If ICE takes me

I want to tell you a story. It is 2018, and I am a recent college graduate. I’m 23 years old. My high school best friend and I decide to take a little trip to Montreal. We’ve never been. It seems like a really fun idea. She knows French. It felt like a cool thing to do. And we’re in New York City, so it’s a short flight. We get on the plane early in the morning. It’s a very full flight. Boarding was hectic. I remember it being really hard to get our overhead storage and throw things in. Whatever, it was a short flight. We arrive in Montreal, and it’s still very early. Maybe 8 AM. We get to customs, and we’re about to show our passports to the gate person. And I can’t find mine. I can’t find my passport. And I know I have it, because I wouldn’t have been allowed on the plane without it. They checked our passports coming into the airport in New York, and then again at the gate. I know I have it. I got on the plane with this passport. I know that. But I don’t have it now. I don’t have my passport. I’ll remind you again that it is 2018 and I am an African American woman. Trump had just been elected during the fall semester of my senior year at Vassar, which I wrote about here. It’s 2018, and we are two years into Trump’s first administration and I am an African American woman in a different country than I was born in without my passport. I am losing my shit. I am having what I now know is a panic attack. My friend, thankfully, was able to keep it together and made sure that I had WhatsApp installed on my phone so that we could communicate after she went through customs and I went back to the plane to look for my passport. I don’t even really remember the gate number where we got deplaned, but I’m just sprinting through the airport with my carry-on, and I’m probably crying at this point, too. When I finally find the gate, I’m told that they’ve searched and cleaned the plane. I can’t go look myself. And now I’m really freaking out. I’m walking back when an airport worker comes by with one of those big carts—the ones for luggage or people with disabilities. He offers me a ride back to customs. I’m a sweaty, bawling mess. I keep chanting, “They’re going to deport me. They’re going to deport me. I don’t have a passport—they’re going to deport me.” This very kind Canadian airport worker asks, “Where are you from?” “New York.”“So, why would we deport you? Where would we deport you?” “Africa, obviously.“Huh??” He tells me his daughter lives in New York. He’s trying to distract me because I’m hysterical, and he’s doing his best to just be this gentle, lovely Canadian man. It works, but only a little bit. When I get back to customs, my friend is waiting for me. I’m given a slip of paper and sent to the customs office to sort things out. At the office, they ask me questions. Everything is above board, all in public—I’m not taken into any backrooms, thankfully. I’m sent to the help desk to see if my passport has turned up. We haven’t even gotten our luggage yet—we’re just running around looking for my passport. And do you know what the guy at the desk says, when I give him my name? “Oh, there you are! Yeah, we found it. We tried to call you. You didn’t answer. Here it is.” They’d found it while cleaning the plane and had been calling me ever since. But I hadn’t answered because I was running around convinced I was about to be deported. It was the best moment of my life. In the same breath, the guy says, “The baggage is still coming out. They might have lost some of the bags.” I couldn’t have cared less about my bags. They could’ve thrown my bags in the ocean for all I care. The trip was lovely. It was also freezing. But lovely. And on the flight back to New York a couple of days later, I practically caressed my passport the entire time. I used to joke that the moral of this story is: if you’re going to lose your passport, do it in Canada because they’re very nice. And yet now on January 98th, 2026, I’m just as afraid of being kidnapped and sent away to God knows where when I’m taking the subway, in the city where I was born. I woke up to a text from a friend that essentially said “If you don’t want to see the shit storm going on, don’t check social media.” And I was like, yeah, no shit. So I checked. Don Lemon has been arrested, along with Trahern Jeen Crews, Georgia Fort, and Jamael Lydell Lundy. That hit really hard. I’m afraid for all of them. I’m afraid for Don, as a Black gay man. I’m scared for all of the journalists, out there. I’m scared for Liam Ramos. I’m scared for the families who have watched their loved ones be killed. And. I’m finally afraid for myself. I feel relatively safe in the confines of my neighborhood. I lull myself to sleep with the false promise of safety that a double-locked door, a doorman, and an elite zip code provide. I try not to think about what would happen if I got kidnapped while babysitting. But I do. I think about whether or not the child in my care would understand the gravity of the situation. I wonder if I’d convince him to run, or just pick him up. I mostly fear what would happen if ICE took me, and left him alone on the streets of New York, or even in the subway. A child with no wallet, no phone, who has just watched his babysitter get kidnapped, would be tasked with finding his own way home. As chilling as this scenario is, it’s far better than the one where they keep us together, and take us both. I have hope that a kind stranger would help him find his way home. I trust strangers far more than the monsters pretending that they’re protecting us, aka ICE. I think about what kind of facility I’d be taken to. I wonder how long I could survive without food and water, instead of forcing myself to eat food with worms and all other kinds of debris in it. I wonder if I would be able to interact with the children separated from their parents, and cuddle them close. I wonder if my kidnapping would cause public outcry. I wonder how long it would take for people to know that I was gone. I wonder if I’d be released before my 31st birthday. I wonder if they have calendars in those detention centers. I wonder if I’d be physically and sexually abused, or if the guards would just stick to verbal, emotional, and racial abuse. I wonder how many times I’d be called the n word before lunch. Maybe I’d die of frostbite, laying on a cold, damp floor somewhere. Maybe I’d stain myself with my menstrual blood, and be told to take a Tylenol. Maybe I’d dissociate and drift off somewhere far away to ease the pain. Maybe I’d replay Heated Rivalry on loop in my head. And hum ‘No Place Like Home’ and the soundtrack of Ragtime. Would my ancestors be with me? Would they come to me in some way, to help me through? If I’m kidnapped wearing the beaded bracelet made to remember my Aunt Eileen by, would they let me keep it? Or take it, like they took Liam Ramos’ bunny hat? Would they rip the beads off my wrist, just for fun? And laugh as I cried? I wear one that says “worthy.” I think about getting that word tattooed on my risk one day, to remind myself of my worth. Will I forget my worth, in the company of people who think of me as 3/5 of a human being? The same “men” who parade around kidnapping people, were probably inspired by the texts sent to black women in the days after the 2024 election, stating that we’d been selected for cotton picking shifts. I watched The Handmaid’s Tale for a week after the 2024 election. I told myself I was preparing myself for what was to come. Wasn’t I? I recently saw a quote that said something like “the worst kind of slavery is…” and the answer was something like the prison of your mind or something. And I thought to myself, well isn’t the worst kind of slavery, slavery? Plantations. Concentration Camps. Detention Centers. ICE officers are rounding up anyone and everyone, like slave catchers … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thenuancediaries.substack.com/subscribe