On July 5, 1852, over a decade before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Frederick Douglass delivered a keynote address at an Independence Day event. “What, to the American slave, is the Fourth of July?” Douglass asked. “A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.”

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Enslaved Americans and their descendants, of course, did not voluntarily come to America. It was a forced migration in shackles, one drenched in blood—a painful history that, nearly 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, has not been fully reconciled with.

On this Independence Day holiday weekend, amid increasingly aggressive, reckless immigration raids; in the aftermath of the Supreme Court inviting chaos and confusion into settled constitutional birthright citizenship law, and the Senate voting to give ICE a budget larger than the Marines; as Florida constructs a massive “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center and its governor talks of deputizing National Guardsmen as immigration judges; and as everyday Americans look at each other with doubt and wonder if their neighbors are truly “American,” we must ask: What, to the immigrant—particularly to the undocumented immigrant—is our Fourth of July?

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In Southern California, ICE has been quietly tearing apart Asian immigrant communities, with detainments often happening out of public sight, and detainees not being told in their language what is happening to them or where they are. Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese........

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