Apr 17
Dred Scott
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Dred Scott
Trump's ICE deployment to Minneapolis echoes one of the darkest periods in our history
Tobias Barrington Wolff at The Big Picture:
During the extended assault on the Minneapolis-St. Paul area by ICE and Border Patrol in early 2026, the Whipple Federal Building abruptly went from a largely unknown federal facility to a place of infamy. Located in a small unorganized territory in Hennepin County called Fort Snelling on the outskirts of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, Whipple is where most of the people ICE has subjected to abusive detention during its assault on Minnesota have been taken and held, often with little regard for their citizenship or immigration status. Myriad reports from Whipple tell of substandard detention conditions, denial of access to medical care and violations of the civil and human rights of detainees. For many, Whipple has just been a way station on a trafficking route that will bring them to the Dilley incarceration facility in South Texas where conditions are even worse. Liam Conejo Ramos, the little boy in the blue bunny hat whom federal immigration agents used as bait to seize his father, was trafficked through Whipple on his way to Dilley. When about a hundred members of the clergy were arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport for engaging in peaceful protest of ICE abuses, they chose their location in part because of its proximity to Whipple and the trafficking run through that facility. This is not the first time the land around the Whipple Building has been a site of trafficking, violations of human rights, and assaults on the concept of citizenship. Almost two hundred years ago, two Black Americans were illegally trafficked to a U.S. military post located on that same stretch of the Mississippi Riverfront. The garrison was called Fort Snelling, now referred to as Historic Fort Snelling, and it gave that territory in Hennepin County the name it still bears. This aerial view shows both properties today: the Whipple Federal Building on the left side of the frame and Historic Fort Snelling on the right: The Black married couple who were trafficked and abused on this land, nearly two centuries before the arrival of ICE, launched a fight for their freedom that changed the United States forever. Their names were Dred and Harriet Scott.
The Missouri Compromise, Fort Snelling, and the Trafficking of Black Americans
The original Fort Snelling was built by the U.S. Army between 1819 and 1825. Located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers on land long occupied by the Dakota peoples, the garrison was encompassed within what the U.S. then called the Wisconsin Territory. Federal law had prohibited the practice of enslavement in that territory from the early days of the Republic and that prohibition continued under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, one of the most consequential in the series of obscene bargains Congress struck over the atrocity of slavery. The 1820 law admitted Missouri to the Union as an enslaver state, admitted Maine as a free state, and banned the practice of enslavement in U.S. territory above the 36°30’ latitude outside Missouri itself. The Wisconsin Territory included what are now the States of Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota along with parts of the Dakotas. Following the 1820 compromise, enacted shortly after construction of Fort Snelling began, federal law dictated that the military base must be free from enslavement.
[...]
That language creating a caveat for criminal punishment still exists in the Thirteenth Amendment, sad to say, and the provision for the return of “fugitives” reflects a conflict between enslaver states and free states that was written into the original Constitution. But an even more common slavery practice contaminated Fort Snelling from the beginning: the trafficking of Black Americans to free territory on what the enslavers claimed was a transient basis. When enslavers traveled around the United States they sometimes forced people held in bondage to accompany them as personal servants. When a free state was the travel destination an enslaver would often traffic the individual there nonetheless, introducing slavery on a transient basis into the free jurisdiction. These were not short sojourns. “Transient” often meant a period of years, as was true for both Dred and Harriett Scott.
This aggressive trafficking practice gave rise to one of the major interstate legal disputes of the enslavement period: whether a trafficked individual who was able to secure legal assistance could sue to be declared free after being brought into a free jurisdiction by an enslaver. (I have written about that issue in some depth here.) A noted 1772 ruling of the English Court of King’s Bench, Somerset v. Stewart, had established the principle that the legal status of enslavement cannot be enforced in a free jurisdiction, meaning a person can sue for freedom when trafficked into a free state. By the 1830s courts in Massachusetts, Ohio and even the enslaver state of Louisiana had held the same, though the issue remained highly contested.
[...]
The Dred Scott Case
Dred and Harriett Scott argued that the decision of their enslavers to traffic them to the free jurisdictions of Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory entitled them to be declared free, both under the law of Missouri where they were still being held in bondage when they brought their lawsuits and by operation of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. They litigated their claims for almost fifteen years and ultimately ended in defeat, first before the Missouri Supreme Court and then in the Supreme Court of the United States. The 1857 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court is infamous for its attempt to write a permanent status of dehumanization and disqualification from citizenship for Black Americans into the Constitution. Dred Scott v. Sandford invented a constitutional right for enslavers to traffic people for labor and sexual exploitation anywhere in the United States, overriding prohibitions against enslavement by free States and declaring the Missouri Compromise of 1820 invalid. In the process, it declared that our Constitution was founded on a principle of White Supremacy that held Black Americans “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Black people could never be made citizens of the United States or any State under the Constitution that Chief Justice Roger Taney narrated.
Dred Scott left no path forward for Black Americans to secure basic human rights or legal protection, no possibility of a political resolution between enslaver States and free States attempting to contain the practice of slavery, and no alternative to White Supremacy as the defining principle of our Constitution. The decision contributed significantly to the descent into open hostilities and war that soon followed. When the Civil War ended and Congress and the States crafted the constitutional amendments that would fundamentally change the formal parameters of our system of government, the enormities of Dred Scott hovered over all those reconstruction deliberations, as historian Eric Foner has put it.
The trafficking and abuse of Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson Scott at Fort Snelling was the human origin of that judicial betrayal. The Scott family stood for the millions of Black Americans seeking to liberate themselves from enslavers. Today the Visitor’s Center at Fort Snelling makes their story and the morally diseased strain of U.S. history in which it unfolded a central part of the account of that land and the continuing importance of the site. The same land along the banks of the Mississippi River where the Whipple Building operates today.
The legacy of Dred and Harriet Scott is in many ways parallel to ICE’s illegal and unlawful operations in Minneapolis.
BHM100: Remembering Dred Scott, Harriet Scott and How They Survived One of the Worst Supreme Court Decisions in U.S. History
John Roberts meets his Dred Scott moment.
October 16, 2025
Robert B. Hubbell
The struggle for racial justice and equality took center stage in America on Wednesday, largely because the Republican Party and the reactionary majority on the Supreme Court were doing their best to set those efforts back by a century (at least). The major drama occurred during the Supreme Court’s consideration of the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act’s remaining provisions. Chief Justice John Roberts’ mission in life has been to erase the gains of the Civil Rights era by invalidating the keystone legislation that ended the scourge of Jim Crow laws in the post-Civil War South. During oral argument, Roberts made his ambition clear.
On Wednesday, Roberts came one step closer to cementing his status as the equal of Justice Roger Taney, whose opinion in the Dred Scott case is universally acknowledged to be the low point of Supreme Court jurisprudence. In holding that enslaved people were “property” not entitled to rights under the Constitution, Justice Taney infamously wrote that Black people were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
During Wednesday’s hearing, Justice Roberts seemed poised to place an exclamation point on Justice Taney’s statement by killing one of the most effective civil rights statutes ever enacted—thereby ensuring that Black people would no longer have “voting rights that the white man is bound to respect.”
Much of the reporting (not all) focused on the potential political fallout of Louisiana’s challenge to the Voting Rights Act—i.e., dire predictions that a loss in the Louisiana v. Callais case will doom Democratic chances of flipping the House in 2026. Those predictions are neither true nor predestined to occur—unless we join in the surrender of those who are ready to declare defeat in advance.
Yes, a loss in Callais will embolden some states to fracture Black majority districts into non-existence, but we are not potted plants powerless to affect the outcome of the future. The tide of public opinion is turning against the false promises of Trump’s 2024 campaign; our task is to ensure that the sea change swamps the GOP in 2026. Roberts’ evisceration of the Voting Rights Act will make our task more difficult, but not impossible.
While the political ramifications are important, it is equally important to recognize that John Roberts’ lifelong assault on voting rights for Black Americans is the culmination of a half-century of efforts by the Old South to reverse the gains of the Civil Rights era. They accomplished that task with lightning speed and a simple expedient: Packing the Supreme Court with justices hostile to equal rights for Black Americans.
The tactics employed by Republicans to suppress the voting rights of Black Americans can also be used to reform the Court and rehabilitate the rule of law. Expand the Court at the first opportunity!
Commentators agree that the reactionary majority will further restrict or end all remedies under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. See Ian Millhiser in Vox, The Supreme Court appears determined to nuke the Voting Rights Act, and Chris Geidner, Law Dork, Supreme Court likely to further diminish — but not end — Voting Rights Act cases.
Because the reactionary majority has pre-determined the outcome but has not yet agreed on a rationale, I won’t dig into the legal nuances. Ian Millhiser and Chris Geidner do an excellent job of analyzing the legal framework in the articles linked above.
But Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo exposes the reactionary majority’s animating animus. See Kate Riga, Talking Points Memo, In Supreme Court Land, Fixing Discrimination Against Black Voters Is The Real Racism.
Kate Riga writes,
A central grievance motivating today’s conservative legal movement — and the Republican Party more broadly — holds that any measure rectifying the country’s habitual discrimination against minorities actually discriminates against the in-group. This is why “black lives matter,” a call to recognize the disproportionate violence and death Black people suffer at the hands of the state, is met with “all lives matter.” It’s why DEI has become the battle cry for rolling back the perpetuation and memorializing of civil rights advancements. It explains why Republicans’ fixation on protecting freedom of speech evaporates as soon as they bump up against speech they don’t like (say, a rally to protest the Trump administration’s authoritarian behavior). Civil liberties are a zero-sum game, this thinking goes, so any protection of minority groups must implicitly harm the majority group.
In short, the reactionary majority has adopted a Catch-22 test that automatically invalidates any remedy that seeks to protect the rights of a racial minority. If the remedy uses race in fashioning a solution to race-based discrimination—as it must—then the remedy violates the Constitution (according to the reactionary majority).
That “Catch-22” approach ignores the fact that the 14th and 15th Amendments empower Congress to pass implementing legislation to protect voting rights against race-based suppression—which is what the Voting Rights Act does!
John Roberts may finally kill the Voting Rights Act. But it will be his Dred Scott moment, and will tarnish his name and legacy for centuries to come.
JD Vance excuses horrific racial, antisemitic, and misogynistic slurs by Young Republican leaders’ chat group
Two days ago, Politico published a story about 2,900 pages of “chat” texts by leaders of the Young Republicans in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont. See Politico, ‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat.
The leaders were in their twenties and thirties and held political jobs, including
Chief of Staff to New York State Assembly member Mike Reilly;
Staffer for New York State Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt
Communications Assistant for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach
Employee at New York State Unified Court System
Employee at Center for Arizona Policy
Senior Adviser in the Office of General Counsel, U.S. Small Business Administration (in the Trump administration)
In short, these were not “kids,” nor were they “college students.” They were adults with responsible jobs.
Their slurs were offensive, gross, and shocking. I will not repeat them here, but if you are interested in reading the actual chats in detail, please see Jay Kuo, The Status Kuo (Substack), Keystone Klansmen. But be warned, the texts are upsetting.
Although the Young Republicans who participated in the chat group have been fired from their jobs and condemned by most Republicans, Vice President JD Vance has come to their defense, saying that the authors were “kids” (not true) involved in a “college chat” (not true). See Inquisitr, JD Vance Slams ‘Scumbag’ Reporters, Defends Young Republican After Text Scandal.
Vance said,
But the reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. . . . We’re not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old group chat to ruin a kid’s life for the rest of time.
The “jokes” would not be excusable for a 21-year-old, or an 18-year-old, or a 12-year-old. But the participants in the chat were adults who worked for state and federal agencies, legislators, and policy institutes.
And these weren’t “edgy” jokes. Joking about the Holocaust or rape is not “edgy.” It is reprehensible.
What is most remarkable is that the participants in the chat joked about the skin color of a woman from India who was dating one of them. JD Vance’s wife is the daughter of Indian immigrants to the US, and his children are the grandchildren of Indian immigrants. The fact that Vance cannot even find the moral courage or outrage to condemn a slur directed at the Indian people, given his familial connections, tells us everything we need to know about JD Vance.
Coming hard on the heels of the Young Republican scandal is the disclosure that a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill had a modified US flag on his bulletin board that incorporated the Nazi swastika. The Nazi symbol was spotted by a participant in a virtual meeting with the staffer for Republican Rep. Dave Taylor (Ohio). See Tampa Free Press, Capitol Police Investigate Swastika Found In GOP Ohio Rep. Taylor’s Office.
Rep. Taylor’s office has suggested that the swastika symbol was placed in the staffer’s office as the result of “foul play.” Should we expect JD Vance to defend the display of the swastika as an “edgy” joke—as he did with jokes about gas chambers at the concentration camps by the Young Republican leaders?
At a time when the Supreme Court is dismantling protections for descendants of enslaved people, defending Republican officials who “joke” about white supremacy and Nazi atrocities is beyond the pale of decency and humanity.
Concluding Thoughts
I need to cut the newsletter short this evening to take care of some family matters, but I did not want to end the newsletter after recounting negative stories about the depravity of the Supreme Court and Republican leadership.
Every American who is resisting the lawlessness of the Trump administration should be ecstatic over two developments. First, a second university—Brown University—has rejected the “compact” that the Trump administration is attempting to force on leading academic institutions. See the following press release: Brown University president declines invitation for Brown to join federal Compact. With MIT and Brown leading the way, there is no excuse for other universities! They must follow suit and reject Trump’s extortion! There is strength and safety in solidarity!
Speaking of solidarity, major media outlets acted in unison to reject the Pentagon’s attempt to prohibit media outlets from publishing confidential or classified information about the US military. See AP News, Journalists turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agree to new reporting rules. The outlets walking out of the Pentagon include Pete Hegseth’s former employer, Fox News.
Per AP,
Many of the reporters waited to leave together at a 4 p.m. deadline set by the Defense Department to get out of the building. As the hour approached, boxes of documents lined a Pentagon corridor and reporters carried chairs, a copying machine, books and old photos to the parking lot from suddenly abandoned workspaces. Shortly after 4, about 40 to 50 journalists left together after handing in badges.
Coordinated resistance is how we will stop Trump’s lawless behavior! The NY Times published a timely guest op-ed by Professor Henry J. Farrell (Johns Hopkins), Where Trump Is Vulnerable and How to Act on It. (Accessible to all.)
Professor Farrell highlights the actions of Brown University and the major media outlets in resisting the Pentagon. He writes,
President Trump is trying to seize power that he is not entitled to under the law or the Constitution. But Mr. Trump will fail in remaking American politics if people and institutions coordinate against him, which is why his administration is targeting businesses, nonprofits and the rest of civil society, proposing corrupting bargains to those who acquiesce and punishing holdouts to terrify the rest into submission. [¶] Those who oppose authoritarianism have to play a different game, creating solidarity among an unwieldy coalition, which knows that if everyone holds together, they will surely succeed. This too can become a self-reinforcing set of expectations — but only if the coalition’s members resist the threats and promises of those who are trying to break it.
American institutions are finally beginning to understand the urgency of solidarity. Trump will not stop until he is met with overwhelming political opposition. When he is, he will have no one to bully, threaten, coerce, or bribe. Solidarity is the way forward—for the American people and the institutions that underpin civil society and democracy.
No Kings Day will be a massive show of solidarity by the American people. Let’s make it as large and unmistakable as possible so that Trump—and his enablers—get the hint.
[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]
A photograph of Dred Scott, taken around the time of his court case in 1857
The justices are betting that they can’t be held to account.
This is a gift🎁link so anyone can read the entire NY Times article, even if they don' subscribe to the Times.
Jamelle Bouie does another excellent job of looking at current events through the perspective of American history. In this column, he compares the current Roberts Court with the infamous late 1850s/ early 1860s Taney Court--the Court that lost all credibility with its Dred Scott decision. Below are a few excerpts.
If the chief currency of the Supreme Court is its legitimacy as an institution, then you can say with confidence that its account is as close to empty as it has been for a very long time. Since the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization nearly two years ago, its general approval with the public has taken a plunge. [...] In the latest 538 average, just over 52 percent of Americans disapproved of the Supreme Court, and around 40 percent approved. [...] At the risk of sounding a little dramatic, you can draw a useful comparison between the Supreme Court’s current political position and the one it held on the eve of the 1860 presidential election. [color emphasis added]
[See more below the cut.]
