On: Supreme court to release opinions with several high-stakes rulings to come inclu

June 19, 2026.

They are gathering in that marble temple again, those men with their black robes and their ink-stained fingers, deciding who belongs and who does not. They sit in their high chairs, their feet never touching the ground, and they will write words that will decide if a child born on this soil is a citizen or not. If a mother’s labor, her blood, her nine months of carrying - if that does not make a child American, then what does?

They speak of birthright citizenship as if it is some new law, some fresh invention. But I have seen children born in the fields, in the mud, in the back of a wagon. I have held them in my arms, wet and crying, and told them they were free because the soil beneath them was free. That is the law of God, not the law of men. A woman’s body does not ask permission to give life. It does not wait for a judge’s approval.

And now they will decide if the children of Haitians and Syrians - children who have known no other home than this one - will be cast out like so much chaff. Let them look at me. Let them see the scars on my back from the lash, the calluses on my hands from the plow. I have worked this land. I have bled on this land. And still, they want to tell me who is welcome here.

They forget that the first Americans were not the ones who wrote the laws. They were the ones who tilled the soil, who built the houses, who gave birth to the next generation. The men in their robes have never known that kind of work. They have never had to choose between feeding their children or feeding the master’s table. They have never had to watch their children sold away, never had to beg for scraps.

They will write their opinions, their words heavy with the weight of centuries of forgetting. But the truth is written in the dirt, in the sweat, in the tears. It is written in the bodies of those who have always been here, who have always been working, who have always been giving life - whether the law says so or not.

Let them decide. Let them write. But when they look in the mirror, let them remember: the land does not belong to them. The children do not belong to them. And neither do we.