Voting Rights and Immigration Under Attack
Sixty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed two pieces of legislation that, to a remarkable extent, boost forces in the most volatile aspects of today’s political moment. In August 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, a major achievement of the civil rights movement that paved the way for the election of thousands of African Americans to political office in states where previously they were not even allowed to vote. Two months later, he signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, overturning the Immigration Act of 1924 which, through eugenics, sought to retain a stock of white European immigrants. Taken together, these laws democratized the idea of who could be an American and which Americans could freely exercise their rights at the ballot box. The Trump administration and its Republican allies are now engaged in a concerted effort to return the United States to the landscape that preceded it.
The Republican Party under Donald Trump, like many reactionary nationalist movements, is disproportionately concerned with demographics. Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade has reached the point where masked federal troops are ripping people from their homes, including an instantly infamous murder. ice raid on Chicago’s South Side involving a Black Hawk helicopter: their cars, their workplaces, their courthouses and their public streets. Further demonstrating the nature of the president’s exclusionary vision, the administration announced Thursday that it would reduce the number of refugees admitted to the United States next year to 7,500, with priority given to white Afrikaners. Additionally, the administration is pushing for universities to accept fewer international students, recognizing that admission to these institutions is often the first step toward citizenship.
The president’s goals were made clear on the first day of his second term, when he issued an executive order challenging the birthright and citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The clause was written after the Civil War to assert that emancipated blacks born in the country were citizens, as was virtually anyone born in this country. But it was targeted as a way to ensure that children born here without a parent who is a citizen or permanent resident are not automatically granted citizenship. The courts blocked the decree, and in September the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to address the question of its legality. Attorneys general from twenty-four Republican-led states urged the court to act in favor of Trump.
At the same time, the president’s desire to control which Americans’ votes will count has played out in the battle over congressional maps. The maps are generally revised every ten years, after the census. But three states — Texas, Missouri and North Carolina — redrew their maps at Trump’s request, potentially creating six additional seats for Republicans, and several others, including Louisiana, have taken steps to do the same. This is a transparent attempt to move the goalposts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, when a three-seat flip would give Democrats control of the House of Representatives.
In response, at least five Democratic-majority states are considering redrawing their maps. To counter Texas’ decision, California put redistricting on the November ballot, which could give Democrats five additional seats, and voters appear poised to approve the measure. In a perverse mirror of a provision of the Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department is sending federal election observers to some California districts.
But the potential impact of the state’s efforts would likely be minimal compared to that presented last month during oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais before the Supreme Court. In January 2024, following court rulings, Louisiana – which has six seats in the House of Representatives and where African-Americans represent a third of the population – adopted a map creating a second majority-black district. In March, after a legal challenge, the state attorney general defended the map in the Supreme Court, saying it complied with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits drawing districts in a way that minimizes the ability of minority voters to elect candidates of their choice. (Strategically drawn districts played a key role in preventing African Americans from gaining political power before the civil rights movement.) But a group identifying itself as “non-African American voters” claimed that the protections enshrined in Section 2 are themselves discriminatory, in the sense that they offer black voters a right that is not available to non-black voters. And Louisiana has effectively switched sides, arguing that the map it defended last year should now be invalidated.
