I am writing to you from a country where toddlers are held in cages.

From a country where a man died running across a California freeway because he feared ICE more than death.

From a country where mothers miscarry in custody, where children with cancer are deported without treatment, and where citizens are detained simply for existing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I am writing to you from a country where ICE is planning to build space to cage more than 100,000 human beings, doubling its current capacity, turning suffering into an industry larger than most American cities.

I woke up this morning thinking about my great-grandmother.

She was just a teenager when she sailed from Europe with her little sister, nobody else. Two girls, alone on a ship, carrying everything they owned in a single suitcase. They spoke no English. They had no money. They knew no one.

When their ship docked, they walked off at Ellis Island, passed a basic health check, and stepped into America. That was it. No visas. No green cards. No endless paperwork. No lawyers. No detention centers. Immigration wasn't criminalized; it was encouraged.

It must have been a hard journey, and yet she still considered herself lucky. And she was. She made it before the doors slammed shut in the 1920s.

Today, I'm watching those same doors not just close, but turn into cages.

And yesterday, in California, where I was born and where I've lived my entire life, Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdés chose death over capture. I can't stop thinking about that.

Right now, as I'm typing this, toddlers are sleeping in detention centers. Tonight, while we're having dinner, children with cancer are being deported without medical care.

I had to stop writing three times while researching this. The numbers kept getting worse. 107,000 beds. That's not a statistic, that's a small city of human beings we're planning to cage. According to internal ICE documents obtained by The Washington Post, this expansion plan will open or expand 125 facilities this year alone, funded by a record $45 billion budget Congress approved last month in Trump's Big Beautiful Bill. Remember that? It's also where he funded an insane amount of money for ICE, his private military.

I stood up and took a break.

I walked outside and looked at my own street, at the houses where my neighbors live safely, and wondered: how did we get here? How did my own state, California, become a place where people choose the freeway over ICE?

I kept doing the math, hoping I was wrong. $187.48 per day, per person, according to ICE's own 2023 data, that's what we're spending to torture people. Meanwhile, ICE's own Alternatives to Detention program costs just $8 per day per person and achieves over 95% compliance rates for court appearances. Community-based case management programs cost even less, between $5-17 per day, with some "full service" programs seeing 99% compliance rates. We're choosing to spend 20 times more on cages when proven alternatives cost pennies on the dollar. The cruelty isn't a bug; it's the feature that makes people rich. Because when we privatize detention camps, someone is making a lot of money with very little oversight.

My great-grandmother didn't climb some righteous ladder. She didn't "do it legally" in the way people scream about now. She walked through open borders. She was welcomed. She got lucky with her timing. That's the only difference between her and the people we're caging today.

The story of America was supposed to be a story of migration, not walls. Unless you are Native American, whose land was stolen, or descended from those forced here in chains through slavery, your ancestors chose to come. For nearly 150 years, America welcomed almost everyone who could make the journey.

This only changed in the 1920s, when Congress passed harsh quota laws designed to slash immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, driven by rising nativism, racism, and fear. That's when the "open border" era ended. But today, the descendants of those same immigrants scream about "illegal immigration" as if their families had endured a system that never existed.

I can't stop thinking about those two Canadian toddlers, both under four years old, who were held in ICE custody this year. One of them for fifty-one days, and even a second in a cage is too much, but it's important to mention that this is also far longer than the twenty days permitted by the Flores Settlement Agreement. They weren't criminals. They were just children. From Canada.

And then there's Romeo, the 4-year-old U.S. citizen with Stage 4 kidney cancer who was deported to Honduras in April without his medication, unable to contact his doctors. This child was actively receiving life-saving treatment for a rare and aggressive form of cancer when ICE agents forced his family onto a deportation flight at dawn, before attorneys could file emergency petitions.

I've been staring at this sentence for ten minutes because I can't believe I'm typing it. We deported an American child with cancer. An American child.

I look at my own children and wonder: what makes them different from Romeo? Their birth certificate says the same thing his does: "United States of America." If they can deport a U.S. citizen with cancer, who is actually safe?

If they will cage toddlers from Canada, they will cage anyone.

If they will deport a 4-year-old American citizen with Stage 4 cancer without his medication, there is no limit to their cruelty.

Right now, nearly 60,000 people are detained in ICE custody, with very few having criminal records. Just people swept up in raids, paperwork mistakes, or the simple fact of being the wrong color, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Families being caged in the shadows of our own backyards while we go about our daily lives.

Including right here in California. ICE's expansion plan shows they're targeting California City for what would become the state's largest detention facility, 2,560 beds. Despite protests from civil rights leader Dolores Huerta, who points out the area lacks basic infrastructure like pharmacies and clinics, CoreCivic is moving forward. They're planning to turn a former state prison into a detention center while we sleep.

When I discovered that even members of Congress have been blocked from making surprise inspections of detention centers, that they had to sue just to walk inside facilities their constituents pay for, I felt something break inside me. If even our elected representatives can't see what's happening, what hope do detainees have?

And if these facilities are as humane as we are led to believe they are, then why block anyone from inspecting them?

The stories pile up until I can barely breathe:

A pregnant woman miscarrying alone in custody. A ten-year-old recovering from brain surgery denied follow-up care. Detainees in Miami shackled, forced onto their knees, made to eat from Styrofoam plates like dogs while guards laughed.

I don't know how to keep writing this. The horror just keeps going.

But I will because I need my children to know we tried. That when history judges this moment, we didn't just scroll past. We didn't just feel sad and move on. And I want this to be documented for the history books. This happened in America in 2025 under President Donald Trump's command. This is all his doing and his accomplices' work.

I want to scream this high and loud for all to know. This is not new. History has taught us this lesson before. In the 1940s, Japanese Americans, citizens, were rounded up and locked in camps on U.S. soil. Authoritarian leaders everywhere follow the same script: create fear, criminalize the vulnerable, profit off their pain, and convince the public that their neighbor is the threat.

Hitler did it with Jews, gay people, and the disabled. Franco did it with dissenters. Mussolini did it with migrants. And Trump is doing it now, starting with immigrants. The formula never changes.

And it works. Because fear works.

The dictator playbook has been modernized in Project 2025, but the story remains.

Because what we are living through now is not "law and order." It's cruelty as policy. It's fear as governance. It's profit disguised as patriotism. And behind it all, there is money. Five major players already lining up to profit from Trump's detention expansion. Private prison corporations salivating at contracts. Investors circling like vultures. Suffering has become a business model.

So, when is enough?

When toddlers from Canada are caged? When a man dies running across a freeway? When mothers miscarry in detention? When children with cancer are deported without treatment? When suicides pile up behind barbed wire? When detention centers expand to the size of cities?

Tell me, when do we finally say enough?

Because if we don't, there will be no line left to draw. What begins with migrants does not end with migrants. Even citizens are already being detained. History tells us what happens next. Once we accept cruelty for them, it becomes cruelty for us. Once we normalize cages, there is no limit to who fills them.

I think about my great-grandmother's courage, two teenage girls with nothing but hope, stepping into the unknown. She believed in tomorrow. She believed in the possibility of something better.

I want to believe in tomorrow, too.

But right now, I'm supposed to make dinner, help with homework, pretend this is normal. How do I look at my child's homework about the American dream when we're deporting American children with cancer?

I want my great-grandchildren to find these words someday and know that we fought back in any way we could. That we didn't give up on the America that welcomed two scared girls from Europe with nothing but dreams.

Because that's what this is really about, not politics, not policies, but whether we still believe America can be what it promised to be.

Whether we still have the courage my great-grandmother had when she stepped off that ship with nothing but hope.

Right now, in this moment, we get to choose who we are. And I refuse to be the generation that broke that promise.

History is watching what we do next. And I know we will do the right thing.

I believe in us.

I believe in you.

I believe in tomorrow.

I'll see you then,

Heather

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