Rage and rules

On immigration, power, and fearing for my family

Feb 06, 2026

I found this image by chance in my email the other day, and it felt so relevant. Wutai Shan, China, 2008.

In 2018, I received a call from a friend in Pittsburgh who runs a nonprofit that provides interpretation services. There had been an ICE raid at a factory in Salem, Ohio. Dozens of migrants had been detained, and my friend was trying to gather Spanish speakers to interpret so that the impacted families could communicate with lawyers. We drove to Columbiana County, Ohio, a flat expanse of empty fields and decaying farms that went 70% for Trump in 2016. The town’s houses were textbook Appalachian poverty: half-collapsed porches, rusting cars on front lawns, tiny American flags waving before taped-together windows and plywood fences.

The town had been recently revitalized by the arrival of Guatemalans, almost all indigenous and from the same set of villages. Many of them barely spoke Spanish; their native language was K’iche’. They’d come for the promise of work – grueling work, hours processing meat to make the pepperoni that goes on Dominos pizza, operating dangerous machines and getting up to one’s shoulders in blood – but work paid in dollars. No Americans were doing this work. I mean, none. The entire factory was Guatemalans. I can’t confirm it, but I would not doubt that the company sent flyers, advertisements, and perhaps even buses, as other meat processors like Tyson have done, to the border to draw in this cheap labor. Many of the workers, especially those who worked the overnight shift, were teenagers.

We arrived at a church basement where women in heavy traditional wrap skirts, many clutching infants to their chests, waited in a line to ask for help. I interpreted for the team of lawyers: “They came in and everyone started yelling. I ran away but my son is detained somewhere. I don’t know where he is.” Panicky, crying. “We came here for work. In Guatemala, sometimes, we ate grass.”

I can’t remember the exact questions, now, but this was the essence. I accompanied one woman to her house, carrying a huge box of diapers. She and her two young children had taken buses across Mexico and then walked over the border, a journey of several days through the brutal Arizona desert, with no food and very little water. I asked about their journey and she answered my questions matter-of-factly, as if this were simply what one did. It was that, or watch her children slowly wither from malnutrition. Her husband had been detained and she had no idea where he was. I don’t know if she saw him again.

A large Dominos pizza is $7.99. A family pack of Tyson chicken, slaughtered and processed almost exclusively by Mexican and Central American immigrants, is between one and two dollars a pound. Let’s say that again: between one and two dollars a pound. By contrast, local farmer’s market organic chicken costs a minimum of $7, and up to $14, per pound. I’m going to venture here that if I looked in the refrigerator of the average middle-class American family, I’d find a shopping cart’s worth of items provided, at great savings, almost exclusively by immigrant labor: grapes picked by women like the one I met in Houston, Texas, as we both waited for our flight to Oaxaca, who explained how hard it was to retain workers because the grape harvest takes place in cold weather, and one can’t wear gloves, and the fingers freeze (she’d been working in the industry for thirty years, since she was a teenager – her fingers were hardened nubs); blueberries handpicked in Maine, row after row of brown hands exercising extra caution not to bruise the tender fruit; beef slaughtered and processed in Nebraska and Greeley, Colorado, in some of the most dangerous jobs in the United States; Hormel pork.

These meat plants, particularly those run by the massive international conglomerate JBS, stayed open during the peak of the Covid pandemic when most of the U.S. was in quarantine. Kristi Noem forced the Smithfield plant in her state of South Dakota to remain open even as 1,300 workers became sick; she then blamed the sickness on the workers’ living in small apartments. Meanwhile, a nice white suburban family could maintain an uninterrupted supply of meat and produce thanks to the round-the-clock work of “illegal aliens” (and often people with asylum and temporary protected status as well).

When Trump started talking about “mass deportation” in 2016, I really wished it would happen, instantaneously. Even though I knew it would cause mass suffering to immigrants, I wished that all of a sudden they would all disappear. And then, the angry white suburban Republicans who have built their riches over the past thirty years on the backbreaking labor of immigrants might actually see, clearly, who is buoying them up. Who is paving their roads, cleaning their hotel rooms and houses, harvesting and slaughtering most of their food, caring for their elderly.

I am not necessarily against curtailing immigration. I can see how “illegal immigration” is yet another step in American capitalism’s voracious and uncontrolled lust for maximum profit: how much more money can we make while paying even less to workers, having even less accountability to animals and the environment, using even cheaper and more adulterated ingredients? Capitalism is always ruthlessly in pursuit of the most desperate bidder: the Bangladeshi willing to work in the sweatshop for pennies a day so that Americans can buy another T-shirt; the Guatemalan teenager sweeping blood down the drain at 3 a.m. so Americans can save a little more on an Extra Extra Large Pepperoni Pizza.

But the conversation we are having now is not about how to create a more sustainable and humane economy that doesn’t rely on absolutely crushing those at the bottom, and on people buying as much junk as possible. The conversation we are having now is not about how this consumer economy has been supported by the people willing to work brutal jobs in inhumane conditions without complaint or unions, for very little pay, for years on end, therefore enriching massive corporations even further and lowering prices for Americans.

The conversation, as it often does, turns only around “the rules” – who is breaking “the rules,” and how the “good,” “rule-following” Americans are being somehow deprived or cheated by rule-breakers. The irony of upper-middle-class educated white people who are so ignorant they have no clue where their food comes from, nor any notion how they might actually kill and prepare a chicken, nor the faintest idea where grapes grow or what pesticides they’re treated with or how to harvest them, throwing fits about how disadvantaged they’ve been by “illegals” pains my soul. It causes me a physical ache of disgust.

Rules are always relative and contextual. According to the rules a few decades ago in the United States, I was not legally allowed to marry Jorge. Go back just a decade or so further and black people weren’t allowed to drink out of the same water fountain as white people. Women weren’t allowed to have credit cards. It’s important to ask who and what rules serve, and the answer is often the existing hierarchy, the status quo, and whoever is holding the power and making the money.

To immigrate legally to the United States is an incredibly lengthy, expensive, and difficult process. I should know, because my husband did it – not because he wanted to live or work here, but because I got into graduate school and we needed to move. This process would be absolutely impossible for the average Guatemalan trying to come get a job at the Tyson plant – and what most Americans miss is that this is the point.

The illegality is the point: that’s why you can make someone work with chlorine gas, which is banned in Europe because of safety concerns, and know they’ll never sue you, or unionize. That’s why if their arm is chopped off by a machine, you won’t have to pay a cent. That’s how you can charge $2 per pound for chicken. It’s not an accident. It’s on purpose.

And the purpose is, of course, profit. Ask the roofers who are employing teenagers on dirty and dangerous roofing jobs if they’d rather be paying and insuring American workers. Ask General Mills if they’d rather pay a living wage to a unionized American worker than spare change to fifteen-year-old Carolina from Guatemala. Ask yourself if you’re willing to pay $15 instead of $6 for a jumbo-sized box of Cheerios. And if you are, excellent – then let’s talk about rules. Perhaps we might ask if corporations are following them: if they are forced to provide safe and ethical working conditions and pay, if they are forbidden from illegally inflating prices, if they are required to allow their workers to form unions, if they must provide paid maternity and sick leave and vacation to all of their employees.

Who gets to break the rules (not pay taxes, not obey labor laws, employ children, engage in safety violations, endanger workers) and who must follow them? Who is punished? We could ask this about the Epstein files: who, among all the men, including our President (mentioned 38,000 times in 5,300 files; accused of the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl and of engaging in orgies with fourteen-year-olds) has been punished? Who has been shot ten times in the street for “breaking the rules”? None of the men complicit in photos that include a child dressed in a Snow White costume; a child, perhaps eight, kneeling in a sailor suit; a child’s tiny foot on which lines from Lolita have been written in pen.

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When I saw the video of Alex Pretti being assassinated by ICE agents in the middle of the day on a U.S. city street, I started sobbing. I wanted to throw up. I felt this overwhelming grief for my country. That this is what we’ve come to. I’ve lived in places where one could be thrown in jail merely for whispering the wrong phrase, or including it in an email; where citizens are surveilled by a whole quiet army of censors just waiting to pounce. I’ve also lived in places where people can be shot on the street in broad daylight and no one will be held accountable, and where the government can snatch citizens off the sidewalk and disappear them.

Jorge set me straight, as he always does: “Americans don’t know their country,” he shrugged. Because this is the U.S. he has always known. It is the U.S. that many marginalized people know: a hypocritical and mercurial tyrant who promises you riches for labor one day, then hunts you down and tortures you in a cell the next. A profoundly unequal society that is only part “first world,” for a few, and is maintained by a third world shadow economy and life that most middle and upper-class white Americans have no idea exists, would rather not learn about, and see as somehow the choice or the fault of the people caught up within it, even as they build their wealth upon it.

A Spanish friend of mine who works for the UN once told me, “We all know the U.S. isn’t the first world. It’s basically like living in Nairobi: if you have money, you can live a great life, with all the first world luxuries. If you don’t, you’re basically living in a slum, with nothing.”

Many Americans don’t know this. When they say they support law enforcement, they don’t know that when Jorge calls the cops for help because someone hit our car, they ask him for his documents and begin to interrogate him; or that when a white person in the neighborhood where I grew up calls the cops because they see Jorge at a party and don’t want him there, the cops don’t ask the white person for more information but instead interrogate Jorge.

They don’t know that when Jorge is taking photos of a wedding at a park in the suburbs, a white couple will call the cops on him for simply existing in that space. Jorge, ever patient, will explain that he is a photographer photographing what anyone can see is a bride and groom, and will calm down the bride’s mother when she gets outraged and starts fuming at the police. The family is made up entirely of doctors. This is the first time this has happened to them. Welcome to the club. We call the township police later to file a complaint, and they say they’ll “look into it.” We never hear anything back.

They don’t know that when our van broke down fifteen years ago in rural Indiana, the cop we called for help didn’t provide any help to either of us but did order Jorge to stay in the car while he took me to his car and interrogated me about what I was doing with this man and whether I’d been kidnapped. Again, it might be worth pointing out here that our current President and leaders and royals around the world cavorted with a sex trafficker and convicted pedophile and likely engaged in pedophilia themselves, but it is Jorge who is questioned by the cops. To whom are the rules applied? For whom do they exist?

I have been so full of rage I haven’t been able to write. I know what kind of evil is happening inside of ICE detention centers. I have heard it firsthand, from the Central American women who stayed at our house after they were separated from their children and then released from detention with the support of a New York-based nonprofit. They were forced to drink from dog bowls, kicked, sprayed with freezing water from hoses. They were told they’d never see their children again. A sick pregnant woman screamed all night that she thought she was going to die, that she was so cold, I’m going to die my baby’s going to die, she screamed, and the guards did nothing.

What the women did was pray: the woman who stayed at our house was deeply religious, and she formed a circle and the women held hands and they prayed to God. But not the God the white Republican Christians evoke. That one that likes country, faith, and family, but only if they’re rich and white. Only if they’re “American,” the kind that doesn’t speak Spanish and has blue eyes and dyed blonde hair. Maybe these immigrant women’s God won out, because they were rescued by this nonprofit, and that woman cried so hard in my arms that the feeling of shame and horror and guilt at my country embedded in my soul, like the “lifelong concussion” the journalist Martha Gellhorn declared she’d live with after witnessing Dachau. You don’t forget it when someone stays awake all night, sobbing, in your child’s bedroom with the lights on. You don’t forget her face, the look of horror still fresh days later.

I tried and failed to write this essay many times. I didn’t want it to be all rage. And I didn’t know what to do with the rage I feel at the people who are supporting choices and policies that endanger my family; that make it possible that at any time we could be pulled over and my husband could be illegally detained and sent anywhere across the country to one of the many for-profit detention centers, where he could be, as American citizen Aliya Rahman detailed in her testimony before Congress after she was illegally detained, one of many “black and brown bodies, shackled, chained together, being marched by agents outdoors”; or where his skull could be fractured in eight places like the Mexican roofer with no criminal record delivered to a Minneapolis emergency room by ICE, who lied about him “running into the wall,” a claim the nurses called “laughable,” and who was left with significant memory loss and impairment; or where he could be killed.

In Oakmont, a suburb a few miles from us, a Salvadoran father with a pending asylum application who is legally working in the U.S. and has no criminal record was detained while buckling his daughter into her car seat. The daughter later was shaking and sobbing at school: “I want my daddy, I want my daddy.” He is still being held in West Virginia.

The borough of Oakmont, to its credit, responded with an emergency city council meeting which was flooded with residents. The borough issued a statement declaring “We believe that it is our duty to demand justification for this action that traumatized an eight-year-old and her family, residents of our Community.” They immediately passed a resolution preventing local police from cooperating with ICE.

In my rage, I attended a meditation session on Monday night, through the same program where I did my Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course several years ago. The session consisted of about ten minutes of silent meditation, followed by twenty minutes of loving kindness.

In loving kindness, you begin with someone you love – someone “easy.” Then you move on to someone neutral, like your mail carrier, your barista, the guy at Artist and Craftsman who pets your dog. Then, someone difficult. A person you have conflict with, or, if you really want to flex some muscle, someone you actively dislike. Then, yourself. Then, all beings.

May all beings be safe. May all beings be happy. May all beings be healthy. May all beings be free from suffering.

At the end of the session, the instructor read a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.

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I take my rage to the river.
A heron flies into the wind.
I let myself be opened
by the great gray wings
and the great gray sky
and the great gray largeness of water,
not to rid myself of rage
but to become a clearer channel
to meet the chest-scouring,
scab-clawing, cell-screaming,
throat-burning fury of rage
and remind my heart I can
know all this rage, can be
feral with rage and still
keep on loving the world.

The teacher paused, then invited us to share. I’ve attended a lot of these sessions now, and I almost always keep my camera off and stay silent. But that day I turned it on and I raised my little digital hand. When she called on me, I said, “I’m so scared. I am scared for my family.”

And I realized I was furious as I was saying it. “And I’m full of rage and just…shame for my country.” I explained that my husband was a U.S. citizen, and also brown. And that if we were pulled over or ICE came after him in any way, I would film, I would scream, I would protest, I would do all the things that would get me teargassed or perhaps shot in the face – because he has done nothing but follow the rules but the rules have never actually been about rules, they’ve been about power.

I said that I had meditated for long enough now – five years – that I could feel my rage and also know that simply acting on it, shouting, “raging” at people, was likely futile. And I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do with my rage. I wanted it to be useful. Meditation had taught me enough to pause. But then, what?

And the teacher did what meditation teachers are so brilliant at doing: she thanked me, and she allowed me my rage without offering any simple advice or solution. It’s very difficult right now, she said. These are very difficult times. I could sense everyone on the call – nearly a hundred people – grappling with the same question.

In the chat, a person said, “I’m praying for your family, Sarah,” and then many other people hearted it. A woman spoke up and said her husband was also a U.S. citizen from Latin America, and they’d had to have a conversation about what they’d do if he were deported. It was crazy. It was unbelievable. It was infuriating. But she went to church and she drove food to families too scared to leave their homes, and her daughter, a mother to four young children, drove to visit families held in a nearby immigrant detention center.

A man raised his hand and said, “You know what I see here? Courage.” And he meant the courage to seek loving-kindness and goodness when we are also feeling so much rage. I had not thought of courage this way before: as the strength to love people who do not seem to recognize your humanity. But that’s what the civil rights movement was, in essence: the most radical practice of loving kindess. John Lewis described it this way:

“It was love at its best. It’s one of the highest forms of love. That you beat me, you arrest me, you take me to jail, you almost kill me, but in spite of that, I’m going to still love you. I know Dr. King used to joke sometime and say things like, ‘Just love the hell outta everybody. Just love ’em.’”

It’s crucial to note here that love did not equal passivity. It did not equal acceptance. The love made the movement stronger: it gave the people the willpower and the heart to believe that the reality they were fighting for mattered enough to risk their lives.

If you love someone, you don’t let them get away with bullshit. You are clear in what you value because what you value comes from the strength of that love. It is purpose. It is intention. It is lucidity. It erases any weak desire to just stick with what’s easy or status quo. That real love is tremendously fearless and vibrant.

Love is also not about winning or losing, which is so often how our politics and our social media present every single question. It’s about everyone living in a world that calms and fortifies the soul, and minimizes greed and suffering. A world where we don’t carry the subconscious moral taint of consuming food produced through pain and exploitation, of terrorizing the labor that enriches us, of pretending we don’t see a hidden underclass of struggle as we order our coffee and drop our kids off at school.

One thing I learned from Undivided, a one-of-its-kind course on race relations I took at a Cincinnati megachurch many years ago on assignment for Pacific Standard, is that racism doesn’t only affect people of color. The white people who were taking the course – some of whom had never in their six or seven decades of life spoken with a black person – were often overcome with grief at being so disconnected from their neighbors, at carrying with them their whole lives both this alienation and the sense that the alienation was deeply wrong. At the hate they’d witnessed in their families and communities, but stayed silent about.

Even if you benefit from it, even if you tell yourself all sorts of lies about it (“rules”), even if you don’t think it has anything to do with you, that hate corrodes your soul. It’s the queasiness gnawing at the edge of your day, the tightness in your stomach, the way your body pulls back. We are all, as the Buddhists know, one being.

Right now, a group of Buddhist monks and their dog, Aloka, are walking 2,300 miles from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness of inner peace in the United States and the world. Recently, on their Facebook page, they shared a video of a little boy offering them fruit. The boy is wearing a snug blue snow hat with ear flaps. He is almost as big as the basket he holds. One by one, the monks each take a piece of fruit. Some gently pat his head, or give a friendly squeeze to his cheek. One hangs a string of wooden beads around his neck.

Meanwhile, as I write this, as I watch this video, ICE has begun ramping up operations in Pittsburgh, and Casa San José has issued a warning about forthcoming raids. “Tell Jorge to carry his passport,” my family urges. They tell us to come stay with them, so that my husband, a United States citizen, is not detained, sent to a for-profit prison, beaten, harmed, or otherwise brutalized in front of our daughter, and so that if I protest, if I insist on my rights or intervene with what is dangerous and wrong and illegal, I am not killed.

We debate about whether it is safe for Elena to go to school with her bus driver, who is an immigrant, because what if he is stopped? What if Elena is teargassed like the children in Minnesota, whose family was driving by a protest when an ICE officer threw a tear gas canister underneath their car, filling it with toxic black smoke and almost killing their baby, whose mother frantically performed mouth-to-mouth, and who instead of receiving empathy from the administration, found themselves lied about and slandered? Should we drive her, we ask ourselves? Or rather, should I drive her?

In the Walk for Peace video, the mother is filming. As the video goes on, you can hear her crying. A monk hands her little girl flowers, and then offers her some, and she says, “Thank you,” in a trembling voice. She is crying not from sadness, but because with peace comes absolution.

Because we are all seeking it, whether we know it or not, because we are all suffering beings and when we wound each other, we all feel and carry it, and when we finally witness this love – the men in their robes, gently kneeling one after the other; the boy in his blue hat holding the basket so strongly even when it dips – we remember.

We remember.

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