On the evening of March 16, I woke up from a day-long nap hounded by text messages. At least five different people—all White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—had texted me asking what they could do about the “Venezuelan immigrant situation” and how they could help me “in such a trying time.” At the time, I did not know what had happened. While my return from my spring break trip had been two days prior, a late flight and an incoming flu infection made it so that, for the entirety of the day before, I had been out of commission. That does not mean I hadn’t seen the signs, though.

As an immigrant, especially an immigrant from what some people call the “Global South,” you quickly learn to recognize that any major mentions of your nationality in the months leading up to a major election is nothing but bad news. Countless headlines about “Venezuelan gangs” and “thugs” had flooded conservative news sites such as Fox News, the New York Post and Breitbart News. During the second presidential debate last year, President Donald Trump implied that Venezuela had been using the United States as a dumping ground for all its criminals, stating, “They allowed people to come in, drug dealers, to come into our country, and they’re now in the United States … Do you know that crime in Venezuela and crime in countries all over the world is way down? … Because they’ve taken their criminals off the street and they’ve given them to [Vice President Kamala Harris] to put into our country.” I knew for certain that the American political cycle had chosen Venezuelans for the spotlight of calumny and infamy when Dave Rubin, a notable far-right political podcaster, chose to react to Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris by saying, “Taylor Swift, you are a young, pretty girl. Do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young, pretty girls? It ain’t pretty.” 

So, no, I wasn’t particularly surprised when the newly-instated Trump administration decided at the beginning of February to either forgo renewing or outright stop the Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole pathways for legal residence for Venezuelan refugees. Much like the Mexican, Guatemalan and Honduran immigrants who served as the primary scapegoats of the first Trump administration, Venezuelan—in addition to Haitian, Palestinian and Iranian—immigrants would serve as the victims of a particular brand of cruelty and violence which American citizens are only too willing to celebrate. I was not, however, prepared for March 16. I could not have imagined the Kafkaesque levels of suffering, the unimaginable horrors, the existential dread I had to deal with, process and then be expected to move past in order to continue my education as if nothing had happened. 

Shortly after receiving the texts from well-meaning progressives, I logged in to X, formerly Twitter, and immediately saw a video tweet from Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. The first sentence of its caption read, “Today, the first 238 members of the Venezuelan criminal organization, Tren de Aragua, arrived in our country. They were immediately transferred to CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, for a period of one year (renewable).” In the attached three-minute video, you can see dozens upon dozens of men—men who looked like they could be my uncle or my cousin—dragged by their hair, pushed around and physically harassed by heavily armed Salvadoran military forces. The video swells with cheap, falsely grandiose electronic music as the armed forces forcefully push their prisoners to their knees and shave their hair and beards. It is only while they’re being shaved that the men are allowed by their captors to look up; otherwise they are led with their heads facing the floor in a mockery of a courtly bow. 

These were the men who, under an invocation of the controversial Alien Enemies Act of 1798, had been sent to be part of “40,000 inmates engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program, which will help make [El Salvador’s] prison system self-sustainable.” While I stared in horror, I noted a response tweet from failed Missouri politician, self-aggrandizing bigot and native Colombian Valentina Gomez: “It’s insane how a leftist judge wanted to keep these animals roaming freely in American soil.” Perhaps if Gomez were not so compelled to sell her soul to the Republican Party, she might have found that the great majority of the 238 Venezuelans imprisoned in the CECOT had no criminal record. Maybe, if she read on further, she would have found that many of them had entered the U.S. legally, seeking asylum from the violent repression and economic decay that has characterized Venezuela in the past few years. If she had only read any of the news stories that sprouted following the release of Bukele’s video, she would have found that none of those men had undergone a legitimate legal process, had been extradited to a foreign country with little to no justification and had been doomed to an indefinite tenure of state slavery for the mere fact that they had tattoos. Or, perhaps, none of this would have ever mattered, as she had already characterized us as “animals,” creatures unworthy of notice, mercy or care, whose crime of existence would merit the cruelest of tortures.

I’d like to think that the vomit that rose to my mouth was a symptom of my flu worsening, but the disgust I felt crawling under my skin made it apparent that I would never again fully feel human in the U.S. How could I, when a small, insignificant piece of paper dictated whether or not I deserved human rights? After my mother was harassed for speaking Spanish in Florida, one of the largest Hispanic outposts in the U.S., how could I ever feel safe in Cleveland? If I could become an animal at the whims of an immigration officer, then it was almost as if I had never been a human after all.

When I was a child, around the age of eight or nine and old enough to comprehend the comparative value of a dollar and fear the booming void of a pistol, I used to pray to all the saints I knew for the U.S. to come and save us. Now, I am left behind, praying to them once again, to save us from the U.S. 

To the question, “What can I do to help you, Mariana Parilli-Castillo, deal with all that has been happening to Venezuelans lately?” I barely have an answer. Donate to legal funds, spread the word of this injustice, speak out against this regime—all this that you should do, and I have done and thousands of others have done. You will have to learn to live with the bile of horror resting in the back of your throat. Perhaps, if you see me around, invite me to ice cream from Mitchell’s. We can try to purge the bitterness coating our tongues, and you can ignore my far-off look as I remember that, to some, I am just an animal granted humanity through a piece of paper.