Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent

“They came to this country with hopes and dreams, and they gave birth to future Americans, and that’s us.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

April 1, 2026

Today, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president attended oral arguments at the United States Supreme Court. President Donald J. Trump broke precedent to take a seat in the front row of the Supreme Court’s public seating area, alongside Attorney General Pam Bondi and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to observe arguments in the case of Trump v. Barbara, a case under which Trump hopes to end the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

The case argued before the court today grew out of Trump’s executive order of January 20, 2025, the day he took the oath of office a second time, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Fulfilling a campaign promise, the order declared that, contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment, individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal permanent status.

With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other partners, three families who represented the many people endangered by this order sued the administration. Barbara, for whom the case is named, is an applicant for asylum from Honduras whose baby was due after the order was set to go into effect.

Trump has called for ending birthright citizenship since his first term as part of his appeal to his racist supporters who want to end Black and Brown equality in the United States. But his argument would overturn the central idea of the United States articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that we are all created equal.

The Fourteenth Amendment that established birthright citizenship came out of a very specific moment and addressed a specific problem. After the Civil War ended in 1865, former Confederates in the American South denied their Black neighbors basic rights. To remedy the problem, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill in 1866 establishing “[t]hat all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color…shall have the same right[s] in every State and Territory in the United States.”

But President Andrew Johnson, who was a southern Democrat elected in 1864 on a union ticket with President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill. While the Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race, Democrats tended to support racial discrimination. In that era, not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans, faced discriminatory state laws.

In contrast to the Democrats, Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”

When Republicans tried to enshrine civil rights into federal law in 1866, Johnson objected that the proposed law “comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks,” as citizens, and noted that if “all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such.” And if they weren’t already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law “to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States” when eleven southern states were not represented in Congress.

When Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson’s admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined; it simply acknowledged that the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

In the short term, Americans recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” The Fourteenth Amendment established that Black men were citizens.

But the question of whether the amendment recognized birthright citizenship for all immigrants quickly became an issue in the American West, where white settlers were not terribly concerned about Black Americans—there were only 4,272 Black Americans in California in 1870, while there were almost half a million white Americans—but wanted no part of allowing Chinese men to be part of American society.

Western state legislatures continued to discriminate against Asian immigrants by falling back on the country’s early naturalization laws, finalized in 1802, to exclude first Chinese immigrants and then others from citizenship. Those laws were carefully designed to clarify that Afro-Caribbeans and Africans—imported to be enslaved—would not have the same rights as Euro-Americans. Those laws permitted only “free white persons” to become citizens.

In the late nineteenth century, state and territorial legal systems kept people of color at the margins, using treaties, military actions, and territorial and state laws that limited land ownership, suffrage, and intermarriage.

As late as 1922, in the case of Takao Ozawa v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that Takao Ozawa, born in Japan, could not become a citizen under the 1906 Naturalization Act because that law had not overridden the 1790 naturalization law limiting citizenship to “free white persons.” The court decided that “white person” meant “persons of the Caucasian Race.” “A Japanese, born in Japan, being clearly not a Caucasian, cannot be made a citizen of the United States,” it said.

The next year, the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind upheld the argument that only “free white persons” could become citizens. In that case, the court said that Thind, an Indian Sikh man who identified himself as Indo-European, could not become a U.S. citizen because he was not a “white person” under U.S. law, and only “free white persons” could become citizens. After the Thind decision, the United States stripped the citizenship of about fifty South Asian Americans who had already become American citizens.

Those discriminatory laws would stand until after World War II, when U.S. calculations of who could be a citizen shifted along with global alliances and Americans of all backgrounds turned out to save democracy.

But despite the longstanding use of laws designed to perpetuate human enslavement to prevent certain immigrants from becoming citizens, the Supreme Court always upheld the citizenship of their children. In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act agreeing that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens.

Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.

Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.

Immigration scholar Hidetaka Hirota of the University of California, Berkeley, explains that the government went even further to protect children born in the U.S. In 1889 the Treasury Department—which then oversaw immigration—decided that a native-born child could not be sent out of the country with her foreign-born mother. Nor did the government want to hurt the U.S. citizen by expelling her mother and leaving her without a guardian. So it admitted the foreign-born mother to take care of the citizen child.

The Treasury concluded that it was not “the intention of Congress to sever the sacred ties existing between parent and child, or forcibly banish and expatriate a native-born child for the reason that its parent is a pauper.”

In May 2023, then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is “based on an historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.”

But one judge after another has sided against him on this issue, and he apparently showed up at the Supreme Court today to try to intimidate the three judges who owe their seats on the bench to him into supporting his own radical reworking of one of the key principles of our nation. He left after an hour and a half, before Cecillia Wang, the ACLU lawyer arguing for the plaintiffs, began to speak.

Later, Wang described what it was like to argue in court today. She explained, it’s “a nerve-wracking experience to argue any case in the Supreme Court, and especially one as weighty as this one, where the president of the United States is taking aim at a cherished American tradition and individual right of citizenship based on your birth in this country. I myself am a Fourteenth Amendment citizen because my parents had not yet naturalized when I was born. So I walked in today with the spirit of my parents and so many people’s ancestors in that first generation of Americans—whether they naturalized or not, I consider them all Americans. They came to this country with hopes and dreams, and they gave birth to future Americans, and that’s us.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

“Trump may have sold out our national security to enrich himself”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

March 25, 2026

Yesterday Trump told reporters that Iran “gave us a present and the present arrived today. It was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money,” he said. “It wasn’t nuclear-related, it was oil and gas-related,” he added.

Today Katherine Doyle, Courtney Kube, and Dan De Luce of NBC News reported that U.S. military officials have kept Trump up to date on events in the war on Iran by showing him a two-minute montage video of “the biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours,” or, as one put it: “stuff blowing up.”

Although Trump also receives briefings through conversations with military and intelligence officers, news reports, and foreign leaders, some of Trump’s allies expressed concern to the reporters that he is not “receiving—or absorbing—the complete picture of the war, now in its fourth week.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called their observation “an absolutely false assertion coming from someone who has not been present in the room,” but officials noted that briefings tend to focus on U.S. successes rather than Iranian actions.

The story of corruption in the Trump administration broke open after Trump fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as stories about contracting irregularities have leaked into the media. The suspicious timing of trades in S&P 500 and oil futures on Monday about fifteen minutes before Trump announced his team had been negotiating with Iran—although it hadn’t—has raised public accusations of insiders trading on national security information and thereby endangering Americans.

Yesterday Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi in response to a disclosure the Department of Justice (DOJ) had made, likely inadvertently. As part of the Republicans’ attempt to smear special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated Trump’s retention of classified documents when he left office after his first term, on March 13 the DOJ provided the House Judiciary Committee with documents related to Smith’s investigation.

Raskin noted that some of those documents potentially violate the gag order Judge Aileen Cannon placed on that material as part of the attempt to keep it from public scrutiny. This suggests, he wrote, that the DOJ appears to take the position “that it can violate Judge Cannon’s order and grand jury secrecy whenever it sees an opportunity to smear Jack Smith.”

The documents also “include damning evidence” against Trump. The documents show that highly classified documents from his time in office were mingled with material from after he left, suggesting he illegally retained documents.

The documents the DOJ provided to the committee, Raskin wrote, “suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests, and that Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Donald Trump’s super PAC, witnessed President Trump showing off a classified map to passengers on his private plane. This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”

A prosecutor’s memorandum provided to the committee by the DOJ suggested that “the disclosure of these documents represented ‘an aggravated potential harm to national security.’ The prosecutors also wrote that these were ‘highly sensitive documents—the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have.’ One ‘particularly sensitive document was accessible by only 6? people, including the president.’”

Raskin noted that Trump took classified documents on a flight to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, possibly showing people on that flight, including now–White House chief of staff Wiles, a classified map. Raskin also pointed out that at about the same time, Trump was entering into business partnerships with Saudi-backed LIV Golf and a state-linked Saudi real estate company, and that Trump told a ghostwriter he had “classified records relating to the bombing of Iran.”

Raskin wrote: “It is now clear that DOJ is in possession of evidence that President Trump has already endangered national security to further the interests of Trump family businesses. It is time for you to stop the cover-up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them. Our country is at war, American lives are at stake, and the answer to these questions has never been more pressing.”

Raskin asked the DOJ to answer questions about what was on the classified map Trump showed people on his plane, which documents Trump retained were important to his businesses, which family members knew what was in the classified documents, which document was so sensitive that only six people had access to it, whether any of the documents Trump stole or showed to others related to plans for war in the Middle East, and which, if any, foreign actors tried to access—or succeeded in accessing—the documents. He gave it a deadline of March 31 to answer these questions, and a deadline of April 14 to produce “all remaining investigative files” from Smith’s investigations.

Zach Everson of Public Citizen’s Trump Accountability Project noted that when Trump left office in 2021, his businesses were mainly real estate and hospitality and he had massive amounts of debt coming due. At the time, he had no interests in crypto and Trump Media didn’t exist.

Today the DOJ announced a settlement with right-wing activist Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security official who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian operative and ambassador Sergey Kislyak before Trump took office. Trump later pardoned him, and Flynn worked to overturn results of the 2020 presidential election to say Trump won.

In 2023 Flynn sued the DOJ for $50 million in damages, claiming he was wrongly prosecuted because of his association with Trump. A federal judge threw out the lawsuit in 2024, but Flynn’s lawyers renewed their case when Trump was reelected, and the DOJ engaged in negotiations. Today’s settlement notice did not specify a financial amount but said there will be a payment of “settlement funds.” Alexander Mallin of ABC News reported this evening that the amount was approximately $1.2 million.

In the New York Times yesterday, Lauren McGaughy reported that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is urging Republicans in state legislatures to pass extremist legislation on issues like immigration that Congress cannot, especially if one or both of the chambers in Congress flip to the Democrats in 2026. Texas House Republican Caucus chair Tom Oliverson told McGaughy that legislatures like that of Texas “can be a place where some of those ideas can be tried out because they’re difficult to do at the federal level.” Miller has called, for example, for Texas to pass a bill to end public education for undocumented children despite the 1982 Supreme Court decision striking down such a law.

But Democrats are also working at the state level to expand their own vision of equality before the law and government protection of ordinary people, including in places like Minnesota, where officials yesterday sued the Trump administration for access to information about shootings by federal officers, including the shootings that led to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Those state-level efforts to defend everyday Americans resonate tonight because today is the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which 147 workers, mostly girls and women, died either from smoke inhalation or from their fall as they jumped from high factory windows after their employer had locked the fire escape to prevent them from stealing the blouses they were making.

The horrors of that day led New Yorkers to demand the government stop such workplace abuses. “I can’t begin to tell you how disturbed the people were everywhere,” recalled Frances Perkins, a young social worker who witnessed the tragedy. “It was as though we had all done something wrong. It shouldn’t have been. We were sorry…. We didn’t want it that way. We hadn’t intended to have 147 girls and boys killed in a factory. It was a terrible thing for the people of the City of New York and the State of New York to face.”

Perkins joined a committee charged with investigating working conditions in New York, including long hours, low wages, the labor of children, and so on. It worked with a Factory Investigating Commission set up by the New York State legislature that examined working conditions around the state. They found children working in factories, women bending over poisonous chemicals, and overcrowded factories that workers could not escape in case of emergency.

New York City politicians like Al Smith cheered on the “do-gooders” but remained convinced that only political changes could make the deep and lasting changes to society necessary to improve the lives of everyday Americans. He worked to build a coalition to create those changes, and managed to usher 36 new laws regulating factories through the state legislature in three years.

Lawmakers in other states began to write similar measures of their own, and when voters elected New York’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932, the nation was ready to take such legislation national. Roosevelt brought Frances Perkins with him to Washington, where as secretary of labor she helped to usher in unemployment insurance, health insurance, old-age insurance, a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, and abolition of child labor.

Perkins later mused that the state efforts that led to national changes might have helped in some way to pay the debt society owed to those whose suffering brought horrified awareness that something in the nation had gone horribly wrong. “The extent to which this legislation in New York marked a change in American political attitudes and policies toward social responsibility can scarcely be overrated,” she said. “It was, I am convinced, a turning point.”

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

“Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

March 18, 2026

I was intending to take tonight off, but there’s big news—I mean, aside from all the other big news—that I want to make sure gets attention.

Back on February 23, Daniel Ruetenik, Pat Milton, and Cara Tabachnick of CBS News reported on a newly uncovered document in the Epstein files showing that beginning in December 2010 under the Obama administration, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was running an investigation of Jeffrey Epstein and fourteen other people for drug trafficking, prostitution, and money laundering.

The document showed the investigation, called “Chain Reaction,” was still underway in 2015. But the investigation disappeared, although the document suggested that it was a significant investigation and that the government was on the verge of indictments.

As soon as the story broke, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said: “It appears Epstein was involved in criminal activity that went way beyond pedophilia and sex trafficking, which makes it even more outrageous that [Attorney General] Pam Bondi is sitting on several million unreleased files.”

Wyden has been investigating the finances behind Epstein’s criminal sex-trafficking organization: it was his investigation that turned up the information that JPMorgan Chase neglected to report more than $1 billion in suspicious financial transactions linked to Epstein. Wyden has pushed hard for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to produce the records of those suspicious transactions for the Senate Finance Committee, but Bessent refuses.

On February 25, two days after the story of the DEA investigation broke, Wyden wrote to Terrance C. Cole, administrator of the DEA, noting that “[t]he fact that Epstein was under investigation by the DOJ’s [organized crime drug enforcement] task force suggests that there was ample evidence indicating that Epstein was engaged in heavy drug trafficking and prostitution as part of cross-border criminal conspiracy. This is incredibly disturbing and raises serious questions as to how this investigation by the DEA was handled.”

He noted that Epstein and the fourteen co-conspirators were never charged for drug trafficking or financial crimes, and wrote: “I am concerned that the DEA and DOJ during the first Trump Administration moved to terminate this investigation in order to protect pedophiles.” He also noted that the heavy redactions in the document appear to go far beyond anything authorized by the Epstein Files Transparency Act and that since the document was not classified, “there is no reason to withhold an unredacted version of this document from the U.S. Congress.”

Wyden asked Cole to produce a number of documents by March 13, 2026, including an unredacted copy of the memo in the files, information about what triggered the investigation, what types of drugs Epstein and his fourteen associates were buying or selling, when Operation Chain Reaction concluded and what was its result, why no one was charged, and why the names of the fourteen co-conspirators were redacted.

Today Wyden sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, saying: “It is my understanding that shortly after I requested an unredacted copy” of the document in the Epstein files, the Department of Justice “stepped in to prevent DEA from complying with my request. According to a confidential tip received by my staff, DEA Administrator Terry Cole was ready to provide an unredacted copy of the memorandum, but you stepped in to prevent him from doing so. My staff inquired with the DEA about the status of the production of this document and the DEA responded by directing questions to your office.”

The letter continued: “Your alleged interference in this matter is highly disturbing, not just because it continues the DOJ’s long-running obstruction of my investigation, but also because of your bizarrely favorable treatment of Ghislaine Maxwell, one of Epstein’s closest criminal associates. I should not have to explain the significance of the fact that Epstein was a target of [this high-level DEA] investigation. It suggests the government had ample evidence indicating he was engaged in large scale drug trafficking and prostitution as part of cross-border criminal conspiracy and that Epstein was likely pumping his victims, including underage girls, with incapacitating drugs to facilitate abuse. I am at a loss to understand why you are blocking further investigation of this matter.”

Noting that the document in the files was “clearly marked as ‘unclassified’ at the top of every single page,” Wyden noted: “There is absolutely no reason to withhold an unredacted version of this document from the U.S. Congress.” He added: “In order to assist my investigation into this matter, I demand that you immediately authorize the release of this document.”

Wyden also posted today on social media: “HUGE: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—Trump’s former personal lawyer who was also responsible for Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer to a cushy club fed—has intervened to block the DEA from providing details of a mysterious Epstein investigation to my Finance Committee team…. This is stunning interference. The document I’m after literally says ‘unclassified’ at the top. The investigation it details is closed. Given Blanche’s close personal ties to Donald Trump, this reeks of a continued coverup to protect key names in the Trump administration.”

Wyden’s post echoes the September 13, 2019, letter from then-chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff (D-CA) to Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, in which Schiff called out Maguire for illegally withholding a whistleblower complaint.

In that 2019 letter, Schiff warned: “The Committee can only conclude…that the serious misconduct at issue involves the President of the United States and/or other senior White House or Administration officials. This raises grave concerns that your office, together with the Department of Justice and possibly the White House, are engaged in an unlawful effort to protect the President and conceal from the Committee information related to his possible ‘serious or flagrant’ misconduct, abuse of power, or violation of law.”

Schiff was right: the whistleblower had flagged Trump’s July 2019 phone call with newly elected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, demanding Zelensky smear Joe Biden’s son Hunter before Trump would release the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine to fight off the Russian invasion that had begun in 2014. That information led to the story that Trump’s White House was running its own secret operation in Ukraine, apart from the State Department, for Trump’s own benefit. That story led to Trump’s first impeachment by the House of Representatives for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Schiff was the lead impeachment manager of the impeachment trial in the Senate, and in his closing argument, he implored Senate Republicans to bring accountability to “a man without character.” “You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all.”

“You can’t trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country,” Schiff said. “You just can’t. He will not change and you know it.” “A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way.”

But Republican senators stood behind Trump. They acquitted him of abuse of power, by a vote of 48 for conviction to 52 for acquittal. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah crossed the aisle to vote with the Democratic minority. Senate Republicans were unanimous in their vote to acquit Trump of obstruction of Congress.

And here we are.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American