Letters to America: Refuge Is a Luxury Item Now

Hello again my lovelies

And welcome to another week where your country’s jog down the path to authoritarianism seems to be speeding up to the pace of a middle distance runner…

Today’s letter focuses on the particular kind of moral absurdity I’m experiencing in watching a country call itself “The Land of The Free”1 while quietly rebuilding an internal Underground Railroad.

Not a metaphorical one.

A real one: travel funds, volunteer drivers, safe houses, encrypted messages, legal hotlines, mutual-aid spreadsheets, doctors trying to stay one step ahead of prosecutors, and patients trying to get across state lines before the window closes.

In my first letter in this series, I wrote that your Supreme Court is structurally unsafe. In my second, I wrote that fair maps are dying, and that your electoral system is being bent toward managed minority rule.

I closed that second letter by asking what refuge could possibly mean in a country where the law itself has become hostile.

The answer, I think, is darker than it first appeared. Because the problem is no longer just that some states are hostile while others remain decent.

It is that the federal government is increasingly learning how to reach into the states that are trying to remain decent, while the Supreme Court is increasingly willing to destabilise protections from above.

The old hope was federalism: if one state turns cruel, another can shelter you.

That hope is not dead. But it is no longer enough.

And even where refuge exists, it exists unevenly.

In the America now taking shape, refuge is becoming a luxury item.

What the Underground actually is

It helps, here, to be specific.

Since Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade, networks that once sat at the margins of public life have become essential infrastructure. Abortion funds, practical-support organisations, volunteer housing networks and legal defence groups are doing work that governments used to be expected to do: helping people reach lawful medical care without being bankrupted, trapped or criminalised in the process.

The Brigid Alliance is one prominent example. It helps patients travel long distances for abortion care, arranging transport, lodging, meals, childcare coordination and logistical support for people crossing multiple state lines. The Midwest Access Coalition and other groups play similar roles, providing travel, lodging, food, childcare and other practical support for people travelling to, from or within the Midwest for abortion care.

These organisations are not decorative charities. Sadly and horrifyingly they are functioning pieces of a parallel survival system.

That phrase matters: parallel survival system.

Because when citizens need something like an internal escape network simply to obtain healthcare that remains legal elsewhere in the same damn country, the official architecture of protection has not just failed. It has become part of the danger.

And the work is not confined to abortion. Shield laws now operate as legal bulwarks in states trying to protect both reproductive and gender-affirming care from hostile out-of-state investigations and prosecutions. As of late 2025, twenty‑three states and Washington, D.C. had shield‑law protections related to reproductive healthcare, and eighteen states and D.C. had comparable protections related to gender‑affirming care.

That sounds reassuring until you pause - and think about what this actually implies.

A map of shield‑law states is now, to a disturbing degree, a map of where different kinds of person2 can safely exist.

The safe states are real. They are also not enough.

It would be dishonest to pretend these state protections mean nothing. They do matter, and they are saving people.

Some states have strengthened privacy protections around telehealth and prescription data, blocked cooperation with hostile out‑of‑state subpoenas, and protected providers offering lawful care to people travelling in from ban states. For people who can get to those states, those protections are not abstract. They can mean the difference between medical support and forced continuation of pregnancy, between continuity of care and abrupt medical abandonment.

But this is where your national conversation too often slides into comforting fiction.

“Move to a safer state” is not a democratic solution. It is an exit strategy, and one available only to some.

In theory, everyone has options.

In practice, that rhetoric of choice dissolves on contact with reality, and refuge is already a luxury.

If you have money, you can relocate to a shield‑law state, take time off work, pay for travel, pay for childcare, pay for lawyers if something goes wrong. If you have a flexible job, supportive family, and a passport, you can contemplate leaving the country altogether.

If you are poor, undocumented, disabled, tied to shift work, bound up in family court, caring for children or elderly relatives, or simply one crisis away from eviction, your options shrink to whatever an overstretched fund or mutual‑aid network can assemble for you, if they can reach you at all.

The legal map may be national. From my perspective this side of the pond, the escape routes are brutally classed.3

When escape depends on your bank balance, your passport and your boss’s patience, what you are looking at is not freedom. It is filtered permission.

That is why “safe state” rhetoric needs pressure‑testing.

A state is not truly safe if the ability to reach this safety depends on your liquidity, your mobility, your employer’s tolerance, your documentation status, or your ability to disappear quickly and quietly.

It is safer. That is not the same thing.

The federal government is learning to follow people across state lines

The central problem now is not merely that some states are trying to punish care.

It is that the federal government is increasingly using national levers to weaken the states attempting to protect it.

The most immediate mechanism is funding pressure.

The Trump administration has revived and weaponised the Weldon Amendment, a long‑standing federal spending rider, to threaten states that require objecting providers to refer patients elsewhere for abortion care.

Illinois was warned that its law requiring objecting providers to make referrals violated Weldon, with the implication that federal health funding could be at risk. Given the extent to which hospitals rely on Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, such threats are not policy disagreements. They are calculated pressure campaigns against the basic machinery of healthcare.

That matters because it changes the geometry of refuge.

A shield‑law state may have the political will to protect patients and providers. But if the federal government can threaten the hospital system itself, then the state’s protection becomes contingent on its capacity to absorb or resist fiscal punishment.

Refuge starts to look less like a right and more like a negotiated privilege.

Then there is the Comstock Act.

This 1873 law, passed before women could vote4, prohibits the mailing of “obscene” items, including those intended for producing abortion. Anti‑abortion legal activists and officials have been pressing for an expansive federal reading of it, one that could be used to ban mailing abortion medication and other abortion‑related supplies nationwide, including into states where abortion remains legal.

That is a qualitatively different threat.

A state shield law can help protect a local doctor from an out‑of‑state prosecutor. It cannot nullify a federal statute enforced by a hostile federal administration.

If Comstock is fully activated in that way, the logic of refuge changes again: the safe states remain safer, but they are no longer sovereign enough to guarantee the care they have promised.

This is why the old federalist comfort blanket is fraying. The question is no longer simply: which state will protect you?

It is increasingly: how long can that state go on protecting you once Washington decides it objects?

A captured centre makes refuge harder to trust

This is the point where some readers will say: “surely the federal courts still matter, and surely not every national institution is captured.”

That is partly true. It is also not enough.

In 2026, the Supreme Court extended access to mifepristone by halting lower‑court restrictions through an emergency order, allowing mail and telemedicine access to continue while litigation proceeds.

That was a real, material reprieve for abortion medication, and it would be dishonest not to acknowledge it.

But look more closely at what even that “good news” reveals.

It came through the shadow docket, the Supreme Court’s emergency lane, where major decisions can be made quickly, often without full explanation, without full briefing, and without the transparency that would ordinarily accompany rulings of national consequence.

It is therefore both a temporary protection and a reminder that fundamental access to care can now hinge on opaque emergency orders from a court that I have already argued is structurally unsafe.

Once the centre starts governing through improvisation and secrecy, trust in refuge curdles into something closer to fear. People stop asking whether the system will protect them and start asking how long they can stay out of its way.

And the same Court is increasingly asserting power over state courts via that same emergency machinery, even reaching into state‑level election and redistricting disputes before state courts have finished their own work.

That matters for refuge because the “islands of decency” strategy depends on states being able to build and defend their own protections. If SCOTUS increasingly sees state‑court innovation or resistance as something to be managed from above, then even the overground routes to safety become more precarious.

And then came the DOJ’s new “Anti‑Weaponization Fund”.5

Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns. His own Justice Department then settled the case6 by establishing a $1.7767 billion fund, drawing on the federal Judgment Fund, to compensate alleged victims of government “weaponization and lawfare.” The DOJ’s announcement says the fund will run through late 20288 and be overseen through a process created by the Attorney General.

What pushes this beyond ordinary corruption into something systemically darker is the reported settlement language barring future scrutiny of Trump’s past taxes and finances.

If my understanding of this is right, then the executive branch is not merely defending itself politically. It is using settlement power and public money to construct a form of self‑protective immunity around the president and his orbit.

Why does that belong in a letter like this about refuge?

Because refuge depends, at the very bare minimum, on the belief that somewhere in the national architecture there remains an institution willing to investigate the powerful rather than only the vulnerable.

If the executive is shielding itself, the courts are intervening opaquely, and Congress is inert or intimidated, then the meaning of “safe enough” changes everywhere downstream.

That is not law as a shield for the public.

It is law repurposed as armour for one man.

What refuge means now

At this point, the word “refuge” is doing way too much work here - so let’s break it down.

There are at least four different forms of refuge now operating in the United States, and they are not equally available.

1. Refuge as emergency logistics - the abortion‑fund model: travel, accommodation, local navigation, legal triage, childcare, and practical support for people who need care now and cannot wait for the republic to repair itself. It is morally serious work. It is also, by definition, reactive.

2. Refuge as state architecture - the shield‑law model: legislatures, attorneys general, hospital systems and local courts trying to build lawful zones of protection inside a hostile federation. It is more durable than emergency aid, but also vulnerable to federal pressure and Supreme Court intervention.

3. Refuge as internal migration - the choice to move from a hostile state to a safer one. It is rational, real and already happening. It is also brutally selective. Hourly workers, caregivers, people under custody arrangements, people without supportive employers, people with disabilities, and people who depend on local family networks often cannot make this move without wrecking the rest of their lives. That does not mean they lack need. It means they lack the kind of freedom that affluent Americans too often mistake as universal.

4. Refuge as exit - the nuclear button of emigration, or at least preparation for it: passports renewed, second residencies explored, jobs sought elsewhere, children enrolled with one eye on a different future. Exit, too, is classed. It takes savings, documents, useful credentials, and a country willing to admit you, which is to say it is least available to the people your policies have already pushed to the edge. The more your life has already been constrained by American law and policy, the less likely you are to qualify for escape from it.

Put bluntly: in the America now taking shape, refuge is becoming a luxury item. The richer, whiter, healthier and more mobile you are, the easier it is to secure, and the hardest it is to obtain if you are none of those things…

That is not an unfortunate side effect of democratic erosion.

It is one of the key ways democratic erosion works.

Survival is necessary. It is not a strategy.

There is a seduction in writing about underground networks and safe states.

It makes adaptation sound like agency. It makes ingenuity sound like power. It makes survival sound almost noble enough to substitute for justice.

But survival is not justice.

A country where refuge is a luxury is not a healthy democracy, no matter however often it holds elections.

It is a place where rights are aspirational for many and reliably enforceable for a few.

If the best the system can offer its most vulnerable people is a patchwork of escape routes, volunteer drivers, confidential prescriptions, emergency fundraising and whispered advice about which state line to cross, then what you have is not a functioning architecture of rights. You have triage.

That triage matters. It saves lives. It deserves money, time, skill and solidarity.

But it remains triage.

And triage is what you do when the wound is still open and there’s a danger the patient will bleed out in the waiting room.

Beyond refuge

Across these three letters, I have tried to describe not a string of isolated outrages but a pattern.

• A Supreme Court that no longer looks merely conservative, but structurally unsafe.

• Electoral rules and judicial doctrines that turn fair representation into a managed contest.

• A federal government that can use administrative threats, emergency dockets and sprawling settlements to destabilise protection and shield itself from scrutiny.

That is not normal democratic wear and tear.

It is a bent playing field held in place by law, procedure, money and fear, and too many people who should know better - including the politicians you elected to Congress and Senate who swore an oath to your fecking Constitution - are pretending this is still just politics as usual 🤬

I do not want to end this letter by romanticising the growing Neo-Underground Railroad, or by implying that finding a safe state is an adequate answer.

The people building refuge networks deserve admiration. The people who need them deserve far better than admiration.

But the next and final letter in this series has to ask (and give my version of an answer to) the single most important question that follows from all of this.

Not how to survive the bent playing field.

Not even how to find temporary shelter from it.

But what it would actually take to dismantle everything that has allowed this to happen, and make it much harder to build again.

With increasing concern, and yet something still resembling hope

If this piece resonated, share it with someone who still believes “just move somewhere safer” is a serious democratic answer. It is not. It is evidence of how far the country has already moved away from equal citizenship.

If you’re reading this from inside the United States and feeling trapped, it’s worth saying plainly: there are other options.

Countries like the UK, Ireland, much of the EU, Canada, Australia and New Zealand still operate under systems where elections are broadly free and fair, where courts are constrained by real ethics rules and term limits, and where reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights - while imperfect - are not being systematically rolled back.

Leaving is a big step. As I’ve discussed above, it’s not possible or desirable for far too many people. But if you find yourself thinking, “I can’t live under this forever”, know that:

• there are immigration paths (work, study, family reunion) into functioning democracies

• there are communities, and programs such as Sanctuary Europa, already helping people navigate those moves,

• and you are not obligated to stay in a system that no longer treats you as an equal citizen.