When A Congressman Beat A Senator Unconscious, America Confronted The Limits Of Free Speech

In John Magee’s print, Preston Brooks wields a cane against Charles Sumner, who is clutching a pen and a rolled-up speech. John L. Magee, The New York Public Library

BY PAUL QUIGLEY

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

VIRGINIA TECH

On May 22, 1856, Preston Brooks strode into the United States Senate chamber and beat Sen. Charles Sumner unconscious with a cane. Brooks, a South Carolina congressman, was retaliating for a speech Sumner had given condemning slavery and personally insulting a relative of Brooks.

Though lasting only a minute, the beating had far-reaching consequences. It pushed Americans one step closer to civil war.

And, as I discovered while researching my book “The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War,” it sparked a nationwide debate over free speech, political violence and the relationship between the two.
Speak without reprisal

Northerners denounced the caning as an attack on Sumner’s right to free expression. Even if they thought Sumner’s abolitionism too radical – as most white Northerners did in 1856 – they believed a U.S. senator had the right to say what he wanted without violent reprisal.

Visual images of the caning reflected the Northern take on free speech. In John Magee’s political caricature, “Southern Chivalry – Argument Versus Club’s,” Brooks wields a sturdy stick against a defenseless Sumner, who is clutching a pen in one hand and a rolled-up speech in the other. Winslow Homer’s print “Arguments of the Chivalry” depicts Sumner writing at his desk as Brooks prepares to strike.

Homer’s headline captured the message of both depictions: “The Symbol of the North is the Pen; the Symbol of the South is the Bludgeon,” which is a quote from a speech by antislavery activist Henry Ward Beecher.

Defenders of Brooks insisted any abolitionist speech was too incendiary to deserve protected status. Brooks’ hometown newspaper in Edgefield, South Carolina, berated Sumner for “licentiously prostituting the principle of freedom of speech,” reflecting the widespread conviction among white Southerners that free speech had limits.
Collapsing the distinction between words and violence

The argument between supporters of Brooks and Sumner was not isolated to the caning incident. Societies throughout history have punished language deemed blasphemous, seditious, inciting or slanderous. In most times and places, authorities have hewed more to slaveholders’ conception of free speech as a limited privilege than to abolitionists’ assertion of an absolute right. In the United States, the idea of free speech as virtually inviolable became mainstream only in the 20th century.

To pro-slavery Americans, abolitionist words warranted violent responses because such words were themselves tantamount to violence.

Alexander Stephens, future Confederate vice president, justified the caning by saying, “I have no objection to the liberty of Speech, when the liberty of the cudgel is left free to combat it.”

Another Southern politician wrote to Brooks, “Address your arguments to the Skin, to the physical sensibilities.” And one of the many replacement canes given to Brooks bore the revealing inscription “Use Knock-Down Arguments.”

Slaveholders were collapsing the distinction between words and physical violence. Language could constitute violence, and an act of violence could be a counterargument.

This logic has resurfaced in our own time, but instead of slaveholders using it to maintain white supremacy, today it is more often deployed to designate certain types of expression, such as burning crosses or displaying Nazi symbols, as hate speech against marginalized communities. It has also appeared in the increasing moves by the Trump administration to label dissent as terrorism.
Suppressing antislavery language

While most Northerners in the 1850s continued to value freedom of speech over violence, the caning convinced some that they must respond in kind.

One Minnesota newspaper editor hoped that “every Northern member will fully arm himself, and if necessary plant a cannon by the side of his desk to be used as the most effectual argument in favor of Free Speech.”

It was increasingly difficult to keep rhetorical and physical violence separate as the slavery conflict heated up.

This was a new phase in the history of free speech. While abolitionists and increasing numbers of Northerners fought for an expansive idea of free expression, publishing pamphlets and newspapers and submitting petitions to Congress, slaveholders tried to suppress antislavery language.

Terrified that abolitionist words might lead to rebellions by the enslaved, slaveholders feared for their survival. As prominent abolitionist Frederick Douglass recognized, “Slavery cannot tolerate free speech.”

Political reformer Lydia Maria Child described a growing threat: “A slaveholding community necessarily lives in the midst of gunpowder and, in this age, sparks of free thought are flying in every direction.”

Responding to those sparks of abolitionist free thought with violent repression, including acts such as the Sumner caning, slaveholders’ violence fueled the rise of the new Republican Party. The Republicans articulated their opposition to slavery with their slogan of “free soil, free speech, free labor, free men.”

Brooks and his kind ultimately brought about their own demise by provoking Northern outrage – outrage that ultimately led to war once the slaveholding South seceded.

Who gets to say what to whom? Are there any words that can justify violence? These questions polarized the country after the caning. In new forms, they continue to confound American politics 170 years on.

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How Did It Feel To Be An American Colonist In 1776? Probably Itchy, Achy And Slightly Nauseated

Life went on in the late 18th century, regardless of your everyday ailments. Archive Photos/Getty Images

BY KATHERINE OTT

CURATOR OF MEDICINE AND SCIENCE,

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN

HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

Trade the tricorn hats, bonnets and homespun shirts for flip flops, sneakers and soccer jerseys, and the intrepid revolutionaries of 1776 would have looked a lot like the people of 2026. But their sense of embodiment and experience of health was markedly different from Americans today.

It goes deeper than not having aspirin, toothpaste or air conditioning, or not knowing about germs and penicillin. What was happening in their gut and mouth and on their skin was a world away from today. Chronic bodily states of indigestion, itchy skin, flatulence and slow-healing wounds were common and accommodated.

The American colonists were friends with affliction and shared their suffering socially, in writing and conversation. Ben Franklin, no stranger to suffering, wrote that “We are first mov’d by Pain, and the whole succeeding Course of our Lives is but one continu’d Series of Action with a view to be freed from it.”

Acute illnesses like smallpox, typhoid, dysentery, yellow fever and diptheria shadowed every ache and cough. But the everyday diminishment of vitality, mobility and equanimity defined life in 1776. Illness was pervasive. Rich or poor, free or enslaved, everyone was at risk.

Since I was a child, I’ve been fascinated with bodies and what it felt like to be in someone else’s skin. Now that I am a medical historian, I am lucky to be a Smithsonian curator with access to a large collection of medical instruments that figuratively put some flesh on the descriptions in old letters and medical journals about rheum, dyspepsia and other then-common conditions.

Although embodied experience varied in different localities around the Atlantic Basin by climate, legal status, race and other vulnerabilities, the instruments used on those bodies capture general notions of physical well-being. A lot is missing from our connection to people in the past when all we use are words.

Human bodies were like animals’

The few medical instruments of the revolutionary era were heavy in the hand, awkward in use and imprecise to maneuver. They also tell a story of tolerance for pain and discomfort that is both disquieting and fascinating.

The design and materials of devices such as bone saws, fleams and scarifacators – used to bleed veins and skin surfaces – illustrate the close affinity of humans with other animals. The same scalpel or bone saw that cut a human also cleft sheep, horses, pigs and other animals in distress.

The veil between species was thin. In 1776, people lived closely with their animals. They brought them into the house in bad weather or spent nights on straw in the shed with them – exclusive of genteel families, that is.

Cleanliness often took the form of river bathing, intended to invigorate rather than for sanitary purposes. In place of bathing, people changed clothes. The result was a menu of skin complaints – fungal, bacterial and otherwise.

Lice abounded. Bed bugs interrupted sleep. Scabies, ringworm, rashes from numerous unknown sources and unwashed skin was wrapped in clothing of stiff linen, smelly woolens or coarse calico. The byproduct was irritated, itchy skin with the discomfort of scratches, scabs and the stink that accompanied it.

Because infancy was risky, some colonial families and midwives followed tough love and tried to “harden” the child with cold water immersion and weaning. Many Indigenous women, on the other hand, nursed their infants until they were three or four years old. One in three colonist babies did not live to their second birthday.

Tools to purge ill humors

If a person did survive to adulthood, there was a good chance they would live to 55 or 60, barring accidents or childbirth complications.

There were few professional doctors, so healthcare came from midwives, bonesetters who also cut hair and removed cataracts, ministers, and community members, including apothecaries and plantation root doctors who were knowledgeable about plants. Although Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia had been established as the first American hospital 25 years earlier, institutions for care were few at the time of the revolution.

European colonists commonly believed that the balance of humors – yellow and black biles, blood and phlegm – circulating through one’s body was important for health. Belief in the efficacy of bloodletting was well-established and undisputed until well into the 1800s.

Doctors, following accepted practice, would likely have bled or purged an ill person for humoral balance. Surgeons washed their bloody hands in contaminated water and dried them on their equally bloody apron or clothes, unaware of germs.

When fluid accumulated from infection, a practitioner might use a small sharp spear nested in a metal tube, called a trocar and cannula. The pair were pushed into the body wherever swelling threatened a patient’s health, or exploration of an inner cavity was warranted. Then the doctor removed the perforating trocar, with its triangular shaped head, and left the cannula in place, as a conduit for fluids going in or coming out.

Desperate patients drank liquor to escape the procedure in this pre-anaesthesia era. Community care by family, friends and experienced elders was often more effective and safer than a trained physician.

A mouthful of troubles

Low-level scurvy, caused by lack of vitamin C, was common, thanks to diets containing few vegetables and fruits. Mild scurvy caused bleeding gums, tooth loss and foul-smelling breath.

Home manuals offering advice for health, domestic activities and marriage included many recipes for mouth wash. Ingredients often included tobacco ash, alum, sage, clove and sometimes charcoal. Charcoal also doubled for polishing teeth.

To pull a cracked or decayed tooth, a practitioner might yank it with the claw of a tooth key, painful but quicker than slippery fingers or forceps.

Without a reliable way to keep food fresh, many meals included sour milk and meat that was beginning to rot – what colonists called “high.” Spoiled food meant dyspepsia – otherwise known as indigestion – and loose bowels.

People commonly used tobacco to treat many ailments, including indigestion, respiratory problems, pain and loathsome mouth afflictions. They also turned to laudanum, from opium, as well as the poisons mercury and antimony.

A life of daily discomfort

Retrospective diagnosis is always flawed but the Revolutionary generation experienced ailments that sound similar to diabetes, arthritis, cancer, anemia, rabies, the common cold and tuberculosis. There were no effective treatments or consistent diagnosis for any of these.

Some explanations of bodily difference were obviously wrong, such as physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush’s conviction that the dark skin of African Americans was a disease, derived from leprosy. Common wisdom also held that birthmarks were caused by the mother’s experience during pregnancy.

Bodily experiences that made sense in 1776 are often inscrutable to people today. Feelings are fleeting and words inadequate. Without considering objects, understanding history is incomplete, leaving people today disconnected from those who lived it.

We can’t directly know each colonist’s individual self. But knowing their material world through medical objects of their time allows us to visit and appreciate how they managed to cut through distractions of the body and bequeath to us those groundbreaking, enduring self-evident truths.

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‘America Knows Less About Itself At The Very Moment It Needs To Know The Truth’

John Duprey / 1963 Birmingham photograph from NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

BY SUSIE BANIKARIM

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Kerner Commission in response to widespread demonstrations over the treatment of Black Americans. The following year, the panel released a report, outlining systemic white racism across society—and sharply criticizing the press’s failure to cover the subject of race. “Along with the country as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective,” the report concluded, calling on newsrooms to hire and promote more Black journalists. A decade later, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) started a recurring survey to track the news industry’s progress toward inclusion, setting an ambitious goal: that the demographics of newsrooms would mirror those of the broader US population by the year 2000. The survey, which for years served as one of the industry’s primary benchmarks for tracking newsroom representation, was last conducted in 2019. ASNE, later known as the News Leaders Association (NLA), disbanded in 2024.

It’s hard to imagine a more apt metaphor for the state of Black representation in media today. At a time when the Trump administration is aggressively dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and targeting communities of color, many newsrooms have all but abandoned promises they made during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to increase racial diversity in coverage and staffing. As CJR reported last month, 76 percent of journalists identified as white in a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, compared with roughly 58 percent of Americans who identified as white in the most recent census. “You saw the industry making all these promises, but we are in a moment where we’ve got this backlash that is really exposing which of those promises were values and which ones were window dressing or branding,” Errin Haines, the president of the National Association of Black Journalists and editor at large of The 19th, told me.

In the past year, NBC News has shut down all of its verticals dedicated to reporting on Black, Latino, queer, and other underrepresented groups. CBS eliminated its Race and Culture team. Bloomberg and Politico wound down their newsletters about race, according to Nieman Lab. In February, the Washington Post laid off 45 percent of unionized Black staffers amid widespread reductions, but journalists at the Post told my colleague Riddhi Setty that leadership had given up on diverse coverage long before that.

These are a few suggestive examples—but what we know about the bigger picture of representation in journalism is largely anecdotal. There is no comprehensive or current data on reductions of race coverage or diverse staffing across the industry. In 2025, the American Press Institute (API) announced that it had “acquired the survey” from the NLA so that it could relaunch and expand that research. Robyn Tomlin, the executive director of API, told me in an email that they “are working to identify potential funding to support it in the future.” For now, only historical survey data is available on the institute’s website.

“We’re absolutely in a moment now where Black journalists are being disproportionately affected by choices around whose beats get cut and what kind of teams get dismantled,” Haines said. “And frankly, whose expertise is valued versus whose expertise is considered expendable and whose communities and what kind of audiences are just optional.”

It is particularly troubling to see newsrooms cowed by the administration’s cynical efforts to reframe DEI as discrimination, because these are the institutions on which we rely to tell that story. “The press, tasked with protecting American democracy, is best secured by reflecting the American people,” Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School and this magazine’s publisher, wrote for CJR in 2018. Six years later, many news organizations are still failing to tell the full American story. “You can’t say democracy is under threat and then just eliminate the journalists that are best positioned to explain how that threat is landing in Black communities,” Haines said. “If we get pushed out, America literally knows less about itself at the very moment that it needs to know the truth about itself.”

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois introduced the concept of “second sight” and the ability it gives Black Americans to see the country as it truly is rather than the ideal it is often claimed to be. In A Second Sight: How the Wonder and Vision of Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom, Sarah J. Jackson, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, explores how that double consciousness is both a burden and a privilege for Black storytellers, giving them “a profound insight: the ability to see through the veil, to understand the contradictions of American life with a clarity often unavailable to those at the center of power. Second sight is a vision, a tool, a gift.”

The book, out this week, is an alternative history of media in America, an insightful and invaluable examination of how Black journalists, photographers, filmmakers, radio hosts, and podcasters have shaped the nation, even while their contributions have too often been excluded from the official record. Jackson combines deep historical analysis with interviews of contemporary Black media-makers conducted over four years to trace the stories of those “who have used the tools of their time—pen, press, lens, mic—to critique the nation and imagine it otherwise.”

By structuring the book around the founding principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Jackson shows how figures such as Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Mary McLeod Bethune fundamentally reframed our understanding of these concepts. She draws a direct line between their work and journalists of today who continue to interrogate the idea of the American project—including Cobb and Haines, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Gene Demby, Gabriella Angotti-Jones, and Chenjerai Kumanyika. These journalists, Jackson writes, continue to give us “a more nuanced, evocative, and honest story about our nation. Their belief that the public can hold—and act on—this story is itself an extraordinary act of faith.”

In the book’s coda, Jackson reminds us that, as the country prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, “one measure of the integrity” of the flood of expected media coverage will be how it treats the stories of Americans on the margins. “Are the stories and contributions to democracy of countless unnamed Americans—whose lives and futures are tied to these histories—considered worthy of remembrance and celebration?” Jackson asks. “Whose freedom is celebrated? Whose life and liberty? Whose happiness protected? What futures imagined?”

One morning in the fall of 2022, Juliana Pache was solving the New York Times’ “Mini” crossword, as she did every day, when she came across something that stumped her. “I don’t remember the clues from that day, but there was something about one of the clues in particular from that Mini that I was like, ‘This feels like a white person would know this and I probably wouldn’t,’” Pache recalled.

The experience prompted Pache, a first-generation Afro-Caribbean American, to look for puzzles centered on Black history and culture. When she couldn’t find what she was looking for, she decided to make it herself. “That day, I bought a bunch of domain names, because I wasn’t sure what to name it yet. And I had never made a crossword puzzle before. I was like, ‘How hard could it be?’” She laughed. “It turns out it’s way harder than it looks.”

Pache taught herself how to construct puzzles by watching YouTube videos and found support on a Discord channel. Three months later, she debuted Black Crossword with her first mini. She has published a new puzzle every day since. The site’s tagline: “If you know, you know.” Clues this week included “‘There’s Always This ___: On Basketball and Ascension’ (2024 book by Hanif Abdurraqib),” “Radical Puerto Rican civil rights organization, The Young ___,” and “Dancer and choreographer ___ Ninja.” (The answers: Year, Lords, Willi.)

For Pache, it’s important that Black Crossword not present Black culture as a monolith. “A really big part of my goal is to connect people across the diaspora culturally,” she told me. “Language is such a huge part of how black folks across the diaspora communicate with each other. We have these kinds of shared languages.”

She has also published two puzzle books: Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora in 2024 and Black Crossword: 100 Midi Puzzles Connecting the African Diaspora last year. She is currently brainstorming for her third book, which will include a wider variety of puzzles, including word searches and logic games. “There are so many ways to challenge hatred and systemic erasure,” she told me. With Black Crossword, she has found a way to do that by centering Black culture. “My primary feeling,” she said, “was this would be a joy to have.”

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Money, Food And Survival: What Drives Paid Sex Among Young Mums In 3 African Countries

Transactional sex is a coping strategy for some adolescents. Stephane de Sakutin/AFP via Getty Images

ANTHONY IDOWU AJAYI, BERYL NYATUGA MACHOKA AND CAROLINE W. KABIRU

Transactional sex, defined as the exchange of sex for money, food, or favours, is common among young people in Africa. Studies have reported that about 10% of those aged 15-24 have engaged in this exchange in South Africa, 23% in Nigeria and 25% in Uganda. The behaviour has been linked to negative consequences such as unintended pregnancy, sexual violence and HIV infections.

Transactional sex refers to sexual relationships outside marriage that are not classified as commercial sex work, but where there is an expectation that material, financial or other benefits will be exchanged for intimacy or companionship.

We are sexual and reproductive health researchers focused on the intersection of evidence, policy, and lived realities of adolescents in Africa. We recently examined the extent and drivers of transactional sex among pregnant and parenting adolescents in three African countries: Burkina Faso, Kenya and Malawi.

In our earlier qualitative research work with pregnant and parenting girls in Nairobi’s informal settlements, we found that pregnancy intensified economic insecurity. The focus of government and most NGOs, however is mainly on preventing adolescent pregnancy. Little attention is paid to the plight and realities of pregnant and parenting girls.

Our research set out to bring attention to these girls. We did this by examining the prevalence and correlates of transactional sex among adolescents in Burkina Faso, Kenya and Malawi. We surveyed 2,243 girls: 980 in Ouagadogou, Burkina Faso; 594 in Korogocho, Nairobi, Kenya; and 669 in Blantyre, Malawi. They were all either pregnant or already parenting. The youngest participants were 12 years old in Burkina Faso and 13 years old in Kenya and Malawi. The oldest girls in all three countries were 19.

Our findings indicated that transactional sex prevalence varied by context. Living in urban informal settlement environments was a risk. The results were a reminder of the need for stronger support systems for adolescents engaged in transactional sex across the three countries, including those who are pregnant or parenting.

Our findings

Our study found that 44.3% of the girls we surveyed in Kenya, 25.4% in Burkina Faso, and 13.0% in Malawi had engaged in transactional sex at some time. The particularly high prevalence in Kenya reflects the study setting in one of Nairobi’s densely populated informal settlements. There, adolescent girls face poverty, unstable support systems, unsafe living conditions, and limited opportunities for self-development. Other studies have also shown that prevalence is lower in other settings outside informal settlements.

The most common reason girls gave for engaging in transactional sex was money. Money was a reason reported by 31.3% of participants in Kenya, 20.5% in Burkina Faso, and 7.8% in Malawi. But girls also reported exchanging sex for food, rent, shelter, clothing, school fees and sanitary pads.

In Kenya, 13.5% specifically cited sanitary pads, compared to 1.0% in Burkina Faso and 1.8% in Malawi. Smaller percentages engaged in transactional sex for school fees, phones or airtime, or other needs such as baby supplies (milk, diapers, clothes).

Individual-level factors

At the individual level, being single increased the likelihood of transactional sex across all three countries. In Burkina Faso, 20% of married and 46% of single girls had transactional sex. In Kenya it was 28% of married girls and 50% of single girls. In Malawi it was 10% of married girls and 16% of single girls.

This suggests that having a partner may provide some degree of financial, material and childcare support. Without support, single adolescent mothers may face pregnancy and early motherhood with very limited resources, increasing their vulnerability to transactional relationships.

One of the surprising findings emerged from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. There, 31% of adolescents with a secondary education had engaged in transactional sex, against 21% of those with only a primary education. This challenges the common assumption that education is an immediate shield against exploitation. It suggests that remaining in school may itself become financially difficult for adolescent girls living under poverty and weak support systems. For girls who are in school from a poor background, the need for money, food and school fees may make them engage in transactional sex.

Substance use also more than doubled the risk in Burkina Faso, among girls who reported using alcohol or drugs compared to those who did not. This association was not significant in Kenya or Malawi.

Interpersonal-level factors

At the interpersonal level, orphanhood mattered, though differently across countries.

In Malawi, girls who had lost both parents faced nearly double the risk of engaging in transactional sex, compared with non-orphans. In Kenya, girls who had lost one parent were 43% more likely to engage in transactional sex. Even more significant at the interpersonal level was the impact of low parental support in Malawi, where girls who felt unsupported by their parents were three times more likely to engage in transactional sex.

Community-level factors

We asked participants questions to assess how safe they felt in their neighbourhoods. In Kenya and Burkina Faso, a higher score for perceived neighbourhood safety was associated with a lower likelihood of transactional sex. Girls said they engaged in sex in exchange for security and protection. In Malawi, feeling safe didn’t make a difference.

What needs to change

The study demonstrates that transactional sex among pregnant and parenting adolescents is less a choice than a strategy to cope with severe socioeconomic hardship. It is shaped by distinct individual risks, fracturing family support and community insecurity.

What drives transactional sex changes from country to country. Because of this, programmes to address it need to be customised for each specific place.

Interventions should address structural vulnerabilities and strengthen family and community support systems. They must also improve neighbourhood safety to reduce adolescent mothers’ reliance on transactional sex and the harms associated with it.

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Xenophobia In South Africa: State’s Complicity With Gangs And Vigilantes Is Threatening Its Ability To Govern

An anti-immigrant march in South Africa, June 2026. Screengrab/YouTube/Al Jazeera English

BY LOREN B. LANDAU AND JEAN PIERRE MISAGO

Marches, Mozambicans murdered, state-sponsored evacuations, a nationally televised presidential address. Anti-immigrant mobilisation has again drawn the world’s attention to South Africa. The continental backlash threatens tourism, trade, diplomacy and investment opportunities in Africa’s largest economy, and is derailing its constitutional democracy.

Many citizens demand the country restore its sovereignty – the state’s ability to govern itself and determine its own laws within its borders – by tightening border controls. Parties promise to deliver walls, raids and deportations.

What these popular debates over sovereignty and border control overlook is that politics is not defined on the borders. It comes from control over resources and production. In South Africa’s past, this was mines. Now it is cities, townships, and the infrastructure that connects them. This is where the country’s political future is being forged. This is where sovereignty is being lost. And the state is helping to make this happen.

Over the past 20 years, we have investigated the politics of migration and xenophobia in South Africa. Together we founded Xenowatch and the Mobility Governance Lab to document incidents of xenophobic discrimination and evaluate strategies to promote secure mobility and social cohesion.

In a paper published in 2022 we argued that xenophobic mobilisation in South Africa was not merely a grassroots phenomenon by frustrated communities. Nor is it the result of a “third force” or external actors out to embarrass the country. Rather, we argue, it is a political enterprise co-produced by vigilante groups and the state through acts of commission and omission. These include failing to censure those who exclude through violence and other forms of illegal conduct. It also includes migration policies and practices that demonise those from other countries.

This has resulted in the state consistently legitimising and rewarding the criminal conduct of vigilante groups.

Our research shows that xenophobic discrimination has become a feature of post-apartheid South Africa’s socio-political landscape. We argue that the only interventions capable of disrupting xenophobic mobilisation are those that lower, or ideally eliminate, its political, economic and social benefits. This must include holding people accountable for their actions, consistent and impartial application of the law to address both illegal migration and criminal vigilante exclusion of migrants, and joint efforts by the state and civil society to counter anti-migrant mobilisation.

On the ground

Our investigations show that in townships, “community development” associations run protection rackets determining who can live, build, or conduct business in their “communities”. They work in collaboration with local police to remove unwanted people.

Elected leaders often look away or embrace them to win votes. This is not about enforcing law or creating opportunities for all. It is not about immigration control. It is about using social division to extract resources and build power. There is often strong local support for these measures and those leading them. However, they are illegal and institutionalise state complicity in extractive violence that weakens, rather than enforces, the rule of law.

From mid-2025, Operation Dudula – an anti-immigrant social movement that has now registered as a political party – and March and March – a self-described “grassroots” civic organisation focused on illegal immigration – systematically blockaded public health facilities, denying migrants access to at least 53 clinics across KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and Gauteng provinces.

The South African Human Rights Commission found that despite engagement with the Department of Health and the National Commissioner of Police (both of which committed to intervening) vigilante conduct continued. In some instances the police refused to take statements from victims.

Despite court rulings interdicting Operation Dudula, the unlawful operations continued across the country.

Without state enforcement, court orders are only paper. Rather than being sanctioned, March and March confirmed that it had

an agreement with the SAPS (South African Police Service) and Metro Police, which don’t interfere with them.

A co-authored political enterprise

Between 2022 and 2025, Xenowatch recorded 406 verified incidents resulting in 75 deaths. This translates into an average of 102 xenophobic discrimination incidents per year.

In 2025 alone, 151 incidents were recorded. In the first five months of 2026, a further 22 verified incidents were recorded. Of the 22 incidents, 14 were violent attacks that largely followed anti-migrant protests in some parts of the country.

The recent attacks resulted in at least four people dead and hundreds displaced. Despite this, officials regularly argue this is “normal” criminality. In 2008, 2010, and again in 2026, there have been accusations of a third force determined to undermine the country’s successes or punish it for its positions on Israel and Russia.

Rather than intervene effectively, the government has addressed the rise of these political formations with a National Action Plan on Racism and Xenophobia. It contains almost no plan. Rather than marshal state resources against the anti-immigrant campaigns, it focuses on education and public events intended to foster goodwill and social cohesion. Debates and dialogues are welcome. But they do little to erode the power of gangsters and criminal networks.

When the state has acted, it helps reinforce precisely the kind of political fragmentation and profit taking it purports to prevent. Its largest police operation to protect foreigners – Operation Fiela – resulted in police demanding additional bribes from migrants, a loss of economic activity and tax revenue, and only a small reduction in immigrant numbers.

All this was done in the name of restoring citizens’ faith in the immigration system. There were winners: not immigrants or citizens, but law enforcers who line their pockets and boost their operational budgets.

A recent meeting convened at the official seat of government, the Union Buildings, provides another example. On 25 May 2026, senior government ministers convened a high-level meeting with the leadership of March and March and other organisations “to address illegal immigration and the rise in anti-immigration protests in the country”.

In our view, granting groups like this access to the highest political office lends them legitimacy and gives them a place in the South African political system. Their words are broadcast on national television and radio stations. Their ultimatums come to represent legitimate political demands.

The state may temporarily quell crises. But it emboldens these groups to carry on. The results are a politics of fragmentation and self-made laws.

What needs to be done

Protecting South Africa’s constitutional democracy requires three things done simultaneously.

First, genuine accountability for perpetrators: not symbolic arrests, but prosecutions that result in meaningful consequences for instigators and perpetrators.

Second, consistent and impartial enforcement of the rule of law to address both illegal migration and criminal vigilante exclusion of migrants.

Third, the building of political will and muscle by the state and civil society, to hold politicians accountable when their rhetoric or conduct emboldens exclusionary violence and practices. This is not an issue of migration management and border control. It is one of sovereignty and law.

Civil society organisations are already pursuing litigation and winning cases in court. But court orders flouted with impunity are not victories; they are further evidence of the problem. Without the political muscle to hold the state accountable for its complicity, the co-creation of exclusion will continue.

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The Story Behind Soweto Blues, Miriam Makeba’s Famous Song About The June 16 Uprising

Miriam Makeba in 1969 in exile. Rob Mieremet/Nationaal Archief, CC BY

BY GWEN ANSELL

ASSOCIATE OF THE GORDON 

INSTITUTE FOR BUSINESS SCIENCE,

UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA

Miriam Makeba sang a famous song about the 16 June 1976 uprising in her birthplace, South Africa. The protest was a pivotal point in the fight against apartheid and white minority rule in the country. The song was called Soweto Blues and its opening lines go:

The children got a letter from the Master.

It said no more Xhosa, Sotho, no more Zulu

Refusing to comply they sent an answer

That’s when the policemen came…

The song recalls the events of that day when South African schoolchildren, marching peacefully in Soweto to protest the imposition of Afrikaans as an official language of instruction alongside English in Black schools, were shot down by the police of the apartheid regime.

Soweto Blues was also the title chosen by my publishers for the cover of my historical research on the politics of South African jazz and popular music.

Many high school students in South Africa – and many of their teachers – were not fluent in Afrikaans, seen as the language of the oppressor. The move was part of a push, dubbed “Bantu Education”, to reduce Black education and cut it off from international opportunities and “subversive” English-language ideas. The system’s architect, Hendrik Verwoerd, had declared that Black children must never be educated above the level of “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.

Soweto Blues is one of the two compositions most closely associated with the events of June 16. The other, Isililo (Tears of Soweto), from Sakhile, was written in retrospect, in 1982, as the group’s co-leader, saxophonist Khaya Mahlangu, reflected on his nightmare memories of Soweto on that day.

But Soweto Blues was written hot, as the news of the massacre reached the world. The story of the song is a story of solidarity with the struggle against apartheid across the African continent.

Composed and recorded in Kumasi, Ghana

Ask who composed the song, and the answer is likely to be trumpeter Hugh Masekela and/or his ex wife Miriam Makeba. The song, officially released in 1977 by Makeba, is best-known in the version released on her 1989 album, Welela.

The lyrics are instantly recognisable as being penned by Masekela the rhymer – “Just a little atrocity/Deep in the city”.

But the melody tells a bigger, pan-African story. It was co-written by the trumpeter and guitarist Stanley Kwesi Todd, founder of Ghanaian ensemble Hedzoleh (“freedom”) Sounds.

Masekela was introduced to the west Africans by Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti in 1973, and the collaboration produced three albums led by his name: Introducing Hedzoleh Soundz (1973); I Am Not Afraid (1974); and The Boy’s Doin’ It (1975).

But there were other collaborations between Kwesi and Masekela too, including the 1977 You Told Your Mama Not to Worry. That was recorded in Kumasi, Ghana with Kwesi as co-producer, and released in the US by the new Casablanca label, before that imprint settled into a pop and disco music identity.

Makeba came from her exile home in Guinea to record; there were compositions by Masekela and Todd, tunes adapted from tradition, and a title track about exile composed by South African singer and songwriter Letta Mbulu. Soweto Blues closed the A-side. The original album, regrettably, is currently hard to find.

A marketable title

So how did it end up as my book title? It wasn’t my intention.

The main title I wanted was Black Heroes, alluding to a 1976 Tete Mbambisa tune paying tribute to both the young martyrs of ‘76 and to US jazz star John Coltrane. That seemed to me to sum up the relationship between South African and Black American jazz as torches lighting the way to freedom.

But it appeared that “somebody in marketing” didn’t think the two words “Black” plus “Heroes”, would sell. “Aren’t there any other song titles that might be catchier?” A back-and-forth ensued, until Soweto Blues came up. “That’s it! 'Soweto’ always sells!”

The 1976 uprising sparked in Soweto, but spread across the country, from the urban settlements of Langa and Gugulethu in the Cape to the rural villages of the North West province. Parents scoured mortuaries for their dead children, many of whom had apparently been shot in the back. Nobody knows precisely how many died, but the national figure is estimated as well north of 700.

And just as the rising itself cannot be narrowed to what happened in Soweto – even if the name “sells” – so the song paying tribute cannot be confined to South Africa alone. It came from a trumpet-player exiled in the US, a singer sheltered by Guinea, and a musician born in Ghana.

Half a century later, the words of the song still have lessons about the events of June 16. The story of its creation teaches too: about a shared African history in which borders did not define humanity.

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Appolonia: The Story Of An African Kingdom That Resisted The Atlantic Slave Trade

Hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were shipped from the Gold Coast, today’s Ghana. National Maritime Museum, London, CC BY

BY NANA KESSE

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

CLARK UNIVERSITY

The transatlantic slave trade was a multilayered, highly commercialised global enterprise that lasted from the early 1500s to the mid 1800s.

The events over this period are far too complex to fit into a straightforward perpetrator-victim narrative. While the trade catastrophically dehumanised and commodified over 12.5 million Africans, it was not just an external conquest.

Europeans lacked the geographical knowledge, immunity to endemic tropical diseases, and the military power to venture into the African interior. So they became dependent on African states and merchant elites for the supply of captives.

By controlling coastal ports, regulating market access, and managing the interior trade routes that brought captives to the coast, these African brokers enabled and shaped the European trade in human beings.

Yet, this internal participation was rarely uniform. While certain powerful African societies and groups largely procured captives from weaker communities through warfare or raids, a few centralised African states chose neither to fully participate in nor completely abstain from the slave trade.

One such society was the Kingdom of Appolonia (today known as the Nzema State) in the southwestern Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). Throughout the four centuries of Atlantic slavery, Appolonia traded only 352 captives while other Gold Coast towns like Elmina and Cape Coast each shipped hundreds of thousands of enslaved people.

As a historian of west Africa, particularly Ghana, specialising in environmental and water history as well as the slave trade, I have spent nearly a decade researching Appolonia’s role in the Atlantic slave trade. My recent study reveals that Appolonia was the only port region on the Gold Coast where the Atlantic slave trade did not thrive, although indigenous African slavery was practised in the kingdom. Appolonia stands out as a statistical and geographical outlier within the slave trade economy.

Appolonia’s story raises several critical questions. Why did the kingdom trade so few enslaved people? Why is it important to study regions of Africa where the slave trade was less dominant? And what do outliers like Appolonia teach us about historical and reparative justice?

Appolonia in historical context

Appolonia is an Akan society in southwestern Ghana, located at the border with Côte d'Ivoire. The Portuguese named this region after Saint Appolonia, an Egyptian Christian virgin, because they discovered the area on her festival day.

The region was made up of small villages that came together to establish the Appolonian Kingdom in the late 1600s. It was here that Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, was born in 1909.

The founding of the Appolonian Kingdom coincided with other grand historical developments on the Gold Coast. These include the rise of the Asante Kingdom to superpower status and the transformation of the region into a centre for the Atlantic slave trade.

These events drew Appolonia into the larger Atlantic economy. However, Appolonia was probably the only Gold Coast society that effectively said “no” to the Atlantic slave trade.

Saying “no” did not mean a complete abstinence. The 352 enslaved individuals that Appolonia shipped account for 0.0028% of the Africans transported across the Atlantic Ocean. My intention is not to reduce these precious lives to mere statistics. Rather, I aim to show that, in percentage terms, Appolonia’s involvement in the trade was minimal.

To illustrate this point, let’s examine some comparative data.

Distribution of slave exports from the Gold Coast. Nana Kesse, Author provided (no reuse)

The table displays slave exports from various regions of the Gold Coast. This information was obtained from the SlaveVoyages database, compiled over decades by various researchers in an international collaborative effort. It offers statistics on enslaved individuals shipped from Africa and those who survived the journey.

For instance, in the 18th-century Gold Coast, port towns like Anomabo recorded 168,348 slave exports, Cape Coast 100,434 and Elmina 85,636 – compared with Appolonia’s 352.

Consider the figures alongside the historical population densities of these areas.

During the 1700s, Anomabu had approximately 8,750 inhabitants; yet a staggering 168,348 captives were shipped from there. This indicates significant slave trading. Similarly, Cape Coast and Elmina had projected populations of around 5,000 and 25,000 residents, yet recorded high slave exports.

Appolonia, on the other hand, had an estimated population of 15,600-19,600 inhabitants but traded only 352.

What this means

Why did Appolonia trade so few enslaved people? Using demographic database analysis, European archival records, and oral histories, my research suggests two main reasons.

First, Appolonia was not a slaving society. Its economy depended rather on the gold and ivory trade.

Second, the kingdom implemented policies, such as the amonle covenant, that prevented the sale of Appolonian subjects. Amonle was a sacred ritual involving human sacrifice of Appolonian royals and the mixing of their blood with a special herbal concoction. It was then drunk by both Appolonian rulers and migrants who settled in the kingdom.

This powerful ritual served as the binding oath against selling Appolonian locals and refugees, cursing anyone who broke the oath. This policy undermined any internal system for producing enslaved people within the kingdom for sale.

The question of reparations

Appolonia’s story further complicates our understanding and approach to seeking historical justice and reparations for the slave trade. It is one thing for a known victim to demand justice and reparations from an identifiable perpetrator, whether through symbolic acts like an apology, or through monetary compensation.

It’s a different matter when the identities of both the victim and the perpetrator are unknown – or when the perpetrator and the victim are one and the same. Who dispenses reparations to whom?

In the case of Appolonia, we do not know the identities of the 352 victims exported, nor have scholars, including myself, been able to trace these captives to a specific African homeland.

We have not found historical records indicating that the people of Appolonia captured or purchased these individuals for resale. Given this context, should Appolonia be expected to offer reparations? If yes, to whom?

Conversely, is it ethically justifiable for Appolonia to seek reparative justice from the unknown Europeans who purchased the 352 captives?

Appolonia’s story complicates the call for reparative justice. However, it does not contradict the landmark March 2026 United Nations resolution officially declaring the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity”. For the slave trade is indeed the most violent and catastrophic of the many atrocities committed against Africans and African descended people.

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Conspiracy Theories That Emerged From A Civil Rights Shooting 60 Years Ago Resonate Today

James Meredith looks at Aubrey Norvell, partially hidden behind foliage, after Norvell shot him in Hernando, Miss., on June 6, 1966. AP Photo/Jack Thornell

BY ARAM GOUDSOUZIAN

BIZAT FAMILY PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,

UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS

On June 6, 1966, on a stretch of Highway 51 just south of Hernando, Mississippi, a portly, middle-aged white man named Aubrey Norvell stepped out of a gully, lifted his shotgun and fired three shots at James Meredith, a Black civil rights activist and Air Force veteran.

Famous for integrating the University of Mississippi four years earlier, Meredith was on the second day of a walk from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, with the aims of registering voters and defying white intimidation.

Bloodied by bird shot, Meredith again returned to the national spotlight. The shooting transformed his walk into a civil rights spectacle.

Activists descended upon Mississippi for a three-week mass march. It featured titans of the movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., while inspiring Mississippians to march down country roads, volunteer their homes and food, and register at their local courthouses. During these protests, the civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael introduced “Black Power,” a slogan of self-determination that marked the next stage in the Black freedom struggle.

It is a rich, intricate and evocative story – one that I tried to chronicle in my book, “Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear.”

Sixty years later, however, a mystery lingers. Clouded in the haze of a political extravaganza, Norvell never revealed his motivations for shooting Meredith.

His silence allowed for the flourishing of conspiracy theories – most notably, from those most resistant to racial equality. In a political and rhetorical strategy that echoes into the present day, many white conservative Southerners painted themselves as Norvell’s real victims.

‘A quiet, Christian man’

At first, it was civil rights activists who suspected a conspiracy. Meredith’s companions testified that law enforcement had reacted slowly to Norvell’s threat. They assumed that Norvell was a virulent white supremacist, in cahoots with a racist police force.

But as reporters investigated Norvell, they found no evidence of a hate-spewing Klansman. He lived in a middle-class Memphis suburb. He had no criminal record. Neighbors described him as a “quiet, Christian man” who never mentioned civil rights, one way or another.

Upon posting bond, Norvell disappeared from the public eye until his trial that November.
The significance of bird shot

By presenting a blank slate, Norvell allowed white Southern conservatives to launch a counternarrative. The previous decade of Black activism, from the Montgomery bus boycott through the Selma-to-Montgomery march, had taught them that open violence ignited public outrage and prompted civil rights legislation. So they distanced themselves from Norvell.

Mississippi Gov. Paul Johnson noted that Meredith was attacked “by birdshot by an out-of-state resident.” It foreshadowed the language employed by a host of Southern politicians and newspaper editorialists.

Again and again, in speeches and articles and letters, they mentioned that Norvell used bird shot. If he was aiming to kill, why pepper Meredith with pellets? They claimed a conspiracy against the white South.

“The whole affair smells badly of a plot instigated by the Communist-controlled rights groups and capitalized on by the press, the government, and all the other liberal screamers,” wrote one woman to Sen. James Eastland, as I discovered during my research. Like many others, she imagined that civil rights organizations paid Norvell to wound Meredith, which would stoke a media hubbub and invite the federal government to persecute white Southerners.

Searching for a conspiracy

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission opened in 1956 to protect white supremacy. In an incredible twist to this tale, a commission investigator authorized a US$5,000 bribe to Norvell’s attorney if Norvell would admit that liberals paid him to shoot Meredith.

According to commission files, an FBI agent from Mississippi, high-ranking officials of the Memphis Police Department and a Mississippi district attorney all agreed that Norvell’s shooting was “a hired job for the advancement of various civil rights groups.”

Segregationists kept grasping at this far-fetched scenario, exaggerating and manipulating it to serve the purpose of discrediting the Meredith March Against Fear. A Mississippi sheriff named Jack Cauthen went even further, suggesting Meredith hadn’t even been shot in the first place. He claimed to have put his arm around Meredith, who had rejoined the march for its final days.

“His back was just smooth as silk. There hadn’t been no pellets or shots in James’s back,” asserted Cauthen, as I found while conducting research for my book. “I don’t think he was shot, no sir.”

Echoes from the past

Norvell pleaded guilty and spent 18 months in Parchman Prison in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Despite being approached by many journalists and historians – including me – he never revealed his motive. He died in 2016.

In the 1960s, white southerners perceived that their way of life was under assault by big institutions, including the federal government and the media. They blamed the Civil Rights Movement on nefarious “outside agitators” determined to smash their status. Their political motivations led them down bizarre and fantastical paths, with some even fashioning themselves as the true victims of Norvell’s attack.

Racist conspiracy theories still plague American politics, from baseless accusations that Barack Obama was born in Kenya to false assertions that global elites are engineering a “great replacement” of white Americans.

Even if these notions emerge from a modern sense of dislocation and anxiety, I think they have roots in the same crass bigotry that defined the conspiratorial segregationists of the civil rights era.

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Politicians Have Long Misunderstood The ‘Working Class’. The Rise Of The Far Right Shows How Mistaken They Have Been

BY DAVID PEETZ

Class has always mattered, and now social democratic parties that sprung from a working class — including the Australian Labor Party – are finding out why.

Over many years, and in many countries, a growing view among political actors and within political science was that class was losing its punch. The line was something like this. The working class once voted for labour parties. The middle class voted conservative. But over many years) that difference between how the classes voted got smaller and smaller. In some places it disappeared.

The “decline of class” narrative suited the leaders of labour and social democratic parties.

They could safely adopt market-based neoliberal policies, with a human touch added, in the knowledge their base wouldn’t desert them. But their base was changing. It was becoming more middle class, more individualistic, more awake to the benefits of market solutions to complex problems.

Now, those politicians are shocked by the rise of far-right political parties that now claim to represent the working class. In Australia, One Nation is close to matching Labor — in some polls, it is already ahead.

In the United Kingdom, Reform is leading in all the polls, while the governing Labour party is below 20%. In Germany, the neo-nazi AfD is presently leading in all opinion polls, while the Social Democrats are below 14%.

In the United States, the Republican Party has gone full Trump, on an agenda with aspects that look eerily reminiscent of prewar Germany. In France, the National Rally candidate is ahead in all opinion polls for the next presidential election.

‘Blue collar’ is not the same as ‘working class’

In many countries, the labour and social democratic parties are mere shadows of their former selves.

Perhaps the labour parties mistook the decline in “blue-collar” (manual) jobs for the decline of the working class. In Australia, the blue-collar share of jobs fell from 44% in 1979 to 28% in 2025. It’s fallen in the UK, the US and elsewhere.

Union membership, once a mostly “blue-collar” phenomenon, declined in most industrialised countries. It fell from an average of 30% of employees across the OECD in 1985 to 19% in 2005 and 15% in 2023. The fall was even greater in Australia.

But these changes did not reflect how likely people were to identify as working class.

In Australia, national attitude and election surveys give us a good idea of trends in people’s views. Between 1979 and 2007, the proportion of respondents in a standard national survey defining themselves as working class or lower class temporarily grew from 40%, to the low 50s in the 1980s and ‘90s, then back to 44% by 2007. In 2025, after a bit more movement, it was still 44% working class.

A British survey in 1983 found 58% of people claimed to be working class. By 2005, those identifying as working class had barely fallen to 57%. In 2023, still 53% of people identified as working class.

In the US, where the phrase “working class” appeared absent from public discourse for decades until Trump, a differently worded question showed that in 1976, 51% of Americans thought of themselves as either working class or lower class. In 2006, the same survey showed 52% identifying as either working class or lower class. Within this period, numbers had fluctuated from year to year — but always between 48% and 55% expressed working or lower class identity.

A Gallup poll added “upper-middle class” to the options, and the proportion claiming working or lower class status was only 39% in 2006. In 2024, that number was 43%.

In Canada, the proportion identifying as working or lower class was 36% in 1980 and still 36% in 1995. In 2017, a different poll found 37% identified as working class.

In short, while “blue-collar” jobs have sharply declined almost everywhere, the experience of “working class” has been relatively stable, within some fluctuating bounds. Differences in class identity between countries seem more notable than differences over time, perhaps due to how questions are asked or how different cultures interpret them.

This is not to say that giving a “working class” response to a forced-choice survey question is the same as a deeply thought position on class. But if people no longer thought of themselves as working class, you would expect to see some pretty big changes over time in answers to these questions.

How the working class was left behind

Sure, jobs changed, a lot. But there has never been much middle-class glamour in the “white collar” jobs at the checkout counter, behind the hamburger hotplate or in the call-centre factory.

Class relations didn’t weaken. In fact, inequality worsened in many countries. Neoliberal policies, including those adopted by social democratic parties, made the rich much richer, but they slowed the growth in the wellbeing of the majority of people, and left the working class behind.

The proportion that thought big business had too much power, and income and wealth should be redistributed, became larger.

Unions lost ground not because their ideas became unpopular with workers. It simply became much harder for unions to recruit and retain members in the face of increasingly hostile employers, governments and laws.

Working class voters didn’t have solutions to hand. But nor were they offered any by social democratic parties that barely spoke their language. Now the door has been opened to far-right parties, presenting alternatives that appeal to some facing those class problems.

There’s life in class voting yet, just not in the way we thought of it.

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How A Proposed Green Card Application Policy Change Would Disrupt Lives By Assuming Legal Immigrants Are Evading The Law

A draft policy from the Trump administration would make this card much harder to get. Stefano Spicca/Getty Images

BY IRINA D. MANTA AND CASSANDRA BURKE ROBERTSON

More than half a million people rely every year on the ability to apply from within the United States for a green card, the government-issued ID that allows an immigrant to legally live and work in the country long term.

But in May 2026 the federal government issued a policy memorandum – essentially, a draft change to current policy – that could upend this process and deny immigrants the ability to apply for a green card while in the U.S. Instead, they would have to return to their home country to do it.

To see why this matters, picture a British woman, let’s call her Lucy, who comes to the U.S. on a student visa to earn her Ph.D. at Ohio State University. During her studies, she falls in love with Mike, an American engineer, and they marry. Under long-standing practice, Lucy could apply for her green card right in Ohio without uprooting her life.

The new policy memorandum, however, could force families like hers to make wrenching choices, sending one member of a couple out of the country with no guarantee they would be allowed back in.

As law professors who study the legal procedures relating to citizenship and immigration, we see this shift as a significant departure from how the system has worked for decades.

Congress built what’s called “adjustment of status” – the shift from one immigration status to another – into the immigration legal framework as a pathway to permanent residency. A policy memo cannot cut off that avenue.

Instead, what is being proposed by the Trump administration would require congressional action or agency rule-making that follows the proper procedural steps. The hundreds of thousands of people every year who have been clearing the legal requirements of adjustment of status cannot have their rights cut off arbitrarily.

Separation, disruption

Approximately 54%, or 608,260, of the 1.17 million new lawful permanent residents in fiscal year 2023 received a green card from within the United States.

But now, the draft policy emphasizes that those who entered the United States as nonimmigrants – such as people on student visas, who stated that they would be leaving the country once their education was finished – “are generally expected to pursue an immigrant visa and admission from outside the United States if they wish to reside permanently in this country.”

Applying from within the United States, as Lucy sought to do in the hypothetical example above, would be seen by officials as a negative element – a strike against granting the green card – that would need to be balanced out by what officials deem extraordinary counterevidence, such as sufficient family ties, hardship or length of residence in the United States, for the applicant to succeed.

The memo deems application from within the U.S. a red flag, calling such an application an “attempt to avoid the ordinary consular immigrant visa process,” implying that the immigrant hid their intention to immigrate when they obtained the nonimmigrant visa.

If the memo becomes implemented as official policy, individuals like Lucy would be expected to return to their country – in her case, the U.K. – to apply for a green card.

This could take a substantial amount of time. She would thus need to interrupt her studies, which her university may or may not allow for her to complete the degree. Her husband, Mike, would get the choice of being geographically separated from his spouse indefinitely or disrupting his own career in Ohio, with his employer potentially not letting him return to the job. The family would face even more disruption if Lucy and Mike had children.

Unsupported implications

Even if the process to get a green card goes smoothly, it can easily take over a year from applying to receiving the status symbolized by the card.

Spending over a year in the home country while waiting for the application to be resolved is a massive disruption for any individual or family. The policy memorandum justifies this by stating that seeking a green card from inside the United States is founded on applicants’ desire to evade the normal immigrant visa process, “usually accompanied by their violation of our immigration laws.”

In other words, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services believes that certain people applying for green cards from inside the country – the ones who came here saying their time in the U.S. was limited – are trying to cheat the system.

The agency, however, provides no support in the policy memorandum for its claim that most individuals who seek a shift from a temporary status to a permanent one have done anything illegal.

To the contrary, the document acknowledges that such an adjustment of status already can be used only by individuals who have been either inspected and admitted or inspected and paroled, both lawful processes. And it gives no evidence for the accusation that most such individuals have done anything illegal since.

The memo also implies that all applicants for green cards who were previous holders of nonimmigrant visas – such as students and tourists, but also performing artists, athletes coming to compete, diplomats and their staff – should expect greater scrutiny in the future. It treats the move from nonimmigrant to immigrant status as highly unusual. That’s despite the fact that over half a million people a year have routinely benefited from such transitions.

A substantial number of those applicants would now be treated with greater suspicion about their original intentions. They would likely also need to take on tremendous burdens, including spending months or even years separated from a spouse or children while waiting abroad; interrupting or abandoning a degree, a job, or a career; and gambling on whether they’ll be allowed back into the U.S. at all, since consular processing abroad carries the risk of a denial with no easy appeal.

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