--- title: "Rewriting the Rules From the Inside" description: "When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, they knew it needed to be built on the foundation where no single branch of government could do whatever it…" url: https://www.independentpress.com/article/rewriting-the-rules-from-the-inside date: 2026-07-08 categories: ["Politics","United States"] author: "Carlie Hall" --- # Rewriting the Rules From the Inside ![Rewriting the Rules from the Inside](https://images.ctfassets.net/ewtdlsoyixc1/2ovnmv48BPHZTHBm1ejJya/2dffa332cc2944bad69fad8b43025a40/photo-1753799515528-d2873549b442.avif) When the Founding Fathers drafted the U.S. Constitution, they knew without a doubt that it needed to be built on the foundation where no single branch of government could do whatever it wanted. Congress makes the laws, the courts interpret them, and the president enforces them. This ensures the government's system of checks and balances are strong and accountable. But when one branch of government starts doing the functions of all three, the system starts to fail. The second Trump administration has not broken this system but has tested it more aggressively than any president in modern history by exploiting the gaps between branches. As a group of legal scholars wrote in _Time_ magazine in June 2026, many of Trump’s most alarming actions are not technically illegal, but rather legal exploitations of legal loopholes that the Framers of the Constitution never anticipated. Nowhere is that approach more visible than in the administration’s approach to immigration, with the reinterpretation of birthright citizenship, mass deportation campaigns, and warrantless home entries by members of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Each of these actions runs counter to a different provision of the Constitution and represents coordinated efforts by the Trump administration to concentrate enforcement powers in the Executive Branch. The administration's assault on birthright citizenship is the most visible show of executive outreach. On President Trump’s first day of his second term, he signed Executive Order 14160, directing all federal agencies to stop recognizing children born on U.S. soil to parents who are in the country without legal status or on temporary visas as U.S. citizens. Every federal court that has reviewed this executive order has blocked it. A federal judge in Maryland said the order “conflicts with the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment, contradicts 125-year-old binding Supreme Court precedent, and goes against our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth.” The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, asserts, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Thirty years later, the Supreme Court held in _United States v. Wong Kim Ark_ in 1898 that a child born on American soil is an American citizen, regardless of the parents' immigration status. However, the Trump administration has argued that the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” of the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to exclude the children of noncitizens. In June of 2025, in _Trump v. CASA_, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that federal courts may not issue formal court orders requiring a party to perform a specific action or prohibiting a party from taking a certain action. This means that lower federal courts cannot issue nationwide precedents, such as attempting to block Trump’s Executive Order 14160. On June 30, 2026, however, the Supreme Court struck down the executive order in a 6-3 decision. While this decision affirms birthright citizenship as enumerated in the Constitution, Trump has called on Congress to pass legislation that will enable him to carry out his policy, which could circumvent the judicial branch’s checks. Trump’s immigration enforcement campaign also raises a legal dispute about whether the federal government can enter your home, arrest you, and deport you without the procedural protections the Constitution guarantees to everyone in the United States. The Fourth Amendment guarantees “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” In May 2025, the Department of Homeland Security issued an internal memo instructing ICE officers that they may enter homes to conduct immigration arrests using only an administrative warrant. This is a type of warrant that is not issued by any court but by a supervisory ICE officer within the same agency requesting the arrest. In September 2025, the Supreme Court delivered another win for the Trump administration with its decision in _Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo_ by effectively lifting a ban on racial profiling and allowing officers to detain and arrest people based on characteristics such as what language they speak or what they look like. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has documented that ICE’s enforcement practices threaten the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Fifth Amendment’s due process guarantee, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause because enforcement targets individuals based on race, ethnicity, and national origin rather than on any individual finding of wrongdoing. Additionally, the influx of individuals within ICE custody has created overcrowding at ICE detention centers. News outlets have flagged these centers as having “horrific” and “inhumane” conditions. According to a complaint filed by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, “detained people are regularly subjected to severe beatings or sexual harassment by guards with squalid living conditions and inadequate food.” The immigration crackdown has also extended to a campaign against states and ‘sanctuary cities’ that have declined to participate in federal enforcement actions. If states and cities fail to comply with federal orders, the administration has threatened to cut federal funding to these jurisdictions. Minnesota sued the federal government, arguing that it was violating the anti-commandeering doctrine established in _Printz v. United States_ (1997), which holds that the federal government cannot compel state governments to enforce federal law. However, these disputes are about far more than immigration policy. They raise fundamental questions about how much authority the Executive Branch can accumulate before the constitutional system of checks and balances reaches a point of no return. The Constitution was designed to prevent power from becoming concentrated in any one office, yet these policies are expanding presidential authority by testing the limits of the law and openly defying it. Whether the courts or Congress will ultimately reinforce those constitutional boundaries remains unknown, but it will certainly continue to test the full strength of the American system of government.