Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor…

Liz Theoharis

 April 21, 2026

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Image by Steve Knutson.

In late March, I sat in the gallery of the Supreme Court for the first time in my life. Throughout my 30 years of grassroots anti-poverty work, I’ve joined countless protests and vigils outside the Court. In 2018, I was even arrested and held in detention for praying on its palatial steps. Now, I was seated with a clear view of the nine justices of the nation’s highest court. I was there as a guest of immigrant rights lawyers, as their team made oral arguments in Noem v. Al Otro Lado, the most significant case on the right to asylum in decades.

In February, the Kairos Center (the organization I direct) authored an interfaith amicus brief on that very case, alongside 31 denominations and organizations representing faith traditions practiced by billions worldwide. Those groups, including the Alliance of Baptists, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Hindus for Human Rights, the Latino Christian National Network, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Reconstructing Judaism, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the General Synod of the United Church of Christ, and the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church, joined together to declare that our societal obligation to provide for persecuted outsiders is a universally shared moral principle.

Although the case has largely flown under the public radar, there is indeed a lot at stake. Filed on behalf of asylum seekers, Noem v. Al Otro Lado focuses on the legality of a 2018 Trump border policy blocking access to the U.S. asylum process for people arriving at the border with Mexico. Immigrant rights advocates argue that such a turnback policy, under which immigration officers physically stop people seeking safety at official border crossings from setting foot on U.S. soil, flouts decades of settled federal immigration law and our society’s most deeply held legal and moral values.

For more than a century, the government has been required to undertake a legal process of inspection when people seek asylum at official ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border (as they must inspect all noncitizens seeking admission to the United States). That requirement is supposed to ensure that this country doesn’t send vulnerable people back into danger without first allowing them to seek protection. A wide range of immigration lawyers and legal experts argue that the first Trump administration’s turnback policy, euphemistically called “metering,” directly undermined the government’s responsibility to process such asylum claims. As a result, vulnerable children, families, and adults were regularly forced to remain indefinitely stranded in perilous conditions in Mexico.

Although the turnback policy has not been in effect since 2021, when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declared it unlawful, the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to review the case. Should the government win (which is all too possible given the hyperpartisan nature of the current Court), the consequences are sure to be grave and far-reaching. The Department of Homeland Security would have the legal backing to turn away untold thousands of desperate people at the border, potentially clearing the way for even more expansive border closures, while further intensifying the jingoistic nationalism that defines the Trump administration. Alongside other landmark cases this term, like Trump v. Barboza, in which the government seeks to undo the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, the results of Noem v. Al Otro Lado are likely to reveal the lengths to which the Supreme Court is willing to backstop the president’s assault on democracy, including accelerated attacks on the rights of vulnerable populations.

The day I was there, the existential stakes of that case and the larger societal crisis in which it was unfolding did not seem to concern the court’s conservative justices. I had the words of George Washington (written in 1788 to the radical Dutch republican Francis Van der Kemp) in my mind as I sat in the gallery: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.”

Unfortunately, having heard the statements and reactions of some of the judges, I fear that the majority of the Supreme Court may no longer agree with that foundational vision for this country.

Courtroom Friezes and Draconian Law

The first thing that struck me on entering the Supreme Court gallery were the stone friezes on the walls of the room. Designed by Adolf Weinman more than a century ago, those large marble reliefs, featuring what he called the “great lawgivers of history,” tower over the space. Among them are prominent religious figures like Moses (holding a scroll of the Ten Commandments), King Solomon, Confucius, and a rendition of the Prophet Muhammad (that is entirely unrecognizable). The friezes also include Roman Emperor Octavian (otherwise known as Caesar Augustus, Jesus’s great nemesis), French King Louis IX (leader of the seventh and eighth crusades), and Draco (a Greek jurist whose legacy lurks in the word “draconian” because of the extreme measures he took to punish minor offenses).

As I stared at those figures, I reflected on the message they convey about the complex civilizational lineages from which the Supreme Court and our legal system derive their authority. In our amicus brief, we reflected on those varied lineages as they pertain to the right to seek asylum:

“Our asylum laws are the modern embodiment of a deeply rooted religious, cultural, and historical heritage that has consistently affirmed society’s obligation to provide refuge for those seeking safety. Asylum reaches back to some of the earliest moments of recorded human history. It was practiced throughout the ancient civilizations that forged the foundation of Western society. This tradition can also be found in the form of church sanctuary asylum, a mainstay of European culture for over a millennium.

“Our very nation began as a haven for persecuted political and religious minorities. This tradition is present throughout our history, from the practices of Native Americans to the Underground Railroad to modern times. Congress adopted our current asylum laws in significant part due to the efforts of faith-based groups seeking to uphold deeply held societal, moral, and cultural principles.”

Despite such deeply held and ancient principles, I couldn’t shake a sense of impending doom as I scanned the faces on the friezes and those of the justices. I thought of the awesome and awful power of Rome, depicted throughout the gallery, and its draconian reign of “peace” (or what Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently termed “delivering peace through strength”). And I recalled the worsening anti-democratic and pro-oligarchic turn our own Supreme Court has taken in the Trump era.

Just consider the rulings from the past few years: the Court has essentially given immunity to the executive branch (although the Court is supposed to be a critical part of a federal system of checks and balances), criminalized homelessness (although the U.S. claims to be a nation of opportunity and prosperity for all), and degraded voting rights (cutting off the legs of our democracy).

Before oral arguments began in Noem v. Al Otro Lado, I was under no illusion that the Supreme Court delivers equality, freedom, and justice for all. And yet, on an issue as basic and legally sound as the right to seek asylum, I was still shocked by the flippancy of the court’s conservative judges. For hours, they rocked in their chairs, physically broadcasting their disinterest in the case. Rather than take seriously more than 100 years of legal precedent and hundreds more of long-established societal practice, they seemed to enjoy getting into hyper-specific and cherrypicked semantic and rhetorical arguments with Kelsi Brown Cochran, our lawyer.

In preparation for that day, I had brushed up on the history of U.S. asylum law. An important story in that history is the S.S. St. Louis, a ship that in 1939 was carrying 930 refugees from Hamburg, Germany, fleeing the Nazi regime, who were first denied entry to Cuba and then to the United States, only to be returned to Europe, where many of them were taken to the Nazi death camps.

Reflecting on that story at a pre-hearing press conference, Nicole Elizabeth Ramos, border rights project director at Al Otro Lado, a plaintiff in the case, offered this explanation:

“The right to seek asylum is not a policy preference or a loophole — it is a legal right and a moral commitment forged in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Seeking asylum is not like taking a number at a deli counter and waiting for your turn. You cannot ask someone fleeing rape, torture, or death threats to wait in danger indefinitely because a government has decided their lives are inconvenient. We filed this case because the United States has an obligation to follow its own laws — laws duly enacted by Congress. The question before the Court is whether those laws can be set aside by executive action, or whether they remain binding at the border, as written.”

In their apparent willingness to flout precedent and condemn modern-day asylees to harm or even death, the conservative justices unselfconsciously aligned themselves with American nativism and European fascism of the 1930s. If, in their final decision, they uphold Trump’s turnback policy, they will be affirming that, were the S.S. St Louis to sail again today, the ship would still be denied entry and its passengers asylum.

The Moral Crisis Is Not “Border Surges” But the Closing of the Border

The morning of those oral arguments, the Kairos Center and other faith organizations held an interfaith prayer vigil on the steps of the Supreme Court to call attention to the case. Reverend Michael Neuroth, director of the United Church of Christ’s Washington D.C. office, put the matter vividly: “Welcoming and protecting the stranger is not a minor tenet of our faith but is a foundational moral obligation in each of our traditions. Dismantling the right to asylum is morally wrong, strategically short-sighted, and increases insecurity here in our nation. We must be a nation of compassion, a place of refuge to those in need.”

The vigil was organized in the heart of the “holy season” amid Ramadan, Passover, and Easter. As billions of people globally engage in rituals of remembrance, repentance, deliverance, and liberation, our prayers and petitions focused not only on the legal precedent for the right to seek asylum, but on the moral imperative to do so. For Christians, protecting and welcoming the immigrant is one of Jesus’s first and most powerful teachings. It’s also among the highest moral commands of the Torah. As the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, “Do no wrong to the foreigner and do not shed innocent blood.” Asylum and societal hospitality are well-recognized rights within Islamic law and theology, a fundamental Hindu and Buddhist tenet, and part of Native American spiritual teachings.

In our interfaith amicus brief, we wrote: “As the many faiths practiced by this country’s citizens teach, a society that does not protect the least among us is a failed society.” As faith leaders, we had in mind not only the right to seek asylum, but the many ways the Trump administration has deepened and intensified a moral crisis at the heart of our society. We were thinking about the ongoing attacks on immigrant communities — from ICE-led campaigns of terror to family and child detention in places like Dilley, Texas. There was also the stripping of life-saving healthcare and food support from millions of Americans through cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); the criminalization and forced deprivation of LGBTQ+ people; and the prosecution of anillegal war that threatens the lives of so many in Iran and the broader region, as well as the livelihoods of billions of us across this globe.

In Noem v. Al Otro Lado, the Trump administration is attempting to mask its cruelty and despotism through banal legal arguments. By focusing semantically on when protections start for asylum seekers and debating the meaning of the term “arrives in” (as in this country, of course), its lawyers were ignoring the illegality and immorality of border agents blocking asylum seekers from crossing the U.S.-Mexican border and the larger question of whether the United States can any longer be a place of safety and protection for all families “yearning to be free” of violence and persecution.

The government is, of course, hoping that we don’t make the connections between the stripping away of asylum rights, the larger issue of immigrant rights, and the many other ways that it’s targeting “the least among us.” That’s a mistake we can’t make and where the teachings of our many faith traditions have encouragement to offer. In Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and more, love, justice, and peace are not parceled out only for certain people in certain places. Across our religions, all life is sacred, full stop!

No Turning Back for Anyone

Intermixed with the important lawgivers of history in that marble frieze in the Supreme Court gallery are engraved winged personifications of “Peace,” “The Rights of Man,” “History,” “Authority,” “Fame,” and more. Those winged characters form what looked to me like a Greco-Roman “choir of angels,” proclaiming “law and order” at the expense of rights and dignity for us all.

Sitting there, I reflected on just who was not in that room listening to those arguments or forcing the Supreme Court justices to face the very lives impacted by their decision. I thought about all those who will never have access to that courtroom, or justice of any sort for that matter, the millions of people struggling to fight for their communities and a future where everybody is in and nobody is out.

Those people are — or at least should be — our hope. They are the true “choir of angels” who came out for the recent No Kings Day demonstrations and are standing up for the rights and dignity of communities all over the country. They are also the people who are increasingly giving Donald Trump historically low approval ratings. And here’s the truth of these times: this administration has nothing to offer everyday people, other than hardened borders and wars that nobody wants.

At such a moment in history, a movement that connects the dots between our many struggles is certainly the way forward. Therefore, it seems fitting that the coalition that came together to fight this case and protect the rights of asylum seekers calls itself “No Turning Back.” It reminds me of a song by Emma’s Revolution that I’ve sung many times at protests and gatherings. Its key lines are a reminder of what we all need to keep in mind in this deeply disturbing Trumpian moment of ours:

“Gonna keep on moving forward
Keep on moving forward
Keep on moving forward
Never turning back
Never turning back”

Because indeed, there can be no turning back for any of us. Either we get there together or we never get there at all.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

Liz Theoharis, a TomDispatch regular, is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor and We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign. Follow her on Twitter at @liztheo.

How the United States Became a Warmonger

Richard Falk

April 21, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Points of Departure

It seems an opportune time to scrutinize how it has come to pass that the U.S. has become a menace to others as well as to itself. Remembering its early vision of being a peaceful democracy that confined itself to the Western Hemisphere without entangling alliances and suspicious of a standing army that was institutionalized as part of governance and national security, other than in conditions of wartime.

This was not the whole truth, which blurs this mythified positive self-image of ‘greatness’  or ‘American exceptionalism’ by reminding dogmatic patriots of genocidal policies toward America’s native peoples and how imported slave labor sustained its agricultural productivity. In addition, geography helped sustain this peaceful image of a country welcoming to immigrants and skeptical of engagement in the European rivalries of its early experience as a sovereign state, a former colony until it broke away from the mighty British Empire in its War of Independence. Its earlier period as an exploited colony made the talented architects of the American public sensitive, above all, to the arbitrary rule and militarism of European rulers legitimized by the absolutist pretensions of royalism with special attention to the British instance as an influential negative model.

This early image of a guardian of hemispheric autonomy in relation to Europe was never an accurate portrayal of American foreign policy. The United States, once a sovereign state, flirted with the adoption of a foreign policy that included a colonial project of its own devising, focused on both the Caribbean and Pacific regions, seeking hegemonic controls, basing rights, and natural resources. Yet that did not challenge the core character of its foreign policy, which remained committed to isolationism with regard to European wars and general contentment with its successful emergence as an industrial giant.

The two world wars of the 20^th Century began a transformative process that reached its climax at the end of the Cold War, when the U.S. emerged as a globally engaged superpower with no credible challengers possessing the requisite geopolitical muscle to back up strategic ambitions and fears. Yet its domestic identity remained rooted in the savior imagery of exceptionalism, which highlighted benign claims to be ‘a light unto the nations’ or, as all American politicians of right and left still affirm, ‘the greatest country ever,’ almost in the spirit of a loyalty oath. It is this transformation from a relatively peace-oriented republic to a globe-girdling militarist superpower that needs to be better understood if a demilitarized future identity is to become a realistic project of reform. Dwight Eisenhower recognized the domestic problems of this militarization in his 1961 Farewell Address as President, encapsulated in his memorable warnings to democracy of a peacetime ‘military-industrial-complex.’ This warning was a 20th-century echo of concerns about whether a free society could co-exist with what the Federalist Papers referred to as ‘a standing army.’ Such a sensitivity to the fragility of democratic governance has been lost in the long period of belligerency that stretched from World War II to the Cold War, and then was soon resuscitated as neoliberal globalization and increasing inter-civilizational tensions rationalized an expanding military budget and the global projection of American power, resulting in 750 foreign military bases in 85 countries.

From Engagement to Warmongering

The path leading from America’s reluctant engagement in the two world wars to becoming the leading practitioner of wars of choice can only be explained by several converging factors, including a reinvigoration of its mythic past. Each factor deserves a fuller treatment than can be given here, but the complexity of this toxic emergence of a warmongering foreign policy seems important to clarify, if only to appreciate the formidable challenges posed. A primary purpose is to confirm the intensifying and erratic relevance of Trump and the MAGA worldview, but to do so without neglecting the reality that the main elements of the current warmongering posture carried to new extremes systemic pre-Trump developments supported by both major political parties. This pre-Trump consensus is important to acknowledge as it tends to be minimized in public debate as the process evolved, with significant media complicity.

The Militarization of the State

The governing bureaucracy experienced an uninterrupted period of war and geopolitical rivalry dating from the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, a half-century of preoccupation with national security priorities. The advent of the nuclear age, the struggles against European colonialism, and the growing interdependence of the world economy produced important adjustments, and the pause in geopolitical rivalry created an opportunity to establish a more peace-oriented world order.

Among these opportunities was a global setting more amenable to a democratic organization of the United Nations that treated all sovereign states equally. A UN reform process along these lines would have needed to arrange the management of global security free of control by geopolitical actors. This would have required the winners of World War II to adopt a farsighted view of global security in the nuclear age.  It would need to end of or greatly restrict the right of veto and eliminate permanent membership in the Security Council that paralyzed the UN in situations of serious threats to peace and security. It also froze the Organization in its 1945 mold, given the applicability of the veto to the Charter amending process. These design features of the UN architecture became more serious and perhaps unavoidable in the bipolar setting of the Cold War, where conflict pervaded international life and opposing ideological worldviews made conflicts on the peripheries of world power structures of crucial significance to whether Western liberal democracy was winning the war for ‘hearts and minds’ in Europe and the Global South. As Soviet interventions in Eastern Europe and the U.S. efforts to avoid a Vietnamese alignment with Moscow demonstrated, the Cold War was a more genuine global war than either of the so-called ‘world wars’ that are more accurately interpreted as regional wars for changing the hierarchies of power in Europe, with a side event involving the encounter with Japan. In this sense, the Soviet Union, despite its communist identity, was itself European as post-Cold War Russia with its underlying white Christian character. Mikhail Gorbachev and Putin both recognized this European regionalism in their official pronouncement. [See also Richard Sakwa, The Culture of the Second Cold War (2025]

Some of these design flaws represented good-faith efforts to avoid the mistakes of the past. In the case of the UN, its design was based on overcoming the failures of the League of Nations, particularly the exclusion of the Great Powers and the related assumptions that major states were ready to compromise their sovereign rights by subordinating national security to the will of international institutions. Some influential persons thought the League had failed because several major states of the day either failed to join, were expelled, or withdrew their membership. The U.S. role was somewhat typical. It was both the principal supporter of establishing the League, as championed by its wartime president, Woodrow Wilson, and its most notable defector due to the refusal of Congress to ratify the League Covenant. Franklin Roosevelt, as a wartime president, overtly sought to avoid what he believed to be Wilson’s mistake. Accordingly, the drafters of the UN Charter set as a primary goal a universal framework that would encourage all states, including geopolitical actors, to join and remain, no matter what. The goal of inclusivity was achieved and managed to weather many political storms over the more than 80 years since the UN was established. This is a remarkable achievement, but it came with a high price tag. The effectiveness of the UN was undercut where it was most needed. This hamstringing of the UN was evident throughout the Gaza genocide, and at least partly due to geopolitical alignment with the perpetrator government.

Another impediment to a peaceful future after 1945 was associated with the ideology of foreign policy elites in dominant countries. This ideology, known in academic circles as ‘political realism,’ stuck to the belief that it was military ascendancy that shaped world history, and that all alternatives associated with ideas of disarmament, respect for international law, and world government were a mixture of wishful thinking and a misunderstanding of the persistence of conflict and the priority accorded strategic national interests. This ideology was congenial with both the militarized bureaucracy and private sector interest in a large military establishment. This consensus was insulated from self-criticism that nurtured a political culture of ‘group think’ in which dissent and alternate views of national security were effectively excluded from internal policy debates.[Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink, 1972] In recent years this rigid version of political realism has stubbornly ignored the moderate voices of such prominent political realists as John Mearscheimer and Stephen Walt because they advocated a responsible statecraft, along the lines of the Quincy Institute, which conceived of national security interests more cautiously and were more sensitive to the record of military frustration in anti-colonial settings.

As if this ideological closure were not enough, it is strongly reinforced by numerous Washington ‘think tanks,’ funded by defense contractors and foreign governments that give backing to the prevailing narrow views of militarist geopolitics under the guise of objective research but in conformity with the slant of foreign policy elites. These assessments are made in convincing detail by William Hartung and Ben Freeman in their important book The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us At Home (2025). I would argue that spending is the outcome rather than the explanation of American warmongering, which I associate more with a twisted, insular notion of political realism as given enthusiastic endorsement by a militarized state bureaucracy in league with private sector interests driven by the quest for profitability. This bipartisan consensus is reinforced by a compliant media, by the leverage of pro-Israeli lobbying groups overlapping with strategic ambitions, and by the career incentives associated with revolving door relations between top armed forces officials, militarized bureaucrats, executive appointments to top defense contractors, and fancy consultancies in media or research venues.

To gain a seat at the table at the pinnacles of power, you must be willing to validate wars of choice and, in the process, discard the relevance of international law, the UN Charter, and the Nuremberg Principles except as a propaganda tool to wield against adversaries. There are some surprising implications of this warmongering. Of primary importance is profitability rather than political victory. Although regime-changing and state-building militarism as in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, should be looked upon as defeats despite the overwhelming military they avoided any serious rethinking of U.S. foreign policy because they were great successes from the perspectives of profitability. Such a mixed outcome is a barrier to learning the lessons associated with political defeat despite total domination of the military battlefield. Losing wars without heavy American casualties results in little pushback. This was the major lesson learned in the wake of the American defeat in Vietnam. Minimize casualties by relying on weapons innovations that can cause widespread devastation, require heavy spending, and are okay if the results are politically disappointing.

For the United States and the West, the Vietnam War was an ambiguous turning point, at once illustrating the limits of military agency in the post-1945 setting and generating a series of adjustments that consolidated the militarization of the state and its symbiotic relationship with private sector interests in arms sales and a growing ‘peacetime’ military budget. The professionalization of the armed forces, a growing emphasis on weaponry and tactics that did not result in serious U.S. casualties, is orienting the mainstream media to the brand of political realism that prevailed in Washington among the private sector think tanks and political foreign policy elites in government.

Perhaps the least acknowledged and most instrumental explanation of US peacetime militarism is the combination of the collapse of European colonialism in Eurasia and the impacts of shifts from industrial to finance capitalism. This shift has contributed to adverse domestic effects of increasing inequalities between the very rich, the 1%, and everyone else with declines in the standard of living among workers and middle-class professionals. As a result, billionaires have emerged as an ultra-right political influence. Additionally, finance capital flowing to the global south via trade, investments, and markets tends to lend a justification for the vast network of foreign military bases and a global naval presence enabling military operations anywhere on the planet.

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global law, Queen Mary University London, and Research Associate, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB.