It’s easier to demonize immigrants than it is to recognize we’re all in danger.

A glance at the news this summer proves it, including Trump voters who are shocked when ICE shackles their wives. The New York Times reported one example last month (a non-paywalled story is here), about a man who voted for Trump three times only to see his immigrant wife arrested at the airport on their way to a wine country vacation, detained in horrible conditions for weeks, and then released on a $35,000 bond despite the fact that she has a green card application in progress and has never been charged with a crime.

What about the Fourth Amendment?

My partner is a US-born citizen. After ICE harassed him at home, I called Governor Shapiro’s office about it, and a staffer there, on hearing that my boyfriend is Asian American, regretfully suggested that he should always carry his passport. I snapped that he’s already been doing that for months.

The Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect people on US soil (yes, people, not just citizens) from search or imprisonment without a proven cause (that’s habeas corpus, in case you’ve been hearing the term lately, a legal principle dating back more than 800 years, to the Magna Carta). And regardless of residency status or criminal charges, everyone in the US has a right to humane conditions if they are detained, including adequate medical care and access to a lawyer.

But when I mention this on social media, I get a flood of nasty responses. I’m a mentally unfit, communist, socialist, bleeding-heart bitch, a blue-haired libtard cunt with pronouns. And having demolished me, these “patriots” explain why immigrants deserve the abuse.

“[They] got caught and suffered the consequences.”

“Trash.”

“You spelled filthy criminal wrong.”

Taking the easier road

It’s bigotry that looks at immigrants and sees filth, criminals, trash. But it’s also profound cowardice. Instead of grappling with state-sponsored violence or their complicity in it, or at least finding empathy for their fellow human beings, these folks take the far easier road of arguing that state violence happens for a reason—to other people.

I know the truth is hard to accept. When horrible and often deadly ICE incidents become as widespread as they now are in the US, targeting citizens and immigrants alike, some primal part of us must calculate our own risk. Regardless of our values, we cling for comfort, perhaps unwittingly, to the things that differentiate us from the people who are targeted. Something that would justify the terror. That might be why a lot of my friends had the same question when they heard about my partner’s brush with ICE: “Is he a citizen?”

Again and again, I had to bite off a bitter answer: Would you be ok with this if he wasn’t?

True terror is hard to face

I don’t think people pose the question because they’re racist. I think they ask it because it’s terrifying to face the fact that things are truly so bad. If masked agents of the state are banging on doors for no reason, or dragging people screaming out of family minivans, it’s less frightening to think, even subconsciously, that this might be happening for a legitimate reason (or at least a reason that is legitimate to the agents), than it is to accept that there is no good reason, that terror and cruelty are the reason, and that you or someone you love could be next, regardless of race, citizenship, or residency status.

It takes more than empathy to face this reality. Because contrary to the tough, righteous, hyper-masculine ethos of MAGA pundits who claim that empathy is somehow the enemy of justice, it is empathy that takes courage. We need courage to realize that despite all our parsing rationalizations, nothing can protect any of us from the direct or secondary effects of the violence of open white nationalists like those in the president’s cabinet. We need courage to recognize that we deserve no more and no less than the people around us.

False divisions

In their 2025 book How To Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, Johanna Hedva articulates a theory of ableism. Through genetics, illness, or accident, anyone can become disabled at any time, but instead of accepting that reality, many able-bodied people instead choose to believe that they’re inherently stronger and worthier than disabled folks. This is much more comfortable than facing our own vulnerability.

A similar delusion about the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda has infected America. Instead of facing the truth that no-one is safe, complacent US citizens sling insults and say anything to shore up their convenient conviction that immigrants have done something to warrant this terror.

When replying to me, they say things like “Don’t break the law. See how easy this is?” But my boyfriend didn’t break the law before ICE showed up at his house.

Or “If you comply and show them your ID and act responsibly [ICE] won’t harass you.” Ah yes, a free society where people must carry papers everywhere for suspicious federal agents. And there are many reported cases of immigration and border patrol agents detaining US citizens, including journalists and military veterans.

Or “Sign the FN GUESTBOOK on the way in. No problems. No ICE. Welcome to the United States.” The US immigration system: famously just a nice big guestbook at the border!

The confusion is the point

In reality, this vaunted boundary between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants is shifting every day. ICE, to fulfill a daily arrest quota, is detaining immigrants with active asylum cases and no criminal history when they arrive for routine check-ins (this happened recently to a friend of my family). And DHS, with the help of the Supreme Court, has suddenly ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including Haitians and Syrians who may now be subject to surveillance, arrest, and deportation after living and working peacefully and legally here for years.

This week, a 20-year-old Haitian honor student named Pierre Damas Bel, who has been legally in the US for two years thanks to TPS, died by suicide. His family says he was driven to despair by the humiliation of ICE forcing him to wear an ankle monitor in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision. He was an aspiring doctor.

Choosing humanity

Because of stories like this, I recently got into it on Facebook with someone’s MAGA uncle. When he couldn’t convince me that immigrants and pro-immigrant protestors deserve to be arrested, beaten, and shot, he shifted his tack.

“There’s a reason that both you and I have never been hurt by police,” he said.

Yes, I haven’t broken the law. But his assumption of my experience is wrong. A decade ago, I joined a peaceful march against police killings, and a line of cops suddenly lifted their bikes as barriers and tried to turn the crowd when I was right at its edge. I was crushed between an officer’s bike at my chest and hundreds of people pressing at my back. I couldn’t breathe. The cops deployed tear gas, the crowd jerked apart, and I was thrown backward. A fellow protestor helped me up. My eyes stung and my mouth bled. The next day, I was covered in bruises. (This incident is minor. As a US-born white woman, I am safer than many of my fellow demonstrators.)

But I never stopped protesting, because I don’t want a world where we’re afraid to march, just like I don’t want a world where immigrants and their families are vilified and terrified, a world full of the lie that they are less human than I am.

It brings punishing chronic fear to accept there’s nothing protecting you or your loved ones from life-changing tragedy at the hands of an unjust state. It’s scary to realize that if you decide to care, you could fight your hardest for justice, and still lose in your own lifetime.

But I think the courage to see others’ humanity, and value it as your own, is worth it.