Juneteenth Is a Warning
Freedom wasn’t delayed by accident. It was delayed by design. That design is still with us, still evolving, and it’s pointing at you.
“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“None of us are free until all of us are free.”
— Fannie Lou Hamer
Juneteenth, the ‘Illegal’ Person, and the Machinery of Delay
I didn’t learn about Juneteenth in a textbook. I don’t remember it being taught in school. But I knew. Growing up in Texas, it was in the air even if the official stories ignored it. You learned it from the people around you, not from the curriculum. And later, as an immigration attorney, it came roaring back with a new kind of clarity.
That story of freedom delayed. Not in metaphor. Not in theory. In Galveston. In blood and dust. In fact. And by then, I had already begun to see it happening again. People caught in legal fictions that distorted their reality. Children locked in detention centers while the government decided whether they counted. Fathers disappeared without warning. Mothers told to wait in Mexico, in cages, in silence. Juneteenth wasn’t just history. It was prophecy.
This country has always had a gift for making freedom conditional. It promises justice in one breath and chokes it in the next. It declares liberation, then delays it. Or disfigures it. Or sells it off.
Today is Juneteenth. And if we're going to mark it honestly, we have to tell the truth. Not just about the past. About the present.
The Machinery Never Stopped
On June 19, 1865, Union troops arrived in Galveston to inform enslaved people that they were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been signed two and a half years earlier. But the slaveholders knew. They just didn’t tell anyone. They waited. They extracted two more years of labor, of terror, of profit.
What we’re commemorating is not just freedom. We are commemorating the denial of it. The weaponization of silence. The manipulation of time. The lie that freedom exists because someone says so, rather than when the people rise and seize it.
And that tactic, delay as domination, is still with us.
A Legal Fiction Called “Illegal”
The Constitution never used the word “slave.” It danced around the term. It called people “held to service,” or counted them as three-fifths. Erasure by language. Domination by omission. You could be worked to death, sold, raped, hunted, but not named.
Now we use another word. Illegal. Not convicted. Not tried. Just labeled. Erased. We use it to justify cages, to deny healthcare, to separate families. And more and more, that word is creeping beyond the border. It’s being used to mark protest as crime. Journalism as subversion. Legal defense as conspiracy.
Today’s authoritarian project doesn’t need to rewrite the Constitution. It just needs to expand the list of people who don’t count.
The Prototypes
Immigrants have lived in the future we now fear. Surveillance without oversight. Arrest without charge. Detention without time limit. Deportation without hearing.
Black communities, too, have long understood what it means to live under laws designed to punish survival. Mass incarceration was never a malfunction. It was a design. A continuation of slavery by other means. And it’s no accident that many of the tactics used on migrants were first perfected in Black communities.
ICE raids are built on the same scaffolding as stop-and-frisk. And immigrant detention centers aren’t just similar to for-profit prisons. They are for-profit prisons. DHS is the biggest customer the private prison industry has. Bigger than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The cruelty isn’t theoretical. It’s financed. Streamlined. Branded.
Now those tools are being turned inward. On whistleblowers. On librarians. On teachers. On doctors. On you.
Symbol vs Substance
Juneteenth was made a federal holiday in 2021, signed into law by President Biden. That fact matters. It was a long-overdue acknowledgment of something many Black Americans had been commemorating for generations.
But even as it became law, we were already watching states under MAGA control ban books, gut DEI programs, rewrite curricula to erase the truth about slavery, Jim Crow, and resistance. This is the playbook. Give a symbol. Kill the substance.
Freedom of speech, but not in the classroom. Freedom of movement, but not across a border. Freedom to vote, but only after purging the rolls.
They don’t have to repeal rights. They just delay their meaning until the words don’t matter anymore.
Who’s Next?
When I think about the word “illegal,” I think about who it will be assigned to next. Not based on what they’ve done. But what they refuse to do.
Refuse to lie. Refuse to comply. Refuse to look away.
They’ve already started. Teachers reporting other teachers. Libraries removing books. Legal defense criminalized. Organizers surveilled. We don’t need to imagine what happens next. We’ve seen it before. Slavery had paperwork. Japanese internment had legal memos. Family separation had DHS PowerPoints.
Authoritarianism doesn’t arrive with fanfare. It expands category by category. And always, it begins with who doesn’t count.
This Is What Juneteenth Means Now
Juneteenth is not just a celebration. It’s a confrontation.
With the lie that freedom is given. With the machinery that delays it. With the systems that declare us “illegal,” then act surprised when we resist.
We remember Juneteenth not because the news of freedom came late, but because the delay was the point. Because that delay is still the point. Because the distance between the promise and the people is not an accident. It is the policy.
And we will not wait to be told we are free.
One More Thing
In the background, we’ve been working on something new. A project designed to put our words into action. A tool for professionals who are starting to feel the pressure mount. Who wonder if they’re next.
It’s almost ready.
And when it drops, it will help you see what’s coming. And what to do next.
Happy Juneteenth. Not just a holiday. A demand. A memory. A warning. A vow.
We’re not waiting anymore.
Take Action Now
🔗 RSVP for our weekly Organizing Call, Mondays at 7 PM ET / 6 PM CT / 4 PM PT
🔗 Subscribe to The Firewall
🔗 Share This Now