This is a scary time to be a Latine in the United States. The news is full of stories of face-covered ICE agents rounding up undocumented immigrants, placing them in concentration-type facilities, and deporting them without due process.
These draconian actions are not limited to those without proper documentation. Even people with official permission to be in the United States are being targeted.
Consider the deportation of Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese nephrology specialist and Brown University professor who had a valid work visa. Or the arrest, detention, and torture of Khan Suri, a Georgetown University student and professor on a J-1 student visa, who was picked up after class with the intent of being deported.
Even immigrants with legal permanent residency through a green card are not immune from imprisonment and/or deportation. According to an arcane Cold War-era law, the Secretary of State can deport a noncitizen if their presence or activities threaten U.S. foreign policy interests. (Ironically, the current Secretary of State’s parents were immigrants.) This is what happened to Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student involved in pro-Palestinian activities.
This is horrible, but at least I, a naturalized U.S. citizen since 1969, need not fear.
Not so fast.
If truth be known, I am terrified. So afraid that my family and I have contingency plans in case the worst befalls me and I find myself detained or deported.
Why am I, a naturalized citizen, afraid? First, what the government giveth, the government taketh away.
Second, all Latines are considered “illegal” (as if any human can ever be illegal) until proven otherwise. Consider the detention of Elzon Lemus, who was ethnically profiled and denied his rights because, as a detaining agent who was being recorded, told him: “You look like someone we’re looking for.” In other words, he was Brown.
Third, Latines who are U.S. citizens are already at risk, as in the case of children who are U.S. citizens being deported with their undocumented mothers.
But surely, as a well-established light-skinned Latine professor with certain economic privileges, I should be safe. Right? Wrong.
Consider the peculiar case of Elon Musk, the original Trump bro who fell out of favor, and Zohran Mamdani, the socialist frontrunner in the New York City mayoral race. Recently, the President of the United States claimed their citizenship might be in jeopardy. Both, like me, are naturalized citizens.
My earliest memories are of living at a rat-and-roach-infested one-room apartment in the slums of Manhattan. On June 21, 1960, my family and I received letters from the U.S. government stating we had violated Section 242 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. In other words, we overstayed our tourist visa.
Asked to self-deport, we did not, choosing instead to live in the shadows until we obtained our green cards.
Since becoming a U.S. citizen, I never questioned my legal status, until now, as the country moves toward prioritizing denaturalization. Laws once correctly used to expatriate Nazis are now being broadened to incorrectly deport personas non grata—like Musk, like Mamdani, like me.
According to a June 11 memo from the Justice Department, the denaturalization of citizens should encompass anyone who “pose[s] a potential danger to national security.” It is this vague definition that makes the possible expulsion of Musk, Mamdani and me possible.
So let’s be real. I doubt Musk or Mamdani are in any danger of being deported. One is too rich and both are too high-profile.
But Trump’s musing about deportation was not geared to them. It was geared to people like me—naturalized citizens vocally at odds with the Trump Administration. It was meant for me to start policing myself, to self-discipline my so-called acid tongue.
But my concern goes beyond simply a chilling effect on my free speech. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deportation czar, has already vowed on X to “turbocharge” the denaturalization process begun during the first Trump Administration.
Chad Gilmartin, spokesperson for the Justice Department, announced the filing of five denaturalization cases on X in July, pledging: “MORE TO COME.”
Why shouldn’t I believe Trump, Miller and Gilmartin when they threaten denaturalization? We would be fools not to believe them, not to accept their hatred for all things immigrant, their commitment to Making America White Again.
In a rational and sane world, I should have nothing to fear, for I obviously do not “pose a potential danger to national security.” But in the Trump alter-reality in which we live, I have much to fear.
Is my consistent unmasking of white supremacy posing a potential danger to national security? Is my support of Palestinian liberation and my denunciation of Israel’s settler colonialist strategies posing a potential threat to national security? Is my denunciation of neoliberal global economic policies, which are pauperizing the Two-Third World so that the First World can live in splendor at their expense, posing a potential danger to national security?
And the most important question of all: Are my continued critiques of the Trump Administration for being the most racist, corrupt, and ignorant administration in modern history posing a potential danger to national security?
I am currently living in fear. I say this not as a rhetorical hyperbole. I really, truly am afraid.
Maybe nothing will come of this, and I will never have to face detention or deportation. ¡Ojala! But this really is of no comfort because the fear and stress caused by the uncertainty under which I’m currently living is no doubt shaving years off my life.
I may be afraid, but I will continue to refuse to play the coward. To remain silent, as some of my colleagues have chosen to do, would become a denial of everything I believe, a denial of the God I claim exists, and a denial of my very humanity.
Still, I remain afraid.
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Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, and a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.
