At the beginning of March, my group chats started blowing up. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student, had just been detained without a warrant for his speech and activism. He was a noncitizen legally in the country, just like me and like many others in my orbit. In the following weeks, the reports kept snowballing, as did my group chat messages. I came here on a student visa 10 years ago, so watching the sudden and deliberate clampdown on the rights of people like me was disturbing and felt like a sharp departure from the policies of the first Trump administration. There are about 16 million green card and long-term visa holders in the United States. They work in a wide range of industries, notably tech and health care, but they’re also artists, social workers and media professionals. For many, including me, moving to America and building a life here was based, in part, on the promise of freedom of speech and expression. That guarantee is eroding under the current administration. And I wanted to know how fellow green card and long-term visa holders are contending with all the uncertainty about their place in America now. In a recent episode of the “Opinions” podcast, four legal immigrants reflect on the reasons they chose America as their new home and their fears for the future as the Trump administration continues its attacks on immigrants and destroys whatever is left of the American way of life they aspired to. As one of the immigrants said, while describing America’s projected identity as a bastion of freedom and hope in the world, “How can you be the beacon of hope if you’re not standing up at your house?”
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