“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

‘Unalienable’ means a human being cannot be separated from their humanity, or from their human rights.

The United States was the first nation founded on this existential truth. 

Right now, we are watching one part of our system of self-government attempt, with extreme force and determined indifference to the law, to make existence itself a crime. This is what it means to say a person is “illegal”—that their very existence is inherently criminal and inherently threatening. 

The reason people in power seek to do this is simple, shameful, and clear: They want to establish the precedent that people can be separated from humanity and so from human rights. Once that standard is set, powerholders can use the selective attribution of rights and legal protection to create a zone of impunity around their own uses of public authority. 

No American should be confused about this. The Declaration of Independence is very clear that such selective recognition of rights leads to authoritarian “abuses and usurpations” which reveal “a design to reduce [the people and their rights] under absolute Despotism”.

Dehumanization of any person or group of people is explicitly outlawed by the Constitution.

The 5th Amendment clearly says “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…” The 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection of the law to all human beings. Neither makes a distinction for citizens. These amendments were necessary, because the “usurpations” the republic was established to eliminate remained tempting to those who held power over others. 

The First Amendment also goes a long way to reaffirm the unalienability of universal human rights. The five freedoms it protects (faith, speech, reporting, assembly, and the pursuit of legal redress) are all forms of witness. 

The first modern declaration of legal protections for human rights opens with the words “Congress shall make no law” (that abridges these freedoms). No agent of public authority can act without specific authorization in law. The First Amendment’s prohibition on laws that abridge the right to think freely and bear witness, applies to all government actors. 

This prohibition on any government action abridging the freedom to bear witness creates a unique layer of public authority, by which everyone in society is part of the process of keeping the government honest, identifying injustice, and upholding universal human rights. Any person who witnesses an attempt to dehumanize any person, or to separate them from their universal human rights, is protected as having a right and a responsibility to share that information to ensure justice is served. 

This prohibition is also written into federal law. Title 18, Section 1513 of the US Code (18 US Code § 1513) makes it a felony to threaten a witness to any question of law or the violation of anyone’s rights. The statute punishes “whoever” takes such an action, making no distinction between governmental and non-governmental law-breaking. It is a serious federal crime for anyone, including agents of government, to retaliate against any person for being a witness, whether a criminal proceeding has been initiated or not. 

These careful, constructive protections of universal rights—including through empowerment of civil society to witness and counter abuses by government—are further enhanced by the 8th Amendment’s absolute prohibition on cruelty and the 9th Amendment’s guarantee of full legal protection to any and all rights, whether they are written into law or not. 

The word ‘democracy’ means, as Lincoln said, “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. The word ‘republic’ means “the thing (the state and its power) belongs to the people”. Public officials are servants, who report to the people. They do not rule over anyone; they do not have the power to place conditions on universal human rights.

Corrupt elites throughout history have sought to narrow the meaning of “the people”, in order to establish the standard of selective recognition of rights and to rule with impunity. Those republics fail and are replaced, as the Declaration warned, with “absolute Despotism”. That is why the Declaration of Independence was written and adopted, and why it was followed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. 

If anyone’s existence becomes “illegal”, then everyone else also loses the protection afforded by formal, legally binding recognition of unalienable rights.

Right now, we are witnessing the implications of a lawless campaign of dehumanization. High-ranking officials want certain people to be classified as “illegal” and are openly arguing in court that they should be afforded no rights or protections against arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, or summary sentencing. Those officials are demanding that we give up the standard that our human rights are unalienable.

In more than 1,600 cases, federal judges have ruled that this assertion of dehumanizing authority violates the Constitution and is illegal. 14 judges, however, have allowed at least part of that logic to stand. 

We all have a duty to bear witness, to say No to violent abuse of anyone, to demand that the most vulnerable be recognized as human beings with unalienable rights. Our own moral and legal sovereignty as free citizens depends on it.