Start here.
The New York Times just published a searing article.
Family separation wasn’t a glitch in the system. It was the system.
And now, Trump allies are planning to bring it back—on purpose.
🔗 Read the article (gift link). Let it land. Then come back.
This isn’t a report.
It’s a reckoning.
A refusal.
A line drawn.
At the airport in San Diego, a father stood between his son and the state.
“I’m not giving my son away,” he said.
It didn’t matter.
An ICE agent warned him: comply, or be dragged down, cuffed, and torn from his son.
He refused.
He didn’t plead.
He didn’t explain.
And everything she promised happened.
The boy—eleven years old—had already watched his mother taken after speaking out back home.
Now, in the country where they’d bet their future, it happened again.
This is not history.
This is now.
This isn’t enforcement.
It’s erasure.
I read the article three times.
Once as a citizen.
Once as a father.
Once as an immigrant.
As a citizen, I’m told the law is being followed.
As an immigrant, I know how quickly safety becomes a temporary privilege.
As a father, I want to break something.
I remember standing at the gate in Philadelphia, watching my daughter walk down the jet bridge.
I wouldn’t see her again for six months.
I smiled, waved, held my ground.
Only after the doors closed did I let myself break.
That was consent.
That was choice.
And it still hurt like hell.
What happens when they take your child—and call it lawful?
I crossed borders with a suitcase and a visa.
Others cross with children—and prayers.
But fear doesn’t need translation.
The fear that if you say the wrong thing, sign the wrong line, or fall into the wrong hands,
the country you believed would save you instead sorts you, files you, erases you.
Disassembles your family into paperwork.
Reduces your grief to a “refusal to board.”
That’s what they call it—interior separation.
As if what’s being split is geography, not lives.
Back in 2018, they called it tragic. Temporary. Necessary.
Just a byproduct.
Now it’s something else: leverage.
They offer you a “choice”:
Take your child back to the country you fled—or stay and lose them.
This isn’t zero tolerance.
It’s surgical cruelty.
Just a few families.
Just enough to make the point:
We can do this again.
Trump didn’t invent this.
He’s the useful idiot. The spectacle. The noise.
While he bellows and blusters, others redraw the map—
in boardrooms, courtrooms, and encrypted servers.
The Heritage Foundation drafts the next regime.
Peter Thiel funds the infrastructure.
Elon Musk floods the discourse with distortion.
The Supreme Court clears the path.
What looks like chaos is a blueprint.
What sounds like freedom is compliance dressed in code.
This system wasn’t broken by Trump.
It was built to serve the few—by people who are never in the room when the child starts crying.
He’s the match.
The kindling was already stacked.
And behind every forced separation,
there’s a roomful of architects who never get their hands dirty—only richer.
Still, a father said no.
Not for politics.
Not for hope.
Not even for show.
Just so his son would remember—
someone tried to stop this.
I write this as a father who once held his daughter through hard goodbyes.
As an immigrant who knows how fragile the line is between protection and punishment.
As an ally who no longer believes silence is a form of safety.
Because Maksim, the eight-year-old taken at JFK, has stopped counting the days.
Because candy meant for reunions is softening in the pocket of a uniform that doesn’t know his name.
Because trauma is not paused until the courts catch up.
Because the choice was never a choice.
It was a warning made visible.
Because this isn’t just happening.
It’s being done.
The question isn’t what kind of country does this.
We already know.
They count on our silence.
Our exhaustion.
Our isolation.
But we are many.
And when we come together,
we say what they fear most:
Enough.
Not again.
Not this child.
Not in our name.