You Are Next. Unless You Fight Now.
What began at the border is now coming for all of us. The suspension of habeas corpus isn’t just a threat. It’s a red flare from a regime already disappearing people with impunity.
“The real crime of the totalitarian is not that he silences dissent. It is that he teaches us to forget how to speak.”
— Garry Kasparov
“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
What If It Were You?
He was eighteen. He had just finished a call with his sister. A lawyer had called his name earlier that morning, and for a moment, he thought help had finally come. He thought things were moving in the right direction.
The guards came an hour later. No explanation. No hearing. No paper trail.
They drove him to the tarmac in a van with blacked-out windows. No translator. No interpreter. Just the thrum of the engine and the terror of the unknown.
Where are you taking me?
They didn’t say he was being sent to Libya. They didn’t tell him there would be rifles and no names. No camps with barbed wire in the desert. They didn’t tell him anything.
He disappeared.
No lawyer. No judge. No call. And no right to ask why.
Now replace him with your child. Your mother. Your lover. Yourself.
This isn’t dystopia. This is what the U.S. immigration system already does. The only difference is whether or not we care who it happens to.
This Is Not New — It’s Just Expanding
Trump’s Slave Auction exposed it: secret deals, untraceable flights, coerced transfers to violent regimes. A shadow network that disappears humans like contraband.
And now?
They want to formalize it. Bring the darkness home.
Stephen Miller, from his perch in the West Wing, floated it plainly: the White House is “active looking at” suspension of habeas corpus.
No rebellion. No invasion. Just power. And the thirst to wield it without friction.
This was always a prototype. Immigrants were the test subjects. The border, the laboratory. The next phase is already underway.
They’re not wondering if they can. They’re wondering if we’ll let them.
Habeas Corpus: What It Means, and Why It’s Everything
Habeas corpus is the right to face a judge and demand to know: Why am I being held?
Without it, the state does not owe you an answer. Not for a day. Not ever.
It is the oldest tool of liberty. The wall between law and raw force.
It’s not romantic. It’s not abstract. It’s the one line that says the state can’t make you vanish.
Suspend it, and the government no longer needs a charge. A court. A case. Just a cage.
We are told suspension is only allowed during rebellion or invasion. That’s not a loophole. It’s a limit. One they are already preparing to ignore.
Democracy dies behind closed hangar doors.
Why Say It Now? The Signal, Not the Law
This is about performance. Not policy.
Announcing the possibility of suspension isn’t legal preparation. It’s a dare. A test of our reflexes. A signal to allies and a chill to dissenters.
Miller doesn’t need it to happen now. He needs the country to hear it, fear it, and normalize it.
Authoritarians float the unimaginable to see who flinches. When nobody speaks, they move forward.
The essence of tyranny is not that it is always being acted upon. It’s that it is always being prepared for.
The door is cracked. The order isn’t signed — but the silence is deafening.
Will we scream? Or will we stare?
From Foreign-Born to “Homegrowns”: The Infrastructure Already Exists
This isn’t theory. It’s a blueprint already built.
Private detention centers. Military flights. For-profit contractors. A bureaucracy designed for denial and disappearance. Nothing has to be invented.
We’ve tolerated it for decades — because it happened to “them.”
But the people being taken now have green cards. Citizenship. American children. Some are lawyers. Some are activists. Some just had the wrong last name.
You don’t need a new system to erase new people. Just a shift in the target.
If they can disappear them, they can disappear you.
What Comes Next: The World Without Habeas
Imagine being grabbed at a protest. The cops say the event was illegal. You didn’t hear. You were livestreaming.
Now you’re gone. No lawyer. No docket. No explanation. The jail has no record. Your family calls and gets a shrug.
Without habeas, there’s no demand the government explain itself. There’s no light. Only darkness.
This was the migrant experience. It’s already being mapped onto citizens.
Teachers. Clergy. Journalists. Public servants.
No system can survive that silence for long and still call itself free.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Dr. King didn’t mean someday. He meant now.
Red Line: What Must Happen Now
This is the moment.
The Firewall is convening a national response.
A defense network. A whistleblower channel. A coalition of professionals across law, faith, tech, healthcare, education, nonprofit, journalism, human resources, and more.
Not to talk. To act.
This isn’t about political affiliation. It’s about whether the government owes the people it cages a reason.
If we accept the suspension of that most basic right — then we are accepting a future where any one of us can be taken. At any time. For any reason. Or none at all.
You are not next — if you fight now.
Link to History
The last time they sold people for profit, it was on auction blocks.
Now the sale is quieter. The disappearance, cleaner. The cover story, slicker.
But the outcome is the same: human beings stripped of rights, shuffled out of sight, justified by a state that calls it law.
The infrastructure we revealed in Trump’s Slave Auction — that wasn’t an outlier. It was a dress rehearsal. The only question is whether the curtain rises with or without an audience.
History doesn’t beg. It insists. And it’s knocking again.
We know what this is. The warning has been sounded.
The rest is up to us.
This is The Firewall.
Subscribe. Share. Organize. Prepare.
Join The Firewall's Next Organizing Call
Monday, May 12, 2025 — 7:00 PM ET | 6:00 PM CT | 4:00 PM PT
Tonight, we gather.
Not just to react—but to organize.
The Firewall is holding our weekly call tonight for workers and professionals across law, education, healthcare, tech, journalism, nonprofit, human resources, faith, and public service. If you work within the institutions this regime hopes to bend or break, you have a role to play in resisting its rise. These institutions can become tools of repression—or lines of defense. That choice will be made by people like us.
Join us. Move from concern to action. Stand with others who refuse to be silent witnesses to the erosion of liberty.
This is where the resistance begins.
Jonathan, I am having problem every week trying to get on zoom meeting here