I walk around with my passport now. Not because I’m leaving the country, but because I am from this one.

Now I am also very lucky. I’m fortunate to have been born here. I have the United States birth certificate, education, and the white mom to back it up. Others aren’t so lucky.

They are being rounded up like animals.

Men, mothers, children, aunts, friends, neighbors—our melting pot is being emptied out, and they are sifting through the ingredients, deeming which ones are pure enough to put back into the pot.

It makes me sick.

I might not talk to my dad currently, our relationship is complicated, but I am still proud to be a child of an immigrant. I am proud of his journey to become a citizen. I am proud of a lineage of overcoming. I love my skin. I love my last name. Because they tie me to a family I should talk to more and a language I should learn.

I also love this country. Currently, it’s hard to love. But when I hear, “Go back to where you came from!” Where do I go back to? The Midwest? Chicago? This is my home country.

I got drinks with a friend last week, and I just kept watching the door. Rehearsing the lines TikTok told me to say in my head, “I am a citizen, I was born here, I do not consent to questioning or signing of anything. Am I free to go?” I realize that what I have to fear is being detained for at most a couple of hours or days until some supervisor rectifies the mistake. I know others are fearing for their lives, their children’s lives, the life they’ve built here. Because they aren’t going back to the countries they are ‘from.’

I feel both blessed and terrified. Scared for my neighbors, my friends, my family, my found family.

In high school, I went to a small Christian school on the east side of Michigan. I was sixteen when Trump first got elected, which coincidentally was the same year we as a class took a trip to DC. I remember us all looking for souvenirs, and some of the boys decided to get Trump shirts. They started chanting, “Build the Wall, Build the Wall, Build the Wall.” They had wide smiles, and their laughter filled the air, and I remember feeling like the air was leaving my lungs. But I felt like I had to pretend like I thought it was funny to keep my place in the pecking order. To placate the fear that must have been on my face, they later started saying, “Build a wall but keep Izzy.”

Build a wall, but keep Izzy. Build a wall but keep…

Dangerous words for boys to play with. Boys who have become dangerous men who traded words for action.

I wish I were braver then. I wish I had told them how hurtful the words they were playing with really were. How dangerous they were, and have become. We live in a reality where children are being brought to detention centers. Children. What crimes have they committed? If this was really about getting the “criminals” off the streets.

Build a wall, but keep Izzy.

These words have stayed with me for almost ten years.

The words we play with have power. The words we use have intention. The words we are too afraid to say out loud, the ones we have in the back of our minds, rising like bile in the back of our throats, those are the ones that should rattle you the most.

Words like genocide. Words like concentration camps. Words like ethnic cleansing.

I’m not playing with words.

I’m using my voice, while I’ve got it, even though it shakes.

Abolish ICE.

Izzy Nunez

Izzy Nunez graduated from Calvin in 2022 after studying graphic design and sociology. Today she lives in North Carolina where she is living out her dream of being a graphic designer.