Roseanne Rodriguez took an oath when she became a combat medic for the U.S. Army to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies.” She said it was important to her to uphold her oath as a civilian even if President Donald Trump doesn’t.
Rodriguez is an avid protester in D.C. Most recently, she attended the protests outside the Supreme Court on May 15 as justices heard arguments in a case about birthright citizenship — a right outlined in the 14th Amendment providing all born in the U.S. citizenship that has come under fire by the Trump administration. She was wearing a red beret with an Air Force patch on the front and carrying a sign that read, “Protect and Defend the Constitution.”
“What really drives me, especially right now in this world where I feel like we’re losing democracy, is that every generation has an opportunity to either fight for it or just let it die, that this is our generation’s time, and you either are going to be there or not,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez is a veteran who served in Iraq for 15 months beginning August 2006. She is from a Mexican family long-settled in the U.S., with generations having served with the Marines. Growing up in a small town in Texas’s panhandle called Littlefield, she and her brother were the first in their family to join the army instead. “I wanted to be better than my brother, because he’s infantry,” she laughed. “I volunteered for Airborne School so I could be cooler than him, which he still doesn’t think I’m cooler than him.”
She is a former employee of the Republican National Committee of Texas and Florida, a position she believes contributed to a political climate of anger and fear that she regrets. She was also a volunteer with Texans for Marco Rubio in late 2015 and early 2016. Now, she says, she “will never give any party loyalty to anyone anymore.”
(Photo: Roseanne Rodriguez campaigning for Marco Rubio while he ran for president in the 2016 candidacy.)
“I was conservative, and I still say I’m probably libertarian leading,” Rodriguez said. “I do have beliefs, big freedom, small governments. But these days, if I do have very liberal ideas, just expanding my mind a little bit more, learning more about the history, my own history, the country’s history — I guess they’re tied together.”
Eyes were on Rodriguez at the May 15 Supreme Court protest as some advocates thought it strange she was yelling at several Democratic lawmakers who came to support the protest. She blamed the legislators for not doing enough in their capacity as a check on the executive, Trump’s power.
“You didn’t organize this. Somebody else organized all this stuff. Where are you guys at? Why are you guys not organizing in your districts?” she questioned. “I’m sorry if I’m not going to sit here and clap for you when you decide to ascend from your throne and come and take a photo op with the people who’ve been standing out there.”
She shared a memory while working as a field director for the RNC, and later regional director, in Texas she said still haunts her: During an internal discussion, she and her colleagues discussed a mail print “that essentially said, vote straight ticket Republican because if you don’t, ISIS will come through the border and be at your door with Ebola.”
“The discussion was about who would carry that message because the party didn’t want something that inflammatory being sent out under their name. They gave it to the local tea party to push out under their name,” Rodriguez said. “At the time, it didn’t really bother me. We all laughed about it. It wasn’t until late 2016 did I start to see what a monster we had created. Not me single-handedly, but the political party machine.”
A strict moral inventory of what she had seen and done in Iraq and within the RNC is not something Rodriguez shied away from. “I was a believer that democracy could be something that could be packaged and given to another country, here’s this great gift of democracy,” she recounted, describing her view of war as rose-colored before deployment.
(Photo: Roseanne Rodriguez with her unit while deployed in Mosul, Iraq.)
In particular, Rodriguez shared a night when she was asked to accompany them to a nighttime raid as one of the few women in her unit.
“There were times where I felt like we weren’t doing good and we were doing a lot of harm … At night, they’re doing these raids. And these people are so terrified,” she said. “I had an experience when I was very young with the police, and all I could think about was, ‘Oh, my God, I am a part of these people who are terrorizing this group of people.’ These are women and children who are just waking up at the end of the night, and their husbands and sons are being strapped, tied, and taken out.”
As a 5-year-old child in the 1980s, Rodriguez and her mom were inside their Littlefield home when the police “bust the door down, guns drawn, throw all of us on the ground,” while attempting to arrest her father for possession of marijuana charge.
It was a moment that shaped the criminal justice reform work Rodriguez would do decades later. She said she felt a role reversal when she was in Iraq during the raids.
“You’re in these people’s living room at night, and that’s all I could think about was I remember how terrified I was. I could just imagine, I almost put myself in their place,” she said. “ We would look at [the Iraqis] like they were all the problem. Now, I’m not saying there weren’t bums, and there were people trying to kill us, for sure. But we started to lump them all together.”
Upon returning to civilian life, she went to college at Texas State University, San Marcos, from 2008 to 2012 for a B.S. in Biology. She described it as almost like a different world after growing up in a conservative small town and then being in a more conservative military environment. She said she also had “just basic war trauma, I think, but all bottled up and not dealt with, because that’s just not how the military was at the time.”
“I was a medic, so I treated a lot of other people’s trauma. And I think that’s why I probably felt a lot of guilt for it was because I’m fine — some people were not.”
Rodriguez said after a little bit, another feeling settled in, different than the survivor’s guilt.
“The things that we did over there, just the recklessness of it all, and then, thinking that it was funny, which is kind of hard as a human being to admit that you dehumanized,” she said. “That stuff you feel bad about, like you realize what you did. It’s not great. Doesn’t make you feel like a good person.”
When she read “The Miseducation of the Negro” by Carter G. Woodson, the 1933 book renowned for addressing the influence of racist education upon Black youth and calling for an education system that was inclusive of the lived experiences, history and culture of the Black community, she said she resonated a lot with what she learned.
“I just felt like I was inferior. So I think latching onto the ideology of conservatism and the belief that the systems are because maybe this group did it to themselves and you can just bootstrap it, not looking at the history and oppression and systemic laws that were passed to oppress these people, maybe that contributed to it,” Rodriguez said.
The protests following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, were met with a militarized response that shocked the world in 2014. It reminded Rodriguez of the tactics she had seen in Iraq.
“But I thought that because the Republican Party talked about rights and justice and limited government, that they would be the ones that would want to advocate for having more freedom and protections for individual people,” Rodriguez said. “They didn’t want to hear about policing. And then the more I spoke out, it was like my acceptance was conditional.”
(Photo: Roseanne Rodriguez worked as a field director for the Harris County Republican Party in 2015.)
Stunned by recognizing tactics from her time in Iraq, Rodriguez took to criminal justice reform.
“I have told people that I feel like the environment has been very like we’ve already been conditioned to accept a large police presence around us that looks militant.”
In 2022, she started an organization called Get a Warrant focused on criminal justice reform and the criminalization of poverty in the US by strengthening individual Constitutional liberties. But she said as she saw a greater threat emerging of fascism, and shifted her focus to advocating for democracy-related issues. Now, she’s a board member of Justice Forward Virginia — a criminal justice reform advocacy organization — and a protester upholding her oath to defend the Constitution.
“Trump has a lot of these lawyers who seem to be able to find all the loopholes and come at the Constitution in all different ways. Who’s to say us protesting out there, we’re not deemed a terrorist organization and a threat to national security,” she said. “We either do something or we sit back and we just let [democracy] die. I remember saying that I would do something, so now’s the time — shit or get off the pot type situation.”
Cover Photo: Roseanne Rodriguez protesting outside the Supreme Court during oral arguments for the birthright citizenship case