed: the foundational premise of the American Experiment, as articulated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, is that the legitimacy of a government hinges entirely on the active consent of its citizens. The SAVE Act disrupts this dynamic by fundamentally shifting the burden of proof.
The Bureaucratic Inversion: under standard civic frameworks, the government is responsible for maintaining accurate rolls while facilitating voter registration. The SAVE Act requires individual citizens to affirmatively prove their fitness to participate to state authorities, using specific, hard-to-obtain documentation.
Eradicating Accessible Channels: by effectively eliminating modern, accessible pathways—such as online registration or mail-in applications, the bill mandates cumbersome, in-person registration requirements. This runs directly counter to the democratic evolution of a republic meant to expand, rather than restrict, the public square.
The Re-imposition of Wealth and Status Barriers: The Framers explicitly designed the U.S. Constitution to avoid creating a rigid, aristocratic caste system based on wealth or administrative privilege. Critics argue that the SAVE Act reinstates these exact systemic exclusions by introducing steep socioeconomic hurdles.
Modern-Day Economic Barriers: According to analyses by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Center for American Progress, more than 21 million eligible American citizens lack immediate access to the necessary documentation of citizenship, such as a valid passport or birth certificate.
Disproportionate Impact: procuring these documents introduces significant financial costs and transit burdens, acting as a functional poll tax that disproportionately disenfranchises low-income families, rural communities, students, and marginalized groups. This contradicts the constitutional evolution toward universal suffrage.
The Principle of Federalism and State Sovereignty: the Framers explicitly left the "Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections" to state legislatures under Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution, reserving federal intervention as a backstop.
The Framers' Vision: influenced by a deep distrust of centralized national power, the Framers designed a decentralized system in which states retain primary authority over voter qualifications and registration processes.
The SAVE Act Approach: The SAVE Act overrides state discretion by imposing nationwide federal requirements for voter registration. It mandates that states collect specific Documentary Proof of Citizenship (DPOC)—such as passports or birth certificates—and forces states to submit their voter registration lists to the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Critics argue that this top-down command shifts election authority away from local administrators toward federal agencies.
Separation of Powers and Executive Branch Control: In Federalist No. 47, James Madison cautioned that the accumulation of all powers in the same hands is the definition of tyranny. The Framers meticulously separated powers to prevent any single branch from controlling the machinery of democracy.
The Framers' Vision: election administration was intentionally kept independent of the federal executive branch's centralized security apparatus.
The SAVE Act Approach: under the active versions of the legislation, the federal government routes election roll verification through DHS databases. Opponents voice concerns that this places local election control under a politicized, cabinet-level agency rather than an independent regulatory body. Furthermore, current political pressure to tie the bill's passage to unrelated executive and intelligence priorities—such as delaying the confirmation of the Director of National Intelligence or leveraging the renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—represents a transactional use of legislative power that tests traditional institutional boundaries.
Infringing on Local Autonomy and Civic Stewardship: The architecture of federalism was meticulously crafted by the Framers to prevent a centralized federal authority from dictating the internal civic mechanics of individual states. The SAVE Act upends this structure through aggressive federal mandates.
Federal Overreach: The SAVE America Act requires states to surrender their complete voter registration lists to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This strips local authorities of their traditional oversight and subjects state election systems to centralized federal scrubbing and error-prone databases.
Criminalizing Civic Duty: The legislation introduces harsh criminal penalties and imprisonment for local election workers who commit administrative errors. This punitive approach intimidates the everyday volunteers and civil servants necessary to keep elections running, undermining the baseline of civic trust essential to a healthy republic.
The Verdict: the American Experiment was designed to prove that a free people could govern themselves without top-down subjugation. The SAVE Act, by codifying deep-seated suspicion into federal law, treats the citizen not as the ultimate source of constitutional authority, but as a potential imposter who must seek state clearance to exercise their birthright.
An effective, trust-building alternative to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act must reconcile two foundational principles of the American Experiment: popular sovereignty (ensuring every eligible citizen can seamlessly vote) and the rule of law (ensuring only eligible citizens do so).
While the SAVE Act seeks to mandate strict, in-person documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) at registration, this framework risks disenfranchising tens of million eligible Americans who lack immediate access to passports or physical birth certificates. A trust-building alternative shifts the logistical burden away from the individual and places it onto technological modernization, state-federal cooperation, and localized transparency.
A Modernization Alternative, Aligned with the American Experiment
Federalism & Decentralization: empower states to manage their own elections while providing federal tools and data access to optimize security.
Consent of the Governed: place the burden of verification on the state to maximize lawful participation.
Protection of Civil Servants: support election workers with clear guidelines, better training, and automated verification tools.
Hugh J. Campbell, Jr., CPA, is a Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) professional and a student of W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician often credited as the catalyst for the Japanese economic miracle after WWII.
Chris Murphy, the junior senator from Connecticut, has written an important and timely book. Although he writes as a Democratic politician, his central concern transcends party politics. He asks why in America, by most standards the wealthiest and most technically advanced country in history, we have become lonelier and less connected, and why our concern for the common good has steadily eroded.
He pleads for a beautiful America.
But instead, Murphy sees a disfigured America that will not be quickly repaired. He argues that “our nation would make a grave error if we believed we could repair what is broken within us simply by defeating Trump—or his successor—at the ballot box.” He says, “a deeper rot festers in the American soul: a callousness toward our neighbors, a me-first selfishness, a relentless focus on ‘getting mine’ even if it leaves others behind.”
Murphy organizes the book around what he defines as six “cults,” which he defines as “false idols that promised freedom and meaning but delivered loneliness, that offered abundance but left us feeling empty.” Those “cults” are:
One of the strengths of Crisis of the Common Good is Murphy’s insistence that our deepest problems cannot be explained fully by elections, economic inequality, or partisan conflict. His language of “false idols,” “spiritual collapse,” and “cults” recognizes that Americans have misplaced their ultimate loyalties. His diagnosis reaches beneath policy debates to the realm of meaning, belonging, purpose, and morality.
“America,” Murphy writes, “has constructed its own golden calves. Over the past fifty years, we have become a wealthier and more just country in many ways, but we have also retreated from shared prosperity, social contracts, and strong communities, building altars instead to profit, efficiency, consumer culture, technology, elite credentialism, and a winner-takes-all politics that consecrates corruption.”
Throughout the book, Murphy uses the language of religion and theology in his diagnosis, making the case that our crisis is spiritual, not merely political. So far, so good. But it didn’t take me long to grow uncomfortable because he uses theological language metaphorically without developing an account of what these terms actually mean. For instance, he says we are experiencing a “spiritual collapse” without defining what spiritual health requires or how it is restored.
A theologian might ask whether Murphy’s “cults” are merely unhealthy social conditions. And as I got deep into the book, I found myself thinking that if the language of theology is apt, the conditions Murphy indicts are better understood not as cults but as idolatries: finite goods treated as though they could provide meaning, identity, even salvation.
A New Values Offensive?
Murphy is not alone among Democratic politicians in using moral and spiritual language today. Writing in the New York Times, EJ Dione notes that many of the Democratic frontrunners for the 2028 presidential run—he mentions Pete Buttigieg, Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, and Corey Booker, in addition to Murphy—are using “religiously inflected” language to describe the travails we face. Dionne calls Murphy’s book “The closest thing to a manifesto for the Democrats’ new values offensive.”
If this is true, I worry a bit.
I am generally comfortable with words like spiritual and use the term “spiritual despair” in my own book to describe the consequences of the forces that trouble our country. (See my take in the graphic below.) My concern is not with Murphy's diagnosis but with a theology-laden account of America’s crisis that ultimately points to remedies that are almost entirely policy-driven (and oddly, are presented in an Appendix).
A question kept arising as I read this book: Can politics heal a spiritual crisis? And another: If what we face really is a spiritual crisis, should we be looking to politicians or political parties to save us?
These questions also reveal where my own work diverges from Murphy’s. In my book, also addressed to America’s promise, I argue that citizenship is not simply one remedy among many. The active exercise of citizenship is our core formative practice. When this recedes, democracy stumbles and we get what we have today.
One way of accounting for our troubles as a country—the one I present in my book—is to acknowledge that we have forgotten how to be citizens. We have come to think of citizenship as a passive role and of government as something we consume. Yet, the founders called us to be co-creators of our government and to work together across differences to build and maintain agency, trust, purpose, and hope. In their telling, citizenship is anything but passive. I don’t think Murphy would disagree with this, but he looks primarily to political leadership and public policy to fix what is wrong. I don’t.
Three Systems
While reading Murphy’s book, I also read Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, published in 2016. Both authors describe the essence of our problems similarly: the transition of America from a “WE” culture to an “I” culture.
Sacks, a theologian as well as a philosopher, observes that all societies are composed of three systems: the political system, the economic system, and the moral system. Markets create wealth. Governments distribute power. Moral institutions teach people to restrain self-interest for the sake of the common good. When the moral system doesn’t work, Sacks observes, it is impossible for the other two systems to work in ways that build the common good.
Murphy sees this problem, too. He says the six cults have affected a transition “from a we America to a me America.”
Criticisms about the clumsy use of religious terms aside, my concern with Murphy’s framework is not so much his diagnosis, but his theory of change, i.e., exactly what needs to change and how that will come about.
In my book, I, too, see a spiritual problem in our “I” culture. But I look first to shared meaning, community, and citizenship—the moral system—to address it. My claim is that democracy flourishes only when people practice the habits of reciprocity, restraint, and shared responsibility, all habits that fall into Sacks’ moral realm.
As a United States senator, Murphy naturally imagines politics playing the leading role. My argument is that our history repeatedly shows that democratic renewal begins not with elected officials but with citizens who rise up and say, “No more. This way instead.” Politicians generally ratify such movements; they seldom create them.
Murphy concludes his book saying that to set things right, Americans must “build something beautiful.” I wholeheartedly agree. My question is: Who will build it? And my answer is: We the People.
Throughout American history, our greatest movements for the common good—abolition, women’s suffrage, labor laws, civil rights—have begun not with elected officials but with ordinary people who recovered the habits of trust, responsibility, sacrifice, and shared purpose that self-government requires, and the moral institutions that support these habits: religious institutions, nonprofits, service organizations, and others. Political leaders are essential in the change process, but they rarely create it.
That is why I remain convinced that the future of American democracy depends less on electing better politicians or on formulating better policy than on our becoming better citizens. When this happens, as the title of my book suggests, the leaders will follow.
In the end, Chris Murphy has done us a service. He has challenged the comforting fiction that America’s problems will be solved when Democrats win the next election or pass the next corrective law. He reminds us that democracy is ultimately about the kind of people we become and the kind of society we choose to build together. Whether one agrees with his prescriptions or not, he has made an important contribution to an essential conversation about the common good. For that, I am grateful. I hope his book is widely read—not because it settles the debate, but because it invites the deeper understanding our country desperately needs.
Let’s join with Sen. Murphy and build a beautiful America.
Who Will Make America Beautiful? was first published by Light Many Fires and was republished with permission.
Richard McKnight, PhD, is the author of When We The People Lead, The Leaders Will Follow.
This nonpartisan policy brief, written by an ACE fellow, is republished by The Fulcrum as part of our partnership with the Alliance for Civic Engagement and our NextGen initiative — elevating student voices, strengthening civic education, and helping readers better understand democracy and public policy.
The Origins: The Clinton Administration
“Sensitive area” policies originate from the Clinton administration. Also known as a “Protected Area”, a “sensitive area” refers to any building or region where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is required to refrain from immigration enforcement actions.
This policy originated in 1993 as a memo from James A. Puleo, the acting associate commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), an agency under the U.S Department of Justice. Under Puleo, immigration enforcement officers were to “attempt to avoid apprehension of persons and tightly control investigative operations” within areas like schools and places of worship. Additionally, enforcement actions in these “sensitive areas” required advance written approval from senior officials.
While Puelo’s memo did not outright ban enforcement action at sensitive areas, additional precaution and approval were required to conduct such activity, limiting officer autonomy and operational flow. However, exceptions could be made in emergency situations, such as “a mass alien influx or alien registration action”.
The Bush administration ultimately upheld Puleo’s 1993 memo. Three memos form the cornerstones of the administration’s sensitive areas policy: Byers’ 2008 Field Guidance on Enforcement Actions or Investigative Activities At or Near Sensitive Community Locations, ICE’s 2007 Guidelines for Identifying Humanitarian Concerns among Administrative Arrestees, and Forman’s 2007 Enforcement Actions at Schools.
As a response to the events of 9/11, the Homeland Security Act of 2003 was enacted, restructuring the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Ultimately, this move dissolved the INS and created ICE. Under the Act, ICE’s primary mission is to “promote homeland security and public safety through the criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control, customs, trade and immigration”. The sensitive areas policy established by the INS were maintained by ICE, and the agency released several memos clarifying the policy.
On November 16, 2007, ICE published Guidelines for Identifying Humanitarian Concerns among Administrative Arrestees. The document served as a guide for collaboration between ICE agents and social service agencies to prioritize safe and human conditions. Obligations include: (1) identifying vulnerable individuals early, such as sole caregivers, pregnant women, or individuals with medical conditions; (2) screening arrestees for medical needs; (3) providing access to restrooms and adequate food or water; (4) notifying arrestees of opportunities for legal counsel; and (5) allowing family contact through free telephone service.
In addition to addressing humanitarian concerns, Office of Investigation Director Marcy M. Forman released Enforcement Actions at Schools on December 26, 2007, a memorandum promoting careful ICE operations on grounds where children may be present. Officers were instructed to use “great care and forethought” in such areas, especially schools. Additionally, before ICE detains or questions individuals, they are obligated to notify the Headquarters Operations Manager, get approval from the highest-ranking regional official, known as the Special Agent in Charge, and write a request memo that allows ICE to use administrative warrants rather than judicial warrants to conduct operations. This approval does not apply when ICE agents ask schools for records and information from school officials, or conduct other non-enforcement-related activities. Finally, the memo preserved exceptions given to concerns involving terrorism or other public safety issues.
The final memo during Bush’s term, addressed to ICE from Assistant Secretary Julie M. Byers, was published on July 3, 2008. The memo officially recognized Forman’s and Puelo’s memos, codifying sensitive area protections into ICE operations. Byers’ memo came nearly two months after a controversial raid at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa on May 12, 2008. The Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Iowa charged 306 of the 389 arrestees with false identification and 270 with aggravated identity theft. Critics contend that the defendants were not given sufficient time to meet with counsel, translation services, nor individual court proceedings established by Forman’s or Puleo’s memo.
The Bush Administration did not significantly break from Clinton-era precedent and preserved many of the same exceptions for immigration enforcement in sensitive locations.
The Obama administration’s view on sensitive areas was defined by ICE Director John Morton’s Policy Memorandum 10029.2. Dubbed the “Morton Memo,” it outright prohibited ICE officers from entering or conducting arrests, searches, or surveillance near designated protected sites. Protected sites included: K-12 schools, universities, school bus stops, medical treatment facilities, places of worship, and public demonstrations. Exceptions were narrowly provided in cases of active pursuits, imminent destruction of evidence, and national security investigations.
The Morton memo represents the Obama administration’s leniency towards long-term residents and children, further evidenced by the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Obama’s policy has allowed over 740,000 undocumented individuals who arrived as children to remain in the United States, granting them renewed work authorizations. In contrast, the Obama administration would also expeditiously deport adults with a criminal record, resulting in the highest deportation rates of any previous president. This policy represented a major departure from previous administrations, marking a more politically and legally contested approach to immigration.
Obama-era policy left a legacy of the most comprehensive federal codification of enforcement restraint at community institutions in U.S. history. Morton’s memo was ultimately a tool designed to decouple aggressive interior enforcement from the community trust infrastructure in schools, hospitals, churches, etc., which was seen as a necessity for “social order.”
Coming into office in January 2017, the Trump Administration marked a significant departure from the enforcement priorities of the Obama era, including the guidelines established in the Morton memo. Rather than narrowing deportation to individuals with serious criminal records, the Administration moved to expand interior enforcement to target undocumented immigrants broadly. This shift was formalized through two executive orders signed in the first week of office: Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements (EO 13767) and Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States (EO 13768), which directed ICE to treat nearly all undocumented individuals as enforcement priorities and rescinded the Obama-era guidance that had narrowed those priorities.
On February 20, 2017, DHS Secretary John Kelly issued a memo titled Enforcement of the Immigration Laws to Serve the National Interest, which immediately rescinded Obama’s Priority Enforcement Program and gave officers broad authority to pursue removal against anyone who had committed acts constituting a chargeable criminal offense, including minor traffic infractions. While the Administration did not formally rescind the Morton Memo, it effectively eroded the sensitive areas framework through these broadened enforcement priorities and rhetoric that de-emphasized restrictions near schools, churches, and hospitals.
The consequences for immigrant communities were significant. A 2018 study from the University of Michigan School of Public Health found that Detroit-area ICE detentions rose 44 percent from 2016 to 2017, with more than triple the number of non-criminal immigrants detained, and documented immigrants avoiding doctors, grocery stores, and schools out of fear. The Urban Institute (2019) also found that 1 in 5 adults in immigrant families with children reported avoiding public benefits out of fear of immigration consequences, rising to 1 in 3 among low-income families. Lastly, a 2023 PMC study published in PMC found that direct enforcement encounters among Asian and Latinx immigrants were associated with delayed healthcare access, even when sensitive location protections were technically still in place on paper.
While Trump’s first term did not fully dismantle the sensitive locations framework, its expansive enforcement priorities and aggressive interior operations functionally weakened it. The rise in non-criminal arrests reflected a deliberate departure from the Obama-era framing of prioritizing felons over families, and the cultural shift within ICE laid the groundwork for the full rescission of sensitive area protections that would come in his second term.
The Biden Administration entered office in January 2021 with a stated commitment to reversing many of the Trump-era immigration policies, including the restoration of sensitive areas policies. The Biden Administration both restored and expanded the protections that had been culturally eroded under Trump I.
In January 2021, Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson issued a memo pausing most interior enforcement as the administration developed its new priorities. Then, on October 27, 2021, DHS Secretary Mayorkas issued Guidelines for Enforcement Actions in or Near Protected Areas, a new unified policy for both ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that replaced and expanded upon the Obama-era Morton Memo. The updated guidelines broadened the list of protected locations to include disaster relief and emergency sites, food banks, homeless shelters, community centers, places where children gather, and medical and mental health facilities including vaccine and testing sites. The memo also maintained the requirement for pre-approval before enforcement near any protected area and was grounded in the principle that enforcement should not deter people from accessing essential services. Per American Immigration Council analysis, the 2021 memo narrowed officers’ enforcement latitude more than any prior guidance, adding new protections and closing loopholes that had existed in previous iterations, including eliminating a CBP exception for areas near the international border that had previously left border-community hospitals and schools largely unprotected.
The Biden administration’s approach represented both a formal restoration and the most expansive codification of sensitive area protections in the policy’s long history. However, the 2021 Guidelines for Enforcement Actions in or Near Protected Areas would ultimately become the final formal iteration of the sensitive locations framework.
On January 20th, 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14159, which directed DHS to revoke all previous guidance for immigration enforcement. The order removed the sensitive areas policy while it was still in effect, with DHS Secretary Benjamine Huffman rescinding Biden-era precedent shortly after. On January 31, 2024, ICE issued a follow-up memorandum establishing that authorization for formerly protected areas could be granted verbally or in writing. However, ICE did not explicitly mention that authorization is required, nor did the agency list consequences for failing to receive authorization. As a result, the Executive Order granted agents greater authority over the methods they use to conduct patrols, arrests, and raids.
The removal of the sensitive areas policy causes schools and children to be more vulnerable to arrest, removal, or questioning by ICE. According to NBR, raids coincided with a 22% increase in daily student absences, with younger students more absent than older students. A separate source, Edweek, conducted a national survey which found that 24% of educators who worked with immigrant families reported reduced student attendance. Trump’s retraction of the sensitive areas framework has left 9 million students with at least one noncitizen adult at risk of being affected by arrests.
Critics of Trump’s immigration policies cite the conflict between the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires physicians to provide care regardless of a patient’s citizenship status. Likewise, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandates healthcare professionals to keep sensitive client information – such as citizenship – private from all entities. However, no existing statute prohibits ICE from entering public areas within hospitals in certain states. The Trump administration has not confirmed arrests inside hospitals or medical facilities as of April 2026.
Democratic legislators have opted to keep the sensitive areas policy alive despite the Trump administration’s opposing views. At the federal level, Representative Adriano Espaillat (NY-13) and Senator Richard Blumenthal (CT) reintroduced the Protecting Sensitive Locations Act on February 6, 2025 to re-codify restrictions on ICE and other DHS departments. The Act seeks to codify protections similar to the former policy by restricting immigration enforcement within 1,000 feet of designated sensitive locations, including schools, hospitals, places of worship, polling sites, and labor union facilities. If enacted, the legislation would significantly limit where enforcement actions can occur and reestablish clearer boundaries for federal authorities.
The rescission of the Sensitive Locations policy has significantly expanded immigration enforcement authority, allowing ICE agents to conduct enforcement actions in locations that were previously protected, including schools, healthcare facilities, places of worship, and other community institutions. The change has prompted institutions of higher education to assess how to respond to potential enforcement activity and raising concerns about student safety and institutional policies governing federal access. Overall, federal officials argue that removing the policy restores law enforcement flexibility and prevents individuals from avoiding arrest by remaining in these locations.
At the same time, advocacy organizations report that the policy change has contributed to heightened fear among immigrant communities, particularly in spaces where individuals previously felt safe accessing essential services. Early evidence suggests declines in school attendance and increased missed medical appointments, indicating a broader chilling effect. This shift may discourage immigrants, including some U.S. citizen children in mixed-status families, from seeking medical care, attending school, participating in religious services, or accessing disaster relief and other social support. The policy also increases risks for particularly vulnerable populations, such as youth experiencing homelessness who may lack identification or documentation, as well as individuals relying on shelters, clinics, or other community-based services, all of whom may face a greater likelihood of detention during enforcement actions.
In response, schools, healthcare providers, and religious organizations are assessing how immigration enforcement may affect their communities and institutional practices. Local governments and community organizations have also begun providing “know your rights” information to help individuals better understand their legal protections when interacting with immigration authorities.
Ongoing legal challenges to the rescission of the Sensitive Locations Policy suggest that its long-term implementation remains uncertain. Multiple lawsuits have been filed, and courts have issued mixed rulings, with one federal judge temporarily blocking immigration enforcement actions in certain houses of worship. Another declined to restrict enforcement in school settings. As litigation continues, future court decisions will play a critical role in determining whether aspects of the policy are upheld, limited, or reversed.
In the absence of uniform federal protections, states are increasingly exploring their own policy responses, despite immigration enforcement remaining primarily a federal responsibility. States such as Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Washington, and West Virginia have either implemented or explored policies that limit enforcement in sensitive spaces, including proposals requiring federal immigration officers to obtain judicial warrants or demonstrate probable cause before conducting certain enforcement actions. In addition, some state and local governments are pursuing policies that limit cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities or restrict immigration enforcement on state-controlled property. For example, proposals introduced by officials such as Kathy Hochul aim to prevent local police from assisting with federal immigration enforcement, while advocacy efforts have also promoted the creation of “ICE-free zones” in certain public spaces.
Looking ahead, the removal of sensitive location protections may have broader, long-term implications for public institutions and community trust. Continued fear of enforcement may discourage immigrant communities from engaging with essential services, potentially leading to lower school attendance, delayed medical treatment, and reduced participation in civic and religious life. Over time, these patterns could have significant consequences for public health outcomes, access to education, and overall trust in government institutions, particularly among the immigrant population.
Where Can Immigration Enforcement Take Place?: Unpacking ICE’s ‘Sensitive Areas’ Policies from Clinton to Trump was first published by ACE and republished with permission.
Nhelia Alemo, Chloe Durham, Mariam Nageeb, Stephanie Olvido, Yazmin Muñiz, Kallista Ramirez, and Jaiden Whitner are ACE Fellows.
Mural of child blindfolded
As part of a collaboration between The Fulcrum's NextGen initiative and Made By Us, The Fulcrum is publishing Letters to America, a series created through the Youth250 project that invites Gen Z to reflect on the nation’s past, present, and future as the United States approaches its 250th anniversary.
Juneteenth. The nation’s 250th anniversary. Two celebrations of freedom, arriving in a season where many of us are quietly wondering whether we feel “free” at all. Our citizens are living through conditions that resemble the very terms that nearly caused our divorce. Economic freedom wanes. Our own citizens are somehow being terrorized. Elites and their technocratic allies advance their priorities while ordinary Americans absorb the fallout. Candidly, an anniversary only means something if the relationship has been maintained. No one gets credit for 250 years of marriage when the work stopped decades ago. So before these milestones arrive, we must ask ourselves: how committed are we to actualized democracy?
I grew up believing that my peers and I were the next iteration of the American experiment. That my unique life experience would augment the quest for a “more perfect Union.” Now, as I approach my three-decade mark, I find myself at an impasse. Academia taught us that, as Americans, we are inherently free. Free to express our minds, free to elect representatives who capture our voice. The truth is harder to sit with: democracy was an idea our citizens never fully enforced. We inherited the deed to a house, enjoyed every amenity, and assumed it would need minimal upkeep.
Part of the problem is the modern connotation of the word itself. We’ve become desensitized to the notion of “democracy.” For some, it’s a symbol of government, for others an affiliation with party politics. It’s been used to sell so much for so long that it stopped registering as something we’ve always owned. Try replacing it with “individual agency,” your actual ability to shape the conditions of your own life, and the stakes get more dire. Each rollback of voting rights or increase in executive power is a withdrawal from your account. So is watching the 1% get richer while your paycheck covers less than it did last year. Imagine asking permission to spend your own money while every transaction that clears covers someone else’s rent.
So what changed? The political process became something we followed rather than nurtured. Not long ago, conservatives balked at federal overreach, the mention of reparations, and excessive government spending. The narrative looks very different today. Federal hands reaching into state elections. Billion-dollar proposals that serve the connected rather than the public. The White House itself altered with little accountability, few guardrails, and no consideration for the citizens it was meant to serve. We didn’t sign anything over. We just stopped opening the statements. We politicized the process until participation shrank to picking a side once a year and arguing about it the rest of the time, and a withdrawal nobody reviews clears every single time. The people who benefit are counting on exactly that. We gave away our agency for no incentive, and we continue to, quite literally, pay the price.
So at what point did we, as Americans, decide we were powerless? Who told us we weren’t already free? Powerlessness was never announced. It was marketed gradually until it felt like the natural order. Remember that “we’re not going back” was never just a slogan. It was meant to be a boundary. Black southerners like my grandparents understood that long before it became a chant, navigating a freedom issued with conditions and learning to read the fine print the country pretended wasn’t there. They had every documented reason to believe they were powerless, yet they enforced their freedom anyway. That instinct is an inheritance, available to anyone who still believes their voice carries weight.
In a few days, grills will fire up and fireworks will go off either way. What’s actually undecided is whether we show up to our 250th as people who hold the deed or people still waiting on a landlord who was never coming. Ownership is unglamorous, and the upkeep is constant. It looks like knowing your state legislators by name, since that’s where most decisions about your daily life actually get made. It looks like reading the full ballot before election day, instead of in the parking lot. It looks like sitting through a school board meeting or a public comment period, the rooms where agency gets exercised or quietly forfeited. But maintenance is the difference between an anniversary and a postmortem.
Nobody is coming to hand you your freedom, because it was never anyone’s to take. It’s been sitting in your name this whole time.
So again I ask: who told you that you weren’t already free? No matter what your answer may be, they never truly had the authority to.
T. Malik Ross, 29, Jackson, MS
