Where We Are Taken From
January 16, 2026
I have been carrying this for weeks. The weight of watching a country I love forget itself. Anxiety, grief, and anger arrive daily as I witness lives being torn apart in the name of enforcement, order, and control. What we are living through feels deeply unfamiliar and terrifyingly intentional.
Writing, storytelling, and photography are the three most powerful tools I have to make sense of what I’m seeing and hearing. Too often, words sit at the tip of my tongue because I’m careful and measured about when and how I speak. Sometimes it feels like those words fall on deaf ears. But this is not a moment for silence born out of fear.
I see the cruelty being carried out against immigrant families and communities. Lives torn apart, dignity stripped away, belonging questioned. I often feel helpless. I often feel hopeless. And I wish I could do more.
Writing helps me find clarity when the world feels chaotic. It gives purpose to the pain. Poetry brings those thoughts to life. Emotion sharpened into language. Grief shaped into something that can be carried and shared.
My poem is an act of witness.
It is written from where I live.
It is written with love.
And it refuses to look away.
---
Where We Are Taken From
In Minneapolis,
sirens braid the air with fear.
In South Omaha, my home,
the smell of tortillas and sweet bread still rises at dawn.
Music still leaks from open windows.
laughter still tries to be louder than dread.
But doors close quicker now.
Mothers clutch children tighter.
Fathers leave for work
unsure if they’ll return to the same table.
South Omaha is where I grew up.
Where I learned that belonging is built with hands,
calloused, tired, generous hands.
Hands that cook, clean, weld, drive, teach, pray.
Hands that feed this country every single day.
And yet, those hands are treated like evidence.
Brown skin like probable cause.
Accents like indictments.
ID cards and citizenship papers waved like shields that fail anyway.
People taken not for what they’ve done,
but for what they resemble.
Questioned for existing.
Detained for breathing while brown.
Even arresting U.S. citizens, as if citizenship itself
can be revoked by suspicion.
Families ripped open,
like envelopes marked urgent.
Mothers vanish from kitchens.
Fathers from job sites.
Grandparents from rocking chairs.
Children learn new words too early:
detention, deportation, gone.
This is not law.
This is fear wearing a badge.
This is power forgetting its soul.
History warned us.
It always does
when the federal government decides
some humans are more questionable than others.
When enforcement replaces humanity.
When obedience is demanded, but dignity is denied.
We recognize this feeling,
the tightening in the chest.
the normalization of cruelty,
the way neighbors are taught
to look away for their own safety.
They call it order.
But order without justice,
is just violence in uniform.
And still, South Omaha breathes.
Minneapolis resists.
Food is shared.
Music survives.
Love refuses to leave.
We are not criminals.
We are the pulse.
We are the labor.
We are the story.
And no matter how many raids they stage,
no matter how many doors they break,
you cannot erase a people
whose roots are already woven
into the ground beneath our feet.
This may be hell on earth right now.
But hell has always underestimated
the power of those who love,
who remember,
who refuse to disappear.
And we are still here.