Trump and his belching proclamations would invade my brain incessantly over the next 4 years, gnawing away at the edges of my sanity. Mobilising the same forces that delivered him his position, he preyed incessantly on those he deemed undeserving of the "American” dream He moved fast, issuing executive orders, proclamations and instituting rule changes. Libertarian scholar Clyde Wane Crews, Jr coined the term “regulatory dark matter” to describe the internal guidance, memos, bulletins, circular and other such documents subject to little scrutiny or democratic accountability. His primary target of this critique was perceived overreach from democratic presidents. Ironically, it was this dark matter that formed the bulk of Trump’s work, functioning as the invisible and effective counterpart to his executive orders. In the obscure bureaucratic realms of federal law, he made devastating changes and successfully embedded his exclusionary agenda within immigration law.

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Empathy - Executive Order 13767

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As Trump continued to occupy media in his favourite forms—TV and Twitter—turning a pretty profit for them all, I developed a sixth sense, for information on immigration policies. Always alert for headlines announcing Trump’s latest executive order, or tracking down the updates on existing orders. For months I devoured a steady diet of memos, executive orders, proclamations and court rulings. I dove in a confused panic down the bedazzled websites of law firms, parsing through pseudo legal advice and explanations for yet another obscure rule change. It soon became clear to me that I was not the primary target of America’s white anger. Instead before me, the oft ignored stories of foreign workers, refugees, asylum seekers, minors, and separated families unfolded—all people of colour, all from what they call the Global South, staggering, just as I was, under the binding chains of immigration law.

I dug deeper into their harrowing stories. Slowly I started to get accustomed to them; they were no longer the faceless mass of “unfortunates' or political talking points for the frenzied American media. They were Anita and Jenri, a mother and son separated at the border when they sought asylum in America. Reports of Jenri’s violent separation and his debilitating trauma left me shattered. Then there was Ahmed Salah Hassan, a refugee from Somalia whose name rang with a bitter familiarity, who sought to escape the violence in his home country. Instead he was deported, his case rejected and would later lose his life, engulfed in the violence he was escaping. These lives, woven together from articles, podcasts and images told me a now recurrent story of nascent hope ruthlessly squashed. Slowly, they coalesced into an awareness of the extent of the damage caused by this constant deluge of cruelty. Families separated, children traumatised and my own deepening anxiety. All of us cowering under a shared menace, painfully cognisant of the fragility of our lives.