The Declaration Made a Promise. At 250, We're Still Fighting to Live Up to It.
A Post-July 4 Reflection by CEO Ann Toback
As America celebrated its 250th anniversary more than 60,000 immigrants sat inside cages in private detention camps. The Workers Circle, the organization I lead, was founded in 1900 by Eastern European Jewish immigrants who arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs. They worked grueling hours, crowded into squalid tenements, and proudly watched their children become Americans. Today's immigrants have made similar journeys, but their stories are ending differently. Masked ICE agents seize them at immigration check-ins and outside their children's schools, and their children are caged alongside them. Many of us fighting this are exhausted, aching for a moment of joy. And so we ask: what does it mean to celebrate our country today?
Two hundred fifty years ago, fifty-six white men signed the Declaration of Independence and its founding promise: that "all men are created equal." They denied women the vote, restricted the ballot to men of property, and forty-one of them enslaved human beings. They saw no contradiction. The Declaration's promise was universal in its words and narrow in its meaning, meant for men like themselves and withheld from everyone else. The Trump administration now reads it the same narrow way.
Equality in the United States has never been gifted. It has always had to be fought for. Slavery was legal until abolitionists and the people who were enslaved themselves ended it in 1865. Women could not vote until the suffragists won it in 1920. Black Americans were promised the ballot in 1870, terrorized away from it, and had to fight for it again and again until 1965. None of these advances came from the Founding Fathers or the leaders who followed them. And those rights can be taken back. This spring the Supreme Court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act, the law that ended Jim Crow in elections, and within hours states were redrawing their maps to dilute the votes it had protected.
The Workers Circle's founders had escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe, and come to a country staging its own racial terror, the lynchings of the Jim Crow South. They recognized that violence, and knew the answer was to organize against it wherever it appeared. Together they built what the country denied them: mutual aid societies, cultural centers, and a place in the American labor movement. They believed democracy was not only a form of government but a daily practice, something you build with your neighbors or lose. For 125 years we have carried that belief, joining with others to make this country's promise of equality real for the people it still shuts out.
Right now the work means fighting once more for immigrants' rights. Today the United States holds more people in immigration detention than at any time in its history; most charged with no crime, others with criminal records who have served their time, and many held in violation of due process. Over 6,200 are children. In August 2025, the Workers Circle organized the first Freedom Vigil in the Everglades, across from the detention camp cruelly named Alligator Alcatraz. One of the men held there was Justo Betancourt, a Cuban father taken last October at a routine ICE check-in. He is diabetic. When his blood sugar spiked, the guards told him to drink more water. He was held over six months, four and a half of which were in Alligator Alcatraz, shackled up to 23 hours a day, until this May, when a federal judge found no lawful basis to keep him. He left fifty pounds lighter, and within days was in an emergency room, where doctors suspected small strokes.
In May, Ron DeSantis said that the camp had held nearly 22,000 people since its opening. On June 14, when I joined one of the last freedom vigils there, fewer than a hundred remained caged inside. "Here we are," I told the people at the gates, "the best of people in the worst of times." Standing with us that day was Justo and his daughter, Arianne. This past week, as we held our final vigil, the camp had been emptied. It was a victory; the first of its kind against the Trump detention regime. We stopped the torture, abuse, and cruelty there. And that victory gives hope and a concrete model to the nation as this fight necessarily continues across the country and make no mistake, it does continue: Most people held at Alligator Alcatraz were transferred to other detention centers, some were deported.
In Justo’s face I saw exhaustion, determination, and a father's pride. He has suffered so much, and still talks about his friends who are still being held. Arianne carries the same resolve. She quit her job, joined the staff of the Workers Circle, and now spends her days helping other detained families. She told me about the friends fighting beside her, people whose activism has freed strangers while their own fathers remain locked away.
The activism is growing. Since that first Sunday in the Everglades, the Workers Circle has built a program to seed and resource Freedom Vigils across the country, demanding these unlawful imprisonments end. The organization now counts more than 250,000 activists, the largest our community has ever been. We did not grow because this country is free. We grew because it is not, and because more people every week refuse to look away.
None of this denies how far we have come. Slavery was abolished. Women achieved the vote. The progress is real and worth honoring. But progress is not a possession, kept simply because it was once fought for. Everything can be lost, which is exactly what we are now experiencing. A birthday that treats the work as finished mistakes a fight still underway for a victory already won.
So yes, we should celebrate America. Not the country congratulating itself on 250 years of freedom it has not yet earned, but the people who have spent those years working, fighting, and demanding it live up to its promises, and those on the frontlines fighting for true democracy, for all of us, today.
