Graduation Weekend Set My Hair on Fire

Like many in the U.S., my family immigrated here. My great-grandfather left England by ship to work in the woolen mills in Massachusetts. My grandmother, pictured above with my mom and two uncles, came with him. She favored wool skirts and regular cups of tea until she died at age 99.

Like many in this country, too, I attended a university graduation this weekend. I won’t say where or who it was for, because that’s not the point. The point is that it set my hair on fire. Not the graduation itself, but the contrast between that ceremony, with its earnest speakers and hopeful graduates from all over the world, and the news feed on my phone.

That Friday evening, after my husband and I celebrated the graduation with two Latin American students and a recent Chinese graduate, I opened my phone to a news story about ICE agents rounding up a dozen men who were waiting at a gas station for vans to pick them up for roofing jobs. This news headline came on the heels of a story about more than 1800 international students having their student visas revoked, often without warning. Some have been arrested and deported.

Trump made an election promise to initiate “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” But it looks to me like ICE is mostly targeting people who came here to support themselves and their families by roofing our buildings, preparing our food, cleaning our houses, mowing our lawns, taking care of our sickly grandparents, or studying to become the next generation of professionals.

I am not a divisive person. Nor am I typically politically outspoken. As the daughter of a Navy commander and a mother who wanted nothing more than Trump for President, my extended family includes kneejerk liberals who were Kamala all the way and Evangelical Christians who think JD Vance was doing the right goddamn thing when he made up stories about Haitians eating pets. But what can you do when your hair is on fire except scream?

Would Trump and Vance allow my white British family into the country now to work in the mills? Probably. I mean, look at the refugee resettlement program they suspended, then made an exception for, allowing white South Africans into this country because they’re allegedly facing “genocide.” Hello, people. What about the Congolese and Sudanese who are facing actual genocide? Is there any expedited program for them?

And what about the Afghans who came to this country legally, with protective status because they helped the U.S. military during the war, only to see that protective status rescinded despite their country being governed by the Taliban?

If the tariffs don’t sink the Republicans, their nutty deportation strategies will. Never mind the damage these strategies have already done to our global reputation as a compassionate, inclusive democracy where freedom rings.

With so few legal pathways open, people who immigrate here will be forced to live even more on the margins. Instead of diligently doing the paperwork required to be here legally, paying their social security, or sending their kids to school, immigrants will hide because they’re afraid. It’s already happening.

And those bright, ambitious young people? They’ll choose to study somewhere else, in countries where they won’t have to worry about being deported halfway through their graduate studies or, worse, arrested because they published an opinion that didn’t match the administration’s. Who can blame them for going elsewhere?

But it will be our country’s great loss, economically and morally.