Jennica Pounds

On June 30, the Supreme Court affirmed in Trump v. Barbara that the 14th Amendment says that if you are born on American soil, you are an American citizen. Chief Justice Roberts, citing Calvin’s Case from 1608, called citizenship “the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community.” The ruling settled the question of birthright citizenship in the courts—for now. But it opened a harder one: If citizenship is unconditional, what holds a nation of citizens together?

The nonprofit Feeding Our Future claimed to have served 91 million meals to children across Minnesota. But as Assistant U.S. Attorney Rebecca Kline described in a recent court hearing, they were not feeding kids—they were instead “feeding the bank accounts of fraudsters.” FOF founder Aimee Bock was sentenced to nearly 42 years in prison for stealing close to $250 million in taxpayer dollars, orchestrating what the DOJ called the largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the country.