Journal Entries: The Border That Crossed Us

When Donald Trump was re-elected in 2024, I expected stability to be challenged and I knew that the administration would double down on its immigration policies—but I could never have anticipated witnessing militarized repression on the streets I grew up in.

I was boarding my flight home to California when the alert lit up my phone: the president had ordered the National Guard to support ICE raids across Los Angeles. While we had been through this before, this was deliberate intimidation—a show of force that felt extremely personal and racist.

I watched the fear unfold through a screen. For the first time, I saw people I knew taken by ICE on live television—members of my community who shared my culture and dreams, treated as enemies of the state. What I was witnessing was not new; it was the latest chapter in a long history of fragmented and dehumanizing policy. The terror of being torn from one’s family is a generational trauma etched into our identities, carried like an inheritance we never asked for.

For Mexican immigrants and other Latinos, this experience is especially layered. We are native to this land, and many of us grow up with the reminder: we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us. The politics of belonging and identity are not abstractions for us; they shape our everyday survival.

As a second-generation Mexican-American, I inherited assimilation rather than migration itself. My abuelito first came to the U.S. through the Bracero Program, a World War II–era agreement that recruited Mexican men for agricultural labor. While he bent his back to feed America and protect it from food shortages, my abuelita raised ten children alone—enduring rural poverty in México and fighting for citizenship, which took a decade to secure. Only then did they settle in the town I now call home. Their lived experience shaped my family, and it left wounds I feel assigned to heal. Their sacrifices have allowed me to sit in spaces they could never have imagined—classrooms at Columbia and conference rooms on Wall Street—where I stand not only as the first from my community to enter, but often the only one carrying our culture and history into the room.

So when I see families brutalized by today’s immigration system, anger rises in my chest. I know their struggle: fleeing poverty and violence, working themselves to exhaustion, only to be met with exploitation and discrimination. I carry the privilege of papers—but also the memory of what it took for me to have them. And with that comes responsibility. If my community is not given a seat at the table, I will build one while inviting those who are ready to listen.

The paradox is clear: those who sustain us are denied sustenance. Yet hope endures—in marches, in defiant voices, in resilience. The struggle for dignity is the struggle for climate justice.

In the climate movement, we talk about stewardship, regeneration, and justice. But those words mean nothing if we criminalize the very communities who embody them every day—if we silence Indigenous, Latinx, and migrant voices while extracting their labor and knowledge. The very people ICE raids target are the same ones who sustain this country. They harvest the food that fills our tables, rebuild cities after wildfires, and preserve ecological knowledge passed down for generations. Yet instead of being honored as caretakers, they are criminalized and erased from the narrative of sustainability—labeled “illegal” by borders that were never meant for them.

Our relationship to the earth goes beyond America’s transactional one—ours is ancestral. And even as helicopters loom over our neighborhoods, we remind this country: we don’t just live on this land—we care for it. We protect it. We are it.