They Test It on Immigrants First, Then Citizenship, Then Us. Wake up! \ stacker news

Wake up! If you’re a white person who says you care about justice.

After George Floyd, a lot of people learned the word “ally.” There were statements, yard signs, DEI trainings, the whole posture of moral alignment.

Now the posture is being stress-tested in real time.

A Minneapolis ICU nurse, Alex Pretti, is dead after being shot by a U.S. Border Patrol officer during a protest tied to federal immigration operations. The government has its account. Family and bystander accounts dispute key parts of it. But the fact that matters is simple: a citizen is dead, federal force was used, and the public is being asked to normalize the tactics and move on.

Bernice A. King called it plainly: this is a moral crisis, nonviolence requires action, and we have to tell the truth about what’s happening.

Here’s the part people keep flattening: my friend and I are Black. So when he told me, “Stephen Miller etc has been smart. Not confronting Black Americans directly but attacking immigrants — Somalis and Latinos — first. Black Americans are the first group to have successfully fought for our rights and won in America. Everyone else walked the trail we blazed…” I didn’t hear a conspiracy theory. I heard a strategy America has run before. Start with the least protected, normalize the tactics, then widen the target set.

I responded with what I’ve been holding in my chest: “I fear the 14th Amendment fight / birthright citizenship is about us.”

He came back: “Ultimately it is. We will eventually have to fight if white people don’t wake up. We have nowhere to go and we are not going back to slavery. It will be bloody.”

Let me be clear: that’s a warning about risk, not a wish and not a call to violence. It’s the kind of sentence a people say when they’ve learned, historically, that waiting for the majority to “come around” can get you killed.

And the reason birthright citizenship hits so hard is this: the 14th Amendment isn’t an abstract civics clause for Black Americans. It’s the constitutional anchor that repudiated Dred Scott and nailed citizenship into the text after slavery. When an administration tries to narrow birthright citizenship by reinterpreting “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” it’s not just “about immigrants.” It’s about whether citizenship becomes a political lever again.

If you actually believe in lawful enforcement and public safety, then the standard can’t be political rhetoric, dehumanizing language, or “trust us.” The standard has to be clear warrants, transparency, court-enforced limits, and accountability when the state uses lethal force.

Question for SN: What evidence would convince you this is contained enforcement… versus a playbook that expands who counts as fully protected by the law?

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