Why the Majority Needs the Minority to Save the Country
What the latest ICE killing reveals about Trump's America.
Last week, ICE killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a man who had lived in this country for more than 35 years. His children, family, and community are now left to mourn him. Mr. Salgado Araujo’s death is not an isolated incident. We’re living in a moment where the Supreme Court has just stripped Temporary Protected Status from people who’ve spent decades building their lives here, where the Court let birthright citizenship survive by only the narrowest of margins, and where ICE quietly stopped reporting its own custody death toll because the numbers had already surpassed 2025, one of the deadliest years on record for immigrants.
That timing isn’t a coincidence. When the legal ground beneath immigrant communities is pulled away and the message is you are not protected, you do not matter, violence follows. Not only physical violence, but the violence in policy and exclusion that makes physical violence possible.
None of this is new. When this country was founded 250 years ago, we wrote a constitution that was supposed to protect everyone. But the Naturalization Act of 1790 made it clear that “everyone” meant free white persons only. For more than two centuries, the same question has echoed through this country’s laws: who belongs here? The TPS ruling sits in a long line of decisions, from the gutting of the Voting Rights Act to Dobbs and Students for Fair Admissions, that follow the same pattern of targeting a population, finding a sympathetic court, and stripping away their protections.
This episode is a call to three concrete actions: commit to understanding the pattern and keeping Lorenzo’s name in public memory; deny complicity by documenting ICE activity, resisting preemptive compliance, and building community defense; and engage elected officials directly, either in hearings, in public comment, or in organizing, because change comes not from a single dramatic moment, but from thousands of sustained, ordinary actions.
At 250 years of American democracy, the question isn’t whether to celebrate — it’s whether this generation finally breaks the cycle by demanding something better. The choice is ours, and it starts now.
Joining the conversation is American civil rights advocate, Critical Race Theory scholar, and Columbia Law School professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, whose new book, Backtalker: An American Memoir, is out now. We discuss how intersectionality and Critical Race Theory matter in today’s political climate and explore how backlash against Critical Race Theory is tied to a broader effort to reshape American democracy.
We need the eleven John McCains in the Republican Party to reject Todd Blanche as a legitimate Attorney General.
I am looking at you eleven Republican members of the Judiciary Committee to finally make one principled stand. Show some courage, individually or as a group.
ICE kills Citizens who are good people, its trumps plan to hate and harm us, he is cruel pos!