What the Trump administration will never understand about America
They have come here in the tens of millions, over centuries.
How brave they were, to leave everything they knew, to risk so much. What faith it took, to believe so deeply in the promises of a new country that they were willing to start again. How hard they worked to make those promises more real each day – for themselves, for their children, for the generations beyond.
For some of them, America threw open its arms: All they needed to do was to get here, and to swear they meant no harm. Some met hatred, but still managed to make lives. For the luckiest, that bigotry would evolve into acceptance.
We hand down all of these stories – as trauma, as family lore, as inspiration. We have lived them, or been shaped by them.
Immigrants are America. They are us.
We are Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, the 26-year-old Colombian man who crossed the border three years ago and settled in Biddeford, Maine. He adored his 3-year-old daughter Dulce, taking on two jobs – one cleaning a veterinary clinic, another delivering food – to give her a future here that he hoped would surpass his own.
He was a giant to his proud friends and family in Colombia, “a marvelous son… a person who was brought up with values,” his father said. He wanted to own a house, and to help his parents, his sister said. His wife and daughter were his whole life, just the sight of Dulce sometimes brought tears to his eyes.
His family’s attorney said he was working here legally, and that he was following all of the requirements to stay. Neighbors saw him come and go in his white sedan each day. His life, like most lives, was both miraculous and unremarkable.
We are Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, whose dreams were familiar, and further along. He had nothing when he crossed the border from Mexico some 35 years ago, settling in Houston. He worked long days, eventually starting his own construction business, employing dozens of workers.
One of 12 children, he did not make it past middle school. So, when he had three sons of his own, education was everything, his middle son Lorenzo Salgado Jr. told my colleague Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio. An A on a report card earned $20. He sent all three boys to college: Salgado Jr went to Tufts and became an engineer, his older brother is a teacher, and his younger brother is working on his engineering degree.
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“If he had had the same opportunities that I had, who knows what he would have accomplished,” Salgado Jr. said.
This is the question so many of us ask about the immigrant parents who loved us with their whole hearts and gave us all they had: Where would they be, if they’d been as lucky as they made us?
Their stories — our stories — are so beautiful, and so common. Men like them made America what it is, but no one beyond their loved ones should ever have known their names.
But we do know them, because we are now ruled by a regime that wants to erase this America. We are governed by people whose forbears also arrived here as immigrants, chasing the very dreams they now seek to destroy. They have blocked off virtually every legal path for non-white immigrants, and they have unleashed an unaccountable army to terrorize those already here, including those with legal status, and the US citizens who want to defend them.
ICE agents cut down Salgado Araujo on July 7 in Houston. Six days later, they killed Guerrero in Biddeford. Reports emerged that neither victim was the agents’ intended target, but is that really true? The regime wants to force millions of immigrants and their families to leave this country, even those who have been here for decades, even those whose children and grandchildren were born here. In many cases, they want those children and grandchildren gone, too.
They are all targets. The Trump administration’s goal is to villainize Black and brown immigrants and tear them from the American fabric, to cut off the stories that have defined us for generations. It is to end the America we know, and replace it with a closed, white, Christian nation, defined by its hostility to the rest of the world.
But their project will fail. What they don’t understand is this: Pull enough threads, and the fabric comes apart.
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