Immigrating, Part 1: Crossings

Crossings

​Transcript for Crossings (Immigrating, ep. 1)

This is State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Immigration comes up everywhere these days, in the news, on the internet, at the dinner table.

It seems like everyone's got an opinion.

Welcome to the Illegal Immigration Connecting the Dots radio show.

Let's talk about the failure of this country to do immigration reform.

Today, our immigration system is broken, and everybody knows that.

First, let's talk about the specifics of what happened in San Francisco.

Wait, hold on, let's look for them.

I don't want to lecture on immigration.

Yeah, but San Francisco.

Does that happen anywhere else?

Maybe it's time for a moratorium across the border.

Let me ask you this question.

How bad is it?

No more immigration, no more people coming in, close the borders.

What about the people already here?

Are you aware of the fact that a country has borders?

Are you aware of that?

The act of immigrating takes place outside of a political debate.

In this episode, we have three stories of personal encounters with immigrating.

This is part one of a two-part episode.

In part two, we'll have individuals in conversation.

Our first story is from Oscar.

He asked that we not use his last name.

I was born in Mexico City, as were my siblings.

I searched for a better future.

My family decided to move us to the United States.

That was in 1993, and we moved to Sacramento, California.

After leaving Mexico with his family when he was only five, Oscar spent the majority of his childhood in Sacramento, his home.

I had like an American childhood.

When I was little, I was involved in soccer, played the violin, did all these things with my friends, went to the mall.

But then, when he was 21, there came a knock at the door.

About eight or nine ICE agents came to the door.

They showed me a paper with about five different faces and descriptions, and they asked me if those individuals lived there.

And I told them, no, we had just moved into that house.

They started rummaging through mail and asking for other names like my brother.

They were not trying to be discreet about it either.

They told us that we don't have an identification and we were going to be arrested and taken to the field offices.

As ICE agents filled the house, all Oscar could do was watch as his mom also got swept up in the raid.

That moment, I saw her face just sort of powerless, which I had never seen in my life before.

So then I told her, you know, everything's going to be OK.

We'll figure this out.

Then we were put on the van, handcuffed at the hands and feet.

Twenty hours later, Oscar and his mother were standing on the U.S.-Mexico border.

They checked us off and we just wandered into Mexico.

Oscar and his mom stayed with family in Mexico City while they worked to get back home.

Eventually, his mom was able to legally return to Sacramento, but without Oscar.

For me, it was nothing but joy.

I never thought about myself when she was going through that process, and when she finally went back, I was just relieved.

For me, it was honestly, I think, a big weight off my shoulders.

I don't think I ever thought about myself at all when she left.

I was just happy that she was finally back.

Oscar's legal status, on the other hand, is a little more confusing.

He petitioned for an immigrant visa.

They basically tell you, yeah, you're not eligible.

You're like, all right, thank you.

And then you go back and submit your waivers.

And then you submit that and you have to wait another year.

Giving Oscar time to build his case.

My waiver was around 600 pages of proof.

And build.

That I was an upstanding citizen.

Letters of recommendation that got notarized.

One, showing hardship.

People in the community that knew me.

For my parents.

If I didn't return.

Statements from them.

Proof, psychological report.

Statements by the lawyer.

Proof from school.

Sacramento City College.

High school.

From my work.

A lot of people I knew.

Things like that.

Your life distilled into two-inch packet.

I had to get so many vaccines my arms were hurting.

Even for things I think I already had, but they just wanted to make sure.

They do TB tests.

Chest x-rays.

And I had to get, do it twice.

Because those are only valid for one year.

And more than one year had passed since my last interview.

Finally, he was ready to go for the official interview.

So you come in with your packet, pass it through the little window.

You just flip through it once and then say, thank you, we'll let you know.

I didn't get approved.

And they're like, we need more information.

I'm going back.

No matter what, that was the goal.

Four years of waiting, petitioning, appealing, rejections, injections, printouts.

He finally got approval to return home, starting at the border.

You go to one of the border entrances for the US.

They review your documents.

They stamp your passport.

They check you one last time.

And then you finally go to the line to entry, like anybody else.

He returned to Sacramento, to his mother, and the same home ICE agents took him from over four years ago.

Because even going back to the house, the ICE agents came and knocked.

So going back to that house, I thought I was going to get some type of reaction, positive, negative, whatever it may be.

But I didn't.

I just went in, sat there, and stared off into the living room.

We all have that fundamental drive to search for something better and understand that that's in everybody.

Coming here without documents, it doesn't make us criminals.

It makes us human.

Oscar recently graduated from Stanford and is now studying law and public policy.

The story was produced by Noelle Chow, Eileen Williams and Kate Nelson.

I was born in Seoul, South Korea.

This is Maddie.

But I don't remember very much of it.

I moved over to Canada when I was two.

And the rest of my family all lives in South Korea.

So the three of us, my mom, dad and me, are here in this half of the world.

I'm in this weird place where my Korean is sort of broken and I'm fluent in English.

And my parents' English is kind of broken, but they're fluent in Korean.

And realizing that at no point in our lives were we or will we ever be completely fluent in the same language.

Every time I'm talking with them or they're talking with me, we're never quite on the same page.

When we got to Canada, we moved to a pretty small suburb of Toronto.

The makeup of the neighborhood, at the time, it didn't really register to me, but predominantly white and predominantly very Italian.

And then here we were, this sort of like strange family.

And I think for a long time, I didn't know how to think about where I was growing up simply because my parents never like talked about it.

When we moved, my parents had only spoke a little bit of English from what they had learned in school, whereas English quickly became not my first language, but essentially the language I was most fluent in.

For a while, that was really frustrating for me because I just didn't understand these parents who are adults and they're my parents who should be able to navigate the situation or be able to order for themselves at a restaurant because they're older and wiser, and then instead I'm having to do everything.

At the age of eight or nine, developed an obsession with pasta because my parents had never made it for me growing up.

So whenever I went over to my friend's houses and we'd have lasagna or spaghetti, which sounds really stereotypical, but that's really what I remember because I was so fixated on how good it tasted, I would go back home and ask my parents to sort of prepare the same thing.

And they had never, like my mom is an amazing cook, like an absolutely amazing cook, but she's never made spaghetti and meatballs.

She learned how to make it on her own, and we had pasta for dinner for six months.

Just the idea that there's this little kid who has all these friends who come from a background that maybe you're not as familiar with, who's like coming back and telling you, oh, this is so great, instead of appreciating what they were able to give me, I can imagine was just incredibly difficult to hear as a parent, or if not difficult, at least confusing.

Was nine years old when we decided, or my parents decided to move to California.

California to me felt like Los Angeles, Hollywood, sunshine, like those were the only images I had.

As we were growing up, like that happened in multiple iterations where every time they wanted me to try something new or every time we were going somewhere else, there was just no information because I think they were afraid I would be resistant or I would be upset.

We moved to a little suburb of California in the Bay Area.

I remember just walking into the classroom and thinking, I had never seen so many people who looked like me who were my age in one place.

And I quickly found that the majority of my friends were also East Asian.

It weirdly threw me off.

A lot of the Korean students that I came to know all had to go to Korean school at one point or another.

At least in the Korean community, language is a huge point of solidarity and bonding.

My parents never really formally exposed me to that or necessarily even wanted to.

And I kind of wish they had.

I think that's always a question that's been in the background of my relationship with my parents, this question of how Korean do we want you to be versus how not Korean do we want you to be.

I became really interested in my family history between my junior year and freshman year of college because we had recently taken a trip to Korea and at that point my Korean was good enough maybe for the first time that I could hold sort of substantial conversations with my family.

It was really exciting to finally be able to talk to my family back in Korea and feel like I was getting to know them for the first time.

I felt like kind of this door in my life had opened.

When I write about my family frequently, I'll be writing and then suddenly realize that there is this huge gap in my understanding of something that's happened to my parents or to us or to both.

But part of the reason I'm writing is also to know where those gaps are.

When my parents came over to the States or even to Canada, that was a place that they had never been to.

So what did that look like in their imagination?

Growing up, there were all these situations in which I kind of had to fill in the blanks for myself.

There are parts that the writing encourages me to kind of imagine myself into.

We do have to imagine ourselves very literally into different places and spaces and ways of existing.

So I think writing is one way to sort of bridge those two things is one, actually sort of tell the story of my family, but also imagine myself into it.

My father's formula for becoming an American, but not too much, had grown more elaborate by the day.

Every addition manifested in unsolicited prescription when I was least expecting it.

As I prepared to shovel a fork full of pasta, reading, very good for your brain, my father proffered through a mouthful of salad.

Playing the piano was the same, but swimming, painting my nails, dating, very bad.

Learning Korean was even worse.

It was a waste of time.

He loaded each variable with moral weight.

In his mind, he saw enemies.

One was a bad kid, embodied, sexual, drugged.

The other was a child not unlike the one he'd been, shy, stifled, un-American.

Both were dangerous enough to infiltrate our fortress of knowledge, collapse a lifetime's work from the inside.

On the first day of ninth grade, Mrs.

K stood by the door of room 202, greeting each student with a grin that revealed laugh lines worn deep from daily use.

She was a petite, curly haired woman, one who devoted 20 something years of her life to teaching freshman English.

A lifetime of soaking in the California sun had granted her a membership to that special subset of human beings who seemed to glow from the inside.

For all this preparation, it would have been impossible for my father to defend against an enemy that looked nothing like what he'd encountered in his imagination.

The bell rung and Mrs.

K stood up from her desk.

Book in hand, she clothed her cork-heeled way to the front of the classroom, determined all five foot three of her.

Wordlessly, with a sinewy arm, she held up her copy of Hemingway in midair, shaking its pages to the ceiling.

She proclaimed that literature, literature is the study of the humanity we share.

I leaned in as my father's voice rung clear, very bad.

The possibility that there was something the same in all of us, no matter how different we appeared, proved too extraordinary to resist.

After coming home from school, I'd fall back belly up onto my bed, clutching Catch-22 or The Great Gatsby to my chest, as if I could soak stories through my skin.

No equation held a candle to the offer to peek into other people's books, their lives, into their brains.

I needed to know if what Mrs.

K had said was true.

For my father, this was very bad indeed.

Over dinner, I tried desperately to get him to understand.

I raved about the roaring 20s, women's liberation, revolutionary jazz, a golden age by all accounts.

Peering at me over his laptop, my father waited until my rhapsody ran dry, then he removed his glasses, pinching the bridge of his nose.

People like us couldn't live like that.

I welled with disappointment, muttered that he had to ruin everything.

That night, I scratched into my diary that my parents are just like the kids in my English class who don't get it.

After all, if they weren't trying to get to know my thoughts on Fitzgerald and Zelda and true love, American hope, that my orchestra teacher couldn't stop herself from calling me my Japanese stand partner's name for a month, so I already knew that not everyone had a fair shot.

And because of Mr.

S, the balding bane of the chemistry students of DV High, who failed as overachieving students and shushed their protests with there's more to life than work and a grin suggesting he thought he was imparting something sacred to today's youth, whose parents had taught them to work was to live because where they were from, refusing to work was a crime equivalent to treason and speaking out was a capital offense.

But still, we lived in different times, in a country where I could be anything I wanted.

Then my parents weren't getting to know me at all and why even bother?

All this I tell a man who had grown up without half a family in a world that the place I called my country had signed on to divide into two.

Maddie Han is a writer.

The story was produced by Kate Nelson, Carissa Cirelli and Jackson Roach.

What do you think, Dad?

Should I go?

And he's like, you know, I think it's just better be safe than sorry.

He was like, I think, you know, you should go.

Nisreen, a Stanford grad student, was in Sudan when the first immigration ban was announced.

My name is Nisreen Al-Amin Abdur Rahman.

I am a Ph.D.

student here at Stanford in anthropology.

I'm originally from Sudan, but I'm also a green card holder.

I'm a permanent resident.

I've been living in the US for 24 years.

We started hearing about this possibility of a Muslim ban and this executive order that might get signed.

Trump put a temporary ban on travelers from Sudan and six other Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.

My father and I were in this very small one-bedroom house in this working-class neighborhood in Khartoum and glued to the TV watching CNN trying to figure out what's going to happen.

I'm establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America.

We don't want them here.

On the day that we heard that this is going to get signed, I decided probably within the span of an hour that I was going to get the next flight out.

We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country and love deeply our people.

Finally get on this flight late at night.

I barely had enough time to say goodbye to my immediate relatives.

Didn't get to say goodbye to any of the people that I've been living within my field research sites.

Even like my goodbye to my parents was really rushed.

And it's like those moments when you're like, my father's 80, you know, he's healthy.

But at the same time, it's like, I don't really know when I'm going to see him again.

So I just kind of like didn't think about that.

And I just like got on the flight.

And when I got on the flight, I just started crying because it's like, you know, it just felt really strange to not know when I was going to see them again.

I was born in Germany.

My father was studying in Germany.

And I grew up for part of my life in Germany.

So I actually never lived in Sudan.

I mean, I've gone back and forth to Sudan when I was a child.

And really, I'm kind of like a child of the world.

You know, moved around a lot, lived in different places.

My parents moved back to Sudan a couple of years ago.

And so doing my field research was actually really timely because I got to spend time with them.

Growing up, I actually didn't get to spend that much time with my family.

So we've been sort of always far away from each other.

I was in a boarding school in Germany.

I was, you know, on a scholarship there.

Had a hard time.

You know, I was one of the few black students in the school.

There was a lot of xenophobia at the time because the Berlin Wall had just fallen recently.

You know, as these economies were integrating, a lot of people were unemployed and they blamed it on foreigners.

And we were having immigration issues.

You know, I was like 13 or 14 and I started reading Roots.

And then I read the autobiography of Malcolm X.

I was really interested in the civil rights movement and like the Black Panther Party.

And there was something about it, I think, that helped me deal with being a black person living in Germany and dealing with racism.

And I just started thinking about how it might be to be somewhere where there are like many other people like me.

And so that sort of just went into my head that I wanted to come to the US but my parents didn't have the money to send me, so I kept applying to the sister school of the school that I was in and then eventually got in and got a scholarship as well.

That was actually the boarding school that Ivanka Trump went to.

The flight attendant announced my name and said, you know, your connecting flight is departing very soon.

Since we're arriving late, please make your way up to the front.

At this point, I'm wearing like full hijab, you know, coming from Sudan.

I'm trying to, you know, saying, excuse me, can I get through?

And there's this man, a British man with his kids, who decides to block me from getting to the front.

And I was like, excuse me, I really need to go.

And, you know, catch this flight.

And he said, yeah, we're all waiting for flights.

You're just going to have to wait.

And I said, you know, I'm really sorry, sir, but I really need to get on this flight.

He was like, we all really need to get on this flight.

Like, you know, on our whatever flights, you're just going to have to wait.

And he just kind of looked at me and just, he literally like, you know, physically kind of blocked me from leaving the plane.

In his head, he doesn't realize like, I really need to get on this flight.

Like, it's not just like, I'm going to miss getting to work on time.

Like, I really need to get on this flight.

And he just, there was no empathy.

I mean, probably also no understanding of my situation.

I don't know.

But I also felt in that moment that he's looking at me as a Muslim woman.

And, you know, actually what I thought about, too, is his child, you know, his son was there and he was looking at me.

Like, what lesson are you teaching your son?

Get to the flight and the person says, you know, I'm really sorry.

Had you gotten here two minutes earlier, you would have gotten on this flight.

So I actually know that had the man let me through, I probably would have been on that flight and none of this would have happened because I then had to wait for another three hours to get on the next flight.

You know, I'm going through security and they're like, oh, you know, you've been selected, like randomly selected for searching.

And usually it happens before you get to the gate, but this is after.

So the other person who was with me was Afgani.

So we were both kind of joking between us like, okay, random selection, like the Afghani and the Sudanese, you know.

So I finally get on the second flight.

I couldn't sleep because I was really nervous because at this point I had seen on Facebook somebody post about the fact that the order had been signed.

So I knew on the plane that this order had been signed.

I mean, I saw that and I was like, this is what I was trying to avoid.

The seven countries on this list have all been, the lives of people in these seven countries have all been impacted by US policy, US military intervention, US sanctions.

And so we think of them as these enemy nations, but we don't really think about on a day-to-day basis how are ordinary people being affected by these policies in terms of how they're making ends meet.

These are all people who get up in the morning and send their kids to school.

They're just like anybody else that you and I know.

On the one hand, I love Sudan, and I love obviously my family who's there.

And on the other hand, this regime, which has been in power since 1989, has been extremely repressive, especially in parts of Sudan that are marginalized.

There are ongoing wars.

People are being killed on a daily basis.

I have seen just over the last five years in my own family, people go from having three meals a day to now having like one and a half meals, essentially.

By the time I got on the flight, I think I hadn't slept in like 36 or maybe 48 hours.

I was really tired, but I just couldn't sleep.

I couldn't do anything.

I couldn't even like watch a movie.

I was just, I was in my head rethinking some of these, processing some of these feelings that were coming up for me.

And I could barely eat too.

I get to the airport around 10 in the evening.

There's a citizenship and permanent resident lane that I'm allowed to go in.

So I go in and put my green card in this machine and there's this paper that comes out.

And if it's a tick, then you just move through.

So I was like really hoping that it would come out with a green tick and there was an X through it.

And I remember the day I got my green card, we had a spontaneous party in my office.

Finally, I'm not going to have to ever deal with this again.

Still, obviously, I'm traveling on a Sudanese passport.

I still had to deal with visas, but everything got a lot easier after that.

Once I had my green card, I physically felt different.

There was this burden that was lifted off my shoulders.

I remember the first time I traveled with a green card and the officer said, welcome home.

And I almost started crying because it was like this moment of, wow, like I've never actually heard someone say that to me.

You know, it's always like, oh, I'm sorry, I need to bring you to this area for further questioning.

And so in that moment, I was just like, I'm back to this.

You know, after so long, just that fear, that anxiety, even that holding area, I'd been in that area many times before.

I'd been questioned many times before.

I handed him my green card and he looked at it and he said, can I have your passport?

He looks at the passport and he says, okay, just, you know, sit tight for a minute.

And he goes to a supervisor who was standing on the corner.

My green card actually says Germany on it.

And at first the supervisor said, well, you just process her like a normal green card holder.

And then as he was literally, as he was walking back, the person called him back and said, wait a minute, actually you need to ask her to go in for further questioning.

Wow, like, actually, again, like if I had gotten here maybe 20 minutes before, I could have just gone through.

And the first part of the questioning was fairly familiar.

Were you coming from?

What were you doing?

The educational institutions I had gone to, the languages I speak.

He asked me about all the countries that I've been to.

And so I started, you know, listing the countries that I'd recently been to.

And he was like, no, like, in your entire life.

The officer told me, I don't know much about Sudan.

So I want to hear you talk about the situation in Sudan.

Like, talk to me about the political situation in Sudan.

Because then he started asking me about whether or not I knew of radical groups in Sudan, you know, whether I knew people who had radical views.

And he was taking notes.

At some point he came back to me and asked me for my social media handles.

Then at some point they were getting tired.

It was like maybe one or two in the morning at this point.

And they needed to shut down that terminal, so they had to transfer us to another terminal.

We then sort of got handed over to the Customs and Border Patrol folks who, you know, didn't know anything about us.

So these two women officers led me into a room and they told me to put my hands against the wall and to spread my legs.

And then they did a body pat down.

And it was really uncomfortable, actually.

And then they said they had to handcuff me because they were transferring us from this terminal to the other terminal that was a 24-hour terminal since they still didn't know what was going to happen to us.

And knew that at that point, if I'm getting handcuffed, even if they're saying, oh, we don't know what's going to happen to you, we're getting led into this van, like that I could end up in a detention center.

So I started crying.

And the woman who handcuffed me was a black woman.

I saw her visibly react to me crying.

And it was like an interesting moment because the other officer who was there with me was not black, was like cold face, no reaction.

I mean, I was literally shaking.

Like I hadn't cried like that in a while just because I was scared.

And so they were going back and forth, and then eventually the handcuffs came off and we were in the car together.

Like she was still really shaken by it.

And I like leaned over to her and I said, you know, it's okay.

Like I knew you were just doing your job, you know?

Because I didn't know it was like this.

I felt like it was in a way a weird moment where we were both like dehumanized.

I could just see like there was something in her that was like, you know, where she connected to my like sense of fear and like was empathetic to that.

You know, I think this historical moment is obviously generating a lot of extreme feelings in people, including in this person.

And I think there's this fear that then gets projected onto people like me.

When we talk about this is necessary to keep our country safe, when you ask black people in this country that question.

Historically, when have black people had the right to feel safe in this country?

It just makes me angry because I just feel like it's dehumanizing to be told like what you went through is, needs to happen to keep our country safe.

Who has the right to feel safe and who doesn't?

So then, we got transferred to this other 24-hour area, and there were other people who were being led in, like an Iranian and an Iraqi citizen, who, they were in handcuffs too.

And it was like this, one of them was this like, like a nerdy Iranian PhD student, who was just, I felt like, I felt his pain, because he was just like, what the hell is going on?

He was like there to go study with this professor at Cornell for a couple of months, and had a visa, and was just like really confused.

And there was this other Iraqi man, whose wife and child were waiting outside for him.

And he, I think, had been waiting forever for a visa to get reunited with them.

And just feeling all of those emotions in that room was like really intense.

And I was trying to help him translate, but the officers wouldn't let me.

And I felt like in that room, we were really treated more like criminals than in the previous holding area.

And it was like, we couldn't sit next to each other.

We couldn't talk to each other.

None of us were brought food and we'd been in there for a couple hours.

At some point asked if I could eat my sandwich and they said yes, but it had to be like in plain sight.

And this is, by this time, it's like three in the morning.

They call you up not by your name, but they're like Sudanese green card holder.

So I walk up and then he says, there was some paperwork that he was signing.

He was looking at a computer screen and they got a message, I guess, telling them that they could let me go.

Because nothing, and he said, quote unquote, derogatory came up in the system against you, which I'm assuming means there's no criminal record and the interview didn't raise any red flags.

But he said, if I were you, I wouldn't travel unless you want to go through this whole thing again.

And then he just handed me my passport and was like, you're free to go.

And I was like, looking around, like, for real, I'm free to go, and I just grabbed my passport and ran out, you know?

And I don't know, I was so full of adrenaline and so happy to be let out that I didn't even really fully process what had happened.

This Land is Your Land by Sharon Jones and the Dapkings.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

I'm Amy Goodman with Juan González.

As we continue our coverage of Donald Trump's executive order, we're joined by Nisreen Amin, a PhD student.

My uncle, he's 98, I was on the front of the newspaper in Sudan, too, and he clipped all of the newspaper articles and listened to the Democracy Now!

interview.

And he said, you know, she speaks in a way that people have to listen.

There's a way in which my dad said, you know, they hit the wrong person.

They thought probably, you know, this, like, barely five foot tall, you know, Sudanese woman was going to keep her mouth shut, but my daughter's not going to keep her mouth shut, you know.

So there's that.

I mean, I've been an activist all my life.

I'm used to speaking out against injustices.

Chaos at New York's JFK International Airport.

Hundreds of people protested the detention of at least a dozen travelers, including Harvard graduate and Ph.D.

candidate at Stanford, Nizrin El-Amin, who told us by phone about being handcuffed and detained.

I just went to my mailbox today, and I got this letter.

I can read it, I guess.

Dear Muslima, I'm terribly sorry you were inconvenienced on returning to the US., but recognize that you come from a country, Sudan, that was designated as long ago as 1993 by the State Department as a sponsor of terrorism.

Recognize also that Americans don't owe you anything, and that you're fortunate to be here receiving an education.

Coincidentally, I've been to Sudan, a shit hole run by a maniac.

Cartoon stank of piss and most likely still does.

But I have no trouble getting Johnny Black at prices even lower than what one generally finds in Cairo.

Like I always say, if you want to already supply a whiskey, go to an Islamic Republic.

The next time you fly on a jet or use a computer or a smartphone, won't you take a moment to incant a prayer for the poor, maligned white man?

After all, you live in a world that he made.

And was signed and, you know, address on and everything.

Anyway, I just got it like a couple of minutes ago.

I mean, I've gotten my share of like hate mail like through Facebook and email.

You know, for every like hateful message that I've gotten, I've gotten probably five to ten messages of support and love.

And people say to me, you know, like I'm glad you're the one who's speaking.

I felt a lot of shame and guilt actually.

You know, I think shame around the fact that I have a lot of privilege that a lot of people who have been put in this position don't have, right?

Just being a green card holder, being someone who, you know, is affiliated with Stanford, you know, I'm sure even actually in my detention, there's a way in which I got treated better than other people who didn't, who couldn't pull, you know, that affiliation out.

What happened to me is something that happens on a daily basis to people coming through borders.

What was exceptional about it is that I have a green card, so, you know, and of course, I was one of the first people to be detained under the order, so there was a lot of media attention on my, on my story.

I was at a teach-in yesterday.

One of the panelists with me is a Japanese American man who's 83 years old.

He was talking about his internment as an eight-year-old.

He was interned for two years in Colorado.

After I spoke, he held my hand and he said, you know, he said he was really proud of me for, like, speaking out, and he said, you know, I want you to not internalize what they're saying about you because it took me a lifetime to undo, you know, what I internalize as a child.

There's, like, a narrowing of belonging that's happening, right?

And I think what we need to do as human beings in the US is to broaden that.

And we have to use that to say, because of our history, we now need to move forward and resist in a different direction.

Like, we can't move back, you know?

People have sacrificed so much for us to be at this point, and there's so much still for us to do.

And we can't let people take that away from us.

Nisreen's story was produced by Helvia Taina, Anne Lee Herring, Eileen Williams and Rosie La Puma, and has aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Making Contact and KLW's Cross Currents.

This episode was produced by Carissa Cirelli, Jett Hayward, Anne Lee Herring, Louis LaFaire, Rosie La Puma, Yui Li, Jenny March, Kate Nelson, Jackson Roach, Helvia Taina, Melina Walling, Jake Warga, Eileen Williams, Cathy Wong and me, Noelle Chow.

This was part one of a two part episode on immigrating.

Next time, we'll hear people in conversation.

You've been listening to State of the Human, the podcast of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, Stanford Arts and Bruce Braitham.

You can find this and every episode of State of the Human through our website, storytelling.stanford.edu.

Thank you.