Before They Killed the Dreamer, They Tried to Kill the Constitution

What Dr. King, My Great-Uncle, and the Immigrant Struggle Teach Us About How Democracy Dies—and How We Bring It Back

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963)

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope… and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

— Senator Robert F. Kennedy University of Cape Town, South Africa (1966)

The Legacy I Carry

For most of my life, I didn’t know that my great-uncle marched with Dr. King.

I didn’t know that Matthew Guinan, my own relative — an Irish immigrant who came to the U.S. long before the rest of my family — had stood beside King on the road from Selma to Montgomery. That he helped lead the Transportation Workers Union of America, and that it was under his leadership that TWU became one of the first unions to formally and publicly back the civil rights movement.

I found out years later.
After I’d already become an immigration attorney.
After I’d spent years defending children in courtrooms, challenging ICE detention, and speaking out against the weaponization of our border.

I learned that my uncle helped deliver thousands of working-class people—mostly white, mostly immigrants or children of immigrants—into solidarity with Black Americans demanding full civil rights. That he didn’t just support King from afar. He showed up. He brought the union. He stood in the heat and the hatred. He risked everything.

And something clicked.

TWU Executive Vice-President, Matthew Guinan conferring with MLK on march from Selma to Montgomery

This work I’ve been doing for decades—this defense of immigrants, this fight for refugees, this resistance to authoritarianism disguised as law — it didn’t begin with me. It didn’t even begin with the generation before me. It was planted long ago, in the stories of people like him. People who crossed oceans, joined unions, took to the streets, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with those whose skin, history, and struggle were different — but whose cause was the same.

I carry his legacy.
I carry Dr. King’s too.

And I defend immigrants because I believe in Dr. King’s dream.
Not the dream they quote in schools.
The one they silenced.

The dream that scared the state.
The one that didn’t just ask for justice — it demanded power be returned to the people it had been stolen from.

Dr. King Wasn’t Killed Because He Dreamed—He Was Killed Because He Organized

They want us to remember Dr. King like he was a poet.
But he was a threat.

He wasn’t just preaching about harmony. He was organizing against empire.

By the time they assassinated him — on this day, April 4, 1968 — King was speaking out against the war in Vietnam. He was challenging American capitalism as a system of legalized theft. He was building the Poor People’s Campaign — an interracial movement that demanded economic justice for those left out of the American promise.

And he was hated for it.

He was watched, wiretapped, blackmailed, and criminalized.
The FBI called him a danger. City leaders called him an agitator.
And when they couldn’t stop him, they killed him.

Not because he dreamed.
Because he organized.
Because he built bridges between Black Americans, immigrant laborers, poor white Southerners, clergy, students, and working people across lines that the powerful depend on to divide us.

And that’s what The Firewall is trying to do now.
That’s why I tell you this story.

Because the same system that feared Dr. King still fears people who organize. Still fears solidarity. Still fears the idea that people from different backgrounds — immigrants and citizens, Black and white, workers and professionals — might come together and start acting like this democracy belongs to all of us.

You want proof?

Look at what they did to Kilmar Abrego García.

A father. Husband. A long-time resident of Maryland. Protected under the law.
And still — they took him.

DHS deported him to El Salvador and called it an “administrative error.”
That’s the new language of state violence. Sterile. Passive. Bloodless.

But let’s name it plainly: they disappeared him.
Because they could.
Because they’ve built a system where immigrant lives can be erased with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. And where the rest of us are expected to look away.

We won’t.

Not this time.

Because the stakes aren’t just Kilmar’s freedom — they’re everyone’s.
Because the longer we accept that some people have fewer rights, the faster all of our rights evaporate.

They killed Dr. King because he refused to accept that bargain.
And we refuse it too.

The Civil Rights Movement and the Immigrant Rights Movement: A Fractured Continuum

It’s become common to draw comparisons between the Civil Rights Movement and the immigrant rights movement. I’ve done it myself — more than once.

But we need to be precise.

The Civil Rights Movement was a demand that Black Americans — citizens — finally receive the rights that were already promised under the Constitution. Voting rights. Equal protection. Due process. The right to live, work, and move through this country with dignity.

The immigrant rights movement is different.
We aren’t just demanding access to rights — we’re fighting to be recognized by the Constitution at all.

Today in America, millions of people live under laws that treat them as if the First Amendment doesn’t apply. As if the Fourth and Fifth Amendments — against warrantless searches, against indefinite detention — were written for someone else. As if the protections of due process and equal protection were conditional. Negotiable. Optional.

But they were never meant to be.

The Framers didn’t write the Constitution to bestow gifts on a favored few.
They wrote it to limit government power.
Because they had lived under monarchy. Because they knew what unchecked authority could do.

That’s what the Bill of Rights is. Not a list of entitlements — but a set of hard brakes on tyranny.

The problem was never in that logic.
The problem was in the exclusions.

From the beginning, that promise wasn’t extended to everyone.
It excluded the enslaved. The Indigenous. Women. The poor. Immigrants.
And that exclusion has always been the weak point — the crack in the foundation where authoritarianism gets back in.

That’s what the Civil War tried to correct.
That’s what the Reconstruction Amendments aimed to fix.
And that’s what the Civil Rights Movement, led by Dr. King, demanded this country live up to.

But that work was not finished. And now, it is being undone.

Immigrants have become the legal frontier. The constitutional test case.
And most Americans don’t even realize it.

The truth is this: every time we allow a group to be placed outside the law’s protection, we are not creating a boundary — we are building a blueprint.

And what starts at the margins always moves to the center.

The Authoritarian Playbook: Divide, Dehumanize, Control

Authoritarianism doesn’t always announce itself with jackboots and tanks.
Sometimes it walks in wearing a tie, holding a clipboard, quoting policy.

But the pattern is always the same.

Pick a group.
Mark them as dangerous.
Create legal justifications for their exclusion.
Apply violence.
Expand the state’s power to make that violence permanent.
Then turn that power on everyone else.

We’ve seen this tactic across history — slavery, segregation, internment, surveillance, stop-and-frisk, family separation.
Different names. Same design.

And today, the test group is immigrants.

The MAGA regime knows exactly what it’s doing.
Immigrants are the low-hanging fruit. They lack political power. They’re easily scapegoated. And too many Americans still believe that constitutional rights are a reward for citizenship, not a protection from government overreach.

But here’s the truth:
Immigrants are not outside the Constitution.
They are inside the United States. That’s the only qualifier that matters.

And if we don’t defend that principle now, we won’t be able to defend it later—when they come for someone else.

Because when you allow the government to detain people without cause, to deport without due process, to surveil, to silence, to disappear — without resistance — those tactics don’t stay in the immigration system.

They spread.

They get rebranded and redeployed against protestors.
Against journalists.
Against lawyers.
Against teachers.
Against union organizers.
Against you.

That’s the playbook.
It always has been.

And that’s why immigration is not a niche issue.
It’s not just a policy fight. It’s the canary in the constitutional coal mine.

This is why The Firewall exists.
To track that playbook.
To expose it.
To resist it.

And to build a movement strong enough to stop it — before it’s too late.

The Firewall Vision: Reviving the Constitution, Reclaiming the Dream

Dr. King didn’t die because he gave a beautiful speech.
He died because he posed a real threat to the structure of American power.

And today, the threat we face is not only to marginalized communities, but to the very foundation of our democratic republic. The Constitution is not being discarded all at once — it’s being hollowed out piece by piece. Rights are being revoked in practice long before they are erased on paper.

This is how it happens. This is how it always happens.

And that’s why I created The Firewall.

Not as a monument to what we’ve lost — but as a defense line for what we can still save.
Not as a platform for commentary — but as an organizing hub for professionals, workers, families, and everyday people who know that democracy isn’t self-preserving — it’s defended by those who refuse to surrender.

But I come to this work humbly.

Because I know I stand on the shoulders of giants — people who bled and were beaten and jailed and murdered for standing in the gap between power and the powerless. People like Dr. King. People like my great uncle Matt Guinan, who marched not for glory, but out of conviction that solidarity across race and class and nationality was the only thing that could save this country from itself.

People who knew they might not see the promised land — but marched anyway.

I do not pretend to match their courage.
But I refuse to ignore their call.

They built a path. We walk it now.

Walk With Us

This Monday, we’ll gather again — on the anniversary of King’s death weekend — for our second Firewall organizing call.

And we will do more than remember.
We will act.

We will build strategy. Share resources. Demand accountability.
We will continue our first campaign: fighting to bring Kilmar Abrego García home.

Because this is where all of these stories come together.

Kilmar’s case is not just a policy failure. It is the latest chapter in the authoritarian playbook.
A man taken from his family without process. A community left without answers. A government that shrugs and calls it a glitch.

We won’t accept that. We won’t forget it.
And we won’t fight it alone.

If you’ve read this far, you’re already part of the movement.
Now it’s time to stand with us. To organize. To protect each other.
To keep the dream alive — not the myth, but the mission.

The mission to restrain power.
To lift every voice.
To build a republic that belongs to all of us.

That dream did not die with King.
It was planted. In the ground. In the grief. In the work.

And it’s ours to grow now.

Monday, April 7 — 7pm ET / 6pm CT / 4pm PT: The Firewall Organizing Call
Subscribers will receive RSVP info via email and Substack. Join us. Bring someone.