I believe in personal myths, not the tales repeated during bedtime routines, but the kind that remind you of the improbability of existence, that make you see your own life as a sequence of miracles. If you trace backward, every small event, every misstep or lucky chance, stacks together, a chain of moments that somehow adds up to survival, to being here, to meeting certain people at certain times. This miracle does not begin with me. It begins with Khadija. I haven’t spoken with her since our high school graduation. Once, by total fate, our paths collided. On the train, both headed to the next stop in our summers: internships. I stepped onto the platform just as she was boarding. For a moment, we were eighteen again, under the Connecticut, May sun, clinging to each other in prolonged hugs, whispering promises of a continued friendship that we both knew would not survive reality. Four days later, I would start my internship: moving into a world of offices, legal pads, and Congressional hearings. I thought of the miracles that led me there, and of the even greater number it had taken for Khadija to exist beside me, even in that fleeting intersection of time and place.
Khadija was born in Afghanistan, though by her junior year, the school roster listed her as Rwandan, a reminder that, for her, returning home was unthinkable. From the start, she drew attention. Whispers followed her across campus: a student from Afghanistan, a girl whose homeland was plastered across news screens, her presence at once both foreign and magnetic. I pretended to be coy, to act indifferent, as if the arrival of a forty-fifth nation were insignificant in a place already filled with forty-four. But the intrigue belonged to me. Over the next three years, I catalogued her words in my Moleskine; although she spoke sparingly, her words carried weight. We were once reading a literary piece about a soldier who was killed in the name of American freedom, and Khadija said that this narrative had destroyed her homeland. It was the reason for her existing Rwandan nationality. The program by which she was admitted to our high school, whose operational base was once in Afghanistan because it served Afghan girls, had to relocate when the newly instated Taliban banned girls from formal education. It was the reason her family sought education continents away from home. It was why they fled a country they had lived in for centuries. And it was also why we met. A thousand small, mostly painful things had to happen for our chance encounter to blossom into a friendship.
Knowing Khadija had already taught me that immigration was never just about paperwork; it was about the fragile chance to build a future when home had turned hostile. Years later, that lesson returned to me in another form. I met a man over the phone. All the important details: his brother’s lawyer, the immigration lawyer’s contact information, were scribbled in my intern notebook. The names of his nieces and nephews were alongside it. At the top, right above a note about an Atlantic article I had been meaning to read, was the name of his brother, an Afghan man who had arrived in the United States in October 2024, with a promised stay of three years. At this point, I had known Khadija for just three years. Our Octobers were spent time eating pistachios on the floor, looking at the ceiling, and wishing instead we were shielding our eyes from the burning sun. This man, who offered translation to American troops, had given more to this country as a foreign resident than I, a citizen, would likely ever contribute. My brief service to the country took place in the comfort of an office with two screens, split between New York Times articles and congressional hearings, as I snacked from the office kitchen. And yet, he had been detained by ICE: six men in unmarked vehicles, wearing masks. For ten minutes, I stayed on the phone with his brother, writing down every piece of information he gave me. Verbatim. His portion of the conversation is forever etched into my legal pad. Every day, I wake up hopeful of a new article promising good news. The last time American news outlets spoke of him was July 23, 2025.
The goal is not execution; it is intimidation.
His story is not an aberration but a pattern. On any given day, a little under 60,000 people are held in ICE detention centers, many of whom are detained on civil immigration violations. Seventy percent of ICE detainees, like him, have no criminal record; many are asylum-seekers who came here in search of safety. I met him, and likely a few others who didn’t share their story, but in America, there are 2,246,725 immigrants awaiting asylum hearings. They sit in legal limbo as their lives are paused while the government decides if they are human enough to belong. There are 3,446,855 open cases in the Immigration Court backlog, and of those, 810,417 court cases have been closed so far in 2025. Asylum officers are reassigned to border enforcement, further slowing humanitarian processing. As a country, we are not meeting the standards we should. We are falling short of the benchmarks required for an effective immigration system. And, if I know anything about working for my Congresswoman this summer, it is that the immigration process is slow, intentionally so. Cases become numbers, dragged on for years, suspended in a kind of bureaucratic purgatory: seven years for a married couple waiting on green card approval, two years for someone trying to bring their parents over, a year for someone to change their status. This fear is operationalized through the machinery of immigration enforcement.
This is what a crackdown looks like: policy written to erase miracles. Since returning to the White House, Trump’s administration has built the immigration system around a single principle: fear. Fear of migrants, fear as deterrence, fear as a tool for national branding. The Trump administration is on track to deport roughly half a million people this year, far below its goal of one million annually. No administration has the logistical capacity or legal authority to deport such a high number in a short time. The goal is not execution; it is intimidation. Every traffic stop, every knock on a door becomes a potential deportation. Millions of immigrants, documented and undocumented alike, are forced into a permanent crouch, afraid to seek medical care, report wage theft, or enroll their children in school. Officials openly speak of “deterrence”—traumatize one generation to scare off the next. Trump sells all this as security. In reality, it is surrender: not to migrants, but to our own panic. If America cannot absorb new people without fear, then the myth of American exceptionalism collapses under its own cowardice. Fear is cheap political fuel. It burns hot, it burns fast. It wins primaries. It drives ratings. But it cannot build. It cannot innovate. It cannot inspire. A country governed by fear becomes paranoid and stagnant.
Officials openly speak of “deterrence”—traumatize one generation to scare off the next.
Immigration is not charity. It is not a burden reluctantly shouldered. It is the engine of renewal. It is how a nation replenishes its ideals when native-born politics grow stale. Every generation of immigrants has faced the same accusations—criminal, diseased, unassimilable—and every generation has disproved them through contribution. Doctors, engineers, teachers, congressional interns. Nearly one in five U.S. doctors is foreign-born. Immigrant entrepreneurs found businesses at almost twice the rate of native-born Americans, employing millions and generating billions in tax revenue. Even undocumented workers, who are barred from nearly all federal benefits, contributed $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. My friend, the Afghan man detained by ICE, the countless others stranded by bureaucratic cruelty: they are the living proof of what America can be when it dares to welcome, when it dares to believe in small, improbable miracles. If America is to live up to its own myths, it must resist fear as a governing principle. It must restore the infrastructure that allowed miracles to happen, a policy that returns to seeing people as human beings rather than liabilities. My friend, the Afghan man, and the countless others waiting in limbo are a reminder of what America can be when it builds, not when it breaks; when it believes, not when it cowers. To forget them, to let fear dictate policy, is to forget ourselves.
My friend, the Afghan man, and the countless others waiting in limbo are a reminder of what America can be when it builds, not when it breaks; when it believes, not when it cowers.
One day, if that day has yet to arrive for you, I hope you meet an immigrant. Though it is unlikely, because she truly was unique, I hope you meet a Khadija or the brother of the Afghan man who aided American troops, only to be detained by ICE. I hope their stories soften your heart. Fear, yes, can be consuming; it can paralyze, shaping how we see the world and each other. But the immigrant story, like the personal myths I cherish, reveals the improbable, the miraculous chain of events that bring lives together against impossible odds. It reminds us that even in a system built to intimidate, human courage, resilience, and hope endure—and they are miracles worth believing in and protecting.
Elise Taylor ‘28 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at elise.l.taylor@wustl.edu.