Ayiti translates to the land of mountains.
to my land:
i’m sorry they’ve mistreated you.
dug through your rubble and left you in the dirt.
to be needed but not wanted is heartbreaking.
to be the weirdo toddler nobody connects with on the playground
because you don’t talk like them or look like them or think like them
is a viscerally hardening experience.
how do we return home when home feels even more empty,
more estranged?
i am reminded that a home once broken can be rebuilt though.
and just like that, a country too.
I still remember the morning of July 21, 2025. I had just returned to the office from summer vacation. I was expecting a slow day—emails, calls, and quarterly planning. Instead, I received a collect call from a colleague detained at the Everglades Detention Center.
He had been taken against his will by ICE and stored in this facility for 10 months. I didn’t know what to say. What do you say when someone you know is swallowed by a system designed to erase them? What does "support" even look like or mean at that moment? A freedom fighter, an organizer, and a faith-based advocate who had been living in the U.S for over two decades was discarded as obsolete. Detained in a facility rife with abuse and built to isolate people from their families and communities– and even access to legal counsel.
What people have been experiencing at the Everglades Detention Center is nothing new. We know that our country’s immigration system has been broken for decades.
We cannot talk about the deportation of immigrants without discussing power. We cannot talk about the injustices of our immigration system without talking about its disparate treatment of Black immigrants— including those from Haiti. Haiti is often dismissed as “poor” and “failed,” but is rarely acknowledged as a landmass that holds significant mineral wealth, like iridium— the world's second largest deposits. Global interests for such resources are never separate from geopolitical control. So, when people like President Trump reduce Ayiti to a “shithole country”, we must ask: what purpose does this framing serve? It’s easier to justify displacement when a nation is portrayed as inherently broken.
Imagine calling a nation “shitty” and in the same breath deciding its people are undeserving of temporary protected status so that they can build a better future for themselves and their families.
I remember the devastation of the 2010 earthquake. I remember the foundations it shattered and the chaos it caused, but I also remember how my father refused to give up. He designed and built a multi-unit apartment building on the road where he grew up. For 12 years, he returned to Haiti every summer to manage the properties until arson wreaked havoc amid gang violence in the deadly summer of 2024.
While policy continues to mask cruel politics, it means we allow stereotypes to govern our immigration system. It means we allow colonization to recreate itself as a new form of oppression. It means reducing an entire people to caricatures and erasing their stories of resilience and bravery.
We know immigrants are not a burden to this country. They are essential to it. Many companies and communities would perish without them. Immigrants contribute over $96B in taxes. They are also among the least likely to commit crimes, despite being framed as such. Anti-immigrant language, though, is obviously used to justify something larger. U.S immigration is not about protecting working-class Americans from danger. It’s about control and maintaining a system where exploitation and extraction are not questioned.
But when policy fails, the community will always remain. Where a government displaces, the people replace. That’s what community has looked like for decades in South Florida—organizations like Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Florida Immigrant Coalition, and the ACLU continuing to build for and with each other with the resources we do have.
There may be those who normalize the moral failure of governance, but there are also those who take action. I am one who takes action because a better life is not guaranteed for immigrants like my family, but because it must be insisted upon. Because those who come from the land of mountains–the highest peak–know heaven isn’t so far away– and that is a promise we are all worthy of.