Imagine that you are a nice woman, not particularly different from any other nice woman except for how the country you live in treats you. You dedicate your life to a craft, working endlessly to provide for your family. Still, you know that the country you live in is inherently predisposed against you and have heard the call of reactionaries to get rid of you—that you are a pest, a plague, all that is evil in the country. These reactionaries say that, for their nation to return to its pure, original state, you ought to be removed like gum from the sole of a shoe.

One day as you’re heading into your workplace, a mysterious police force takes you, leaving you with no way to contact your family. This police force will verge from being distant—never telling you where you’re going, what they’re doing, why you’re even in their custody—to outright cruel—insulting you, pushing you and laughing at your misery. You get placed into a center where the rest of your life will be determined. You spend hours in their custody with no water or food—nor recourse to obtain any. They pack you into a small room with a dozen others. The air is sour and sweaty as the rooms have no toilets, and you’re only allowed to shower once or twice a week. You wonder how your family is doing. You never receive an answer. One day, they tell you that they are moving you to another location. Once again, you wonder why you are moving, what their goals are, whether you’ll ever breathe fresh air or if your lungs will forever burn with ammonia and tears. You stay in limbo for months. You are in limbo even now. That limbo, much like the limbos of the past—but a new incarnation nonetheless—is called Krome North Processing Center.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Krome is a detention center located in Miami. When first created, it was meant to keep 41,500 detainees. ICE now reports that it is holding 46,269, with its population only increasing. Its living conditions are inhumane, with at least two deaths being reported since January and thousands of detainees missing. Krome is a concentration camp. This is not an opinion shared by experts, and journalists are still iffy on the wording of it. When you read the reports from USA Today, not once will that term be used, much like they were scarcely used when the practice of keeping children in cages was first brought to national attention in 2018. They do not use these words for the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the El Salvador high-security prison that the U.S. is spending $6 million to send supposed criminals (who have not undergone due process and most of whom don’t even have a traffic ticket to their name) to work indefinitely, with no signs of release. They will not use these words for the military training centers giving them the capacity to detain migrants by the thousands. They will not even use these words for the detention center being built in Guantánamo Bay meant to once again detain migrants, this time 30,000 of them, outside of American purview. Honestly, I do not expect anyone to say anything, at any time, anymore.

Well, I do expect them to equivocate. I expect them to say 30 or 40 years from now that they could not have seen it coming. That, even though all the signs were there, they still could not have anticipated the level of death and devastation that would destroy the “millions” of immigrants President Donald Trump first declared he would deport during his campaign trail. When the U.S. has destroyed my people, there will be little left for the country outside of the satisfaction of its cruelties. That is the crux of the matter, of course, as cruelty is the point of this exercise, even for those who supposedly belong here. The horrors and the violence, the glorification of the fresh disappearances in the morning are the point. Trump is not setting up those detainment centers because he wants to quickly deport illegal immigrants—and those who are thought to be illegal immigrants. He wants to detain them, strip them of their humanity, and use them as an example of the “evil” he is vanquishing. He will make this happen to the worst and best of us.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia did everything right: As a child, he fled El Salvador due to gang violence after his family was extorted by a group called Barrio 18. He created a life with friends, a wife and children here. He worked as a metalworker and played basketball with his friends here. In 2019, he was brought in front of an immigration judge under supposed ties to the group MS-13. These charges were dismissed, and, in lieu of asylum, he was granted a stay of deportation due to “well-founded fear” of gang retaliation. I am giving all these facts not because I would consider Abrego Garcia any less worthy of human decency, a trial, a return home or even the label of human if he had not done any of these things. Abrego Garcia could have done none of these things, and I would still believe that all that he’s living through, much like what all other detainees the U.S. sent to the CECOT are living through, is nothing short of a horror story that lurks in the back of my mind, scarier because of its proximity. 

The point, however, is that he did all these things—he followed the myth of “doing things right,” “following the rules” and “assimilating into the U.S.” as if donning a protection charm—an apple a day to keep ICE away. As of right now, a unanimous decision from the U.S. Supreme Court has declared that he should be returned immediately to the U.S., to his wife and kids, because he did things right, he followed the rules and he assimilated. The Trump administration has vacillated between placing the responsibility of Abrego Garcia’s return solely on the shoulders of the Salvadoran government (see Attorney General Pam Bondi’s statement that “If they want to return him, we would facilitate it—meaning provide a plane. That’s up for El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us.”) and doubling down on the decision to send him to CECOT (see White House advisor Stephen Miller’s statement that Abrego Garcia was “the right person sent to the right place”). In a meeting with Trump on April 14, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said, “How can I return [Kilmar Abrego Garcia] to the United States? Like if I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.”

When I first came to the U.S., Abrego Garcia’s protection charms of respectability and work ethic were the same charms that my mother instilled in me, much like those instilled in her by her mother when they first came to live in the U.S. in the 1980s. So far, they have worked for me, much like they worked for many years for Abrego Garcia. I will forever wait for the moment they do not. As I am writing this, there have already been three successive major shifts to my status as human. First, the Supreme Court’s brief, four-page unanimous decision on Noem v. Abrego Garcia, which stated that “the proper remedy is to provide Abrego Garcia with all the process to which he would have been entitled had he not been unlawfully removed to El Salvador,” and the subsequent dismissal by the U.S. government. Second, the Senate passed the SAVE Act, which states that it “requir[es] applicants to present documentary proof of United States citizenship … The State shall not accept and process an application to register to vote in an election for Federal office unless the applicant presents documentary proof of United States citizenship with the application,” which means that, for any election, I will have to present my citizenship certificate. Finally, there were the thousands of automatized U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) emails that people received this weekend telling them that the DHS is “exercising its discretion to terminate their parole” and not to “remain in the United States—the federal government will find you,” which imply that the U.S. government has decided to deem whether a certain person is worthy of even the simplest of due process rights with the automatization of an ill-functioning machine. We are no longer animals. Animals are at least given the rules under which they must suffer. We do not exist, and it is only a matter of time until we disappear, leaving the laypeople to turn and only note our absence.