In the days since President Donald Trump’s federal immigration agents launched operations Swamp Sweep and Catahoula Crunch in the greater New Orleans area, the city has been enveloped in palpable fear. Some businesses have temporarily shuttered to protect customers and members of their community. Some families have been opting to keep their children home from school, lest they increase the likelihood of someone in their family being grabbed.
A month or so ago, I decided to stop speaking Spanish in public.
I watch video after video of agents patrolling neighborhood streets and shopping centers. I read my friends’ social media posts lamenting that they have to carry their passport in case someone forces them to prove their citizenship. As I digest it all, I feel increasingly anxious for the city I’ve made my home and the ordinary folks who just want to provide for their families and obtain a good education for their children.
And truthfully, I feel increasingly anxious for myself.
I have been wrestling with defeat. A month or so ago, I decided to stop speaking Spanish in public. I no longer answer my parents’ calls during my neighborhood walks or while grocery shopping. I don’t play music in Spanish unless I’m wearing headphones. I even avoid certain neighborhoods and restaurants. Out of a need to protect myself and, in turn, my loved ones, I keep turning away from anything that might lead to unwanted attention and scrutiny.
cdEven before writing the very piece you are now reading, I reached out to an immigration lawyer and friend for feedback. No, I’m not an undocumented immigrant. Even so, I fear getting caught up in a sweep in which I’m detained before I’m given an opportunity to prove my status.
Numerous stories confirm that I’m right to be afraid. In Minnesota this week, a U.S. citizen originally from Somalia said agents refused to even look at his ID as they handcuffed him and put him in a car. In Key Largo, Florida, a Miami Herald reporter recorded a video of a woman in scrubs screaming, “I’m a U.S. citizen, please help me,” as she was forced to the ground and handcuffed. And in Marrero, Louisiana, a New Orleans suburb, security footage captured masked immigration agents running after a woman who screams, “Leave me alone!” before safely making it onto her property.
In the Minneapolis case, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told NBC News that its agents were looking for someone else and detained the Somali-born citizen because he “walked out of a nearby restaurant, turned around, and fled from law enforcement,” which agents counted as “reasonable suspicion.” In the Florida case, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the woman had refused to roll down her window or hand over her driver’s license when she was pulled over. In the New Orleans metro case, the DHS posted on social media that the woman matched the description of someone agents were looking for and that when agents “determined the individual in question was not the target,” they “departed the area.”
People cheerleading these operations keep asking: If you have nothing to hide, why should you fear?
And, yet, people cheerleading these operations keep asking: If you have nothing to hide, why should you fear? We also hear them claim that everything would be fine if immigrants just entered the country “the right way” and assimilated into American culture.
That oversimplification of immigration unnerves me. I feel annoyed at the smug certitude from people unaware of how authorized immigration works and what it entails — its many challenges and procedural tribulations. The idea that legal and documented immigration is an accessible resource is simply a myth. And even when you do enter the country legally, the challenges don’t stop there.
Nerve-wracking and often demoralizing, the by-the-book immigration process is complicated in ways most people don’t understand. I know this firsthand. My family and I immigrated to the United States in 2002. But the process to enter the U.S. had begun more than a decade earlier. It took thousands of dollars, years of paperwork and myriad other resources to navigate the process.
I was 14 when we arrived, and one of the things I hate to remember was the medical examination I endured to obtain a green card. I remember entering the examination room without my mother and was told by a lady physician with a pixie cut to strip to my underwear. Like any 14-year-old, I was shy and self-conscious, ashamed of the expanse of my hips and the fullness of my breasts. Then there were the questions: “Have you ever had sex?” When did I have my last period? That exam is a metaphor for how hard and painful and humiliating the process of assimilating can be. After all that, we can still be treated like we don’t belong here or like we shouldn’t worry if we came here legally. I’ve considered whether my fear is justified. And I’ve come to understand that it is. With anti-immigrant sentiment intensifying, one’s legal status can be irrelevant. We are made to feel unwanted regardless of how we’ve entered the country. My college degrees, my award-winning book, the public accolades I’ve received, have not insulated me from hate. I’m still called a “foreigner” in a disparaging way, despite having spent most of my life in this country, as an active and loving member of the many communities I belong to. With anti-immigrant sentiments intensifying, one’s legal status can be irrelevant. I don’t believe myself to be more worthy of dignity and fair treatment because of what I’ve accomplished, but what I’ve accomplished serves to illustrate the point that to many, it doesn’t matter if you subscribe to meritocracy. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve pulled yourself up by your bootstraps or you don’t even believe that said bootstraps exist. If I’m still made to feel afraid, can you imagine how folks in more precarious and vulnerable positions must feel? But even during a time of so much fear, there’s hope. We are witnessing a collective resourcefulness, a surge of empathy and kindness. For every unsuspecting father who gets handcuffed outside a shopping center, a volunteer helps her coalition ensure communities are well informed and prepared to respond. A neighbor lends a hand, whether by shopping for groceries for a frightened family that doesn’t want to go outside or by running another errand. Residents have taken to the streets to protest. In New Orleans, they have packed City Hall and demanded that immigrants be treated with dignity. All around us, Americans, whether in New Orleans or Chicago or Newark, New Jersey, are banding together to protect one another and to give us a little less reason to be afraid.
Annell López is the winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize and the author of the short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason, a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for best debut short story collection. 
