The Constitution is the law of our land, the cornerstone of our government, the principles to which our military, our judges, our attorneys, and our public officials pledge themselves. It establishes the most fundamental structure of our government and the rights of our states and the people.
If you’ve been paying any attention to the news this year, though, you might not think so.
Over the last 9 months, the Trump administration and its many colluders have established a pattern. First they violate the Constitutional rights of non-citizens—whether in the country legally or illegally–even though it is well-established that the Constitution protects any person physically present on U.S. soil, not just citizens. Then, once they have shown that they can get away with it, they expand those violations to American citizens.
Let’s start at the top, with the First Amendment. Among other critical rights, it provides that “Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech.”
This is an extremely clear principle: if the government punishes you for your speech, your speech is not free. But this government is doing exactly that.
Consider Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student whose secret-police-style arrest, complete with masked agents and an unmarked van, generated headlines earlier this year. After being arrested, she spent six weeks in an overcrowded cell with 23 other women. Her offense? An op-ed she had written a year prior, where she referred to the war in Gaza as “plausible genocide.”
Ozturk is hardly alone. Even greencard-holding, permanent U.S. residents have had their First Amendment rights blatantly violated this way, and international students are now encouraged to scrub their social media postings before entering the U.S., as though they were visiting China, North Korea, or Iran.
In other words, under this administration, if you are not a full U.S. citizen, your speech is not free. Even “making light” of the wrong topic risks government action.
And citizens, even prominent ones, are not entirely free to speak their minds. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert appears to have been cancelled so that its parent company could complete a merger, one that had to be approved by the government. President Trump and FCC chair Brendan Carr managed to temporarily suspend Jimmy Kimmel Live! by threatening, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action on Kimmel or, you know, there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
We could write a whole column on other First Amendment violations, but let’s instead talk about the Fourth Amendment, which protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures and requires probable cause for search warrants.
On September 30, Border Patrol, FBI, and ATF agents raided an apartment building in Chicago. Witnesses reported that every person in the building was removed from their home and made to wait outside for hours while federal agents ransacked the building and destroyed the residents’ property. The raid led to 37 arrests of immigrants from Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Colombia. Only two were allegedly members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, the supposed target of the raid. The rest of the apartment building’s residents, many of them U.S. citizens, were apparently subject to this raid merely for living in the same building as those two individuals.
That search and seizure was unreasonable.
Sadly, there are many more recent examples of the federal government violating both Constitutional rights and common decency. By electing an insurrectionist President, we have given the current federal government an authoritarian inch. They are in the process of taking a totalitarian mile. If we do not take our power back soon, it will be too late.
The next No Kings protests will be on October 18. Let’s use them to begin to create a more perfect union once again grounded in the rights of the people.
Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick live in Iowa.
Originally published in the Press-Citizen on October 11, 2025.