The Things I’d Like to Think About America

The immigrants in detention are starting to die.

Or, rather, they’ve surely been dying for some time, but we are hearing about it more and more.

We’re getting stories of severe medical neglect. Children are being fed moldy food crawling with worms. Prisoners are crammed into horrifically overcrowded cells with no blankets and no hygiene products. They are lying in their own filth, and being tied to chairs all night. It would be a crime to keep a convicted murderer or rapist in such squalid conditions, but less than a quarter of these people are violent criminals. And they are dying. 2025 was the worst year for immigrant detention deaths in two decades. Six, that we know of, have already died in custody this year. It will get worse.

The Department of Homeland Security has been buying up warehouses all over the country, to use as concentration camps. I am not being dramatic when I say that; I’m just being factual. A prison where a group of people are crowded together for an indefinite period instead of as a set sentence for a crime, because of the class of person they are and not because of something they’ve done, is called a concentration camp. That’s the technical name. They’re not killing centers, but they are concentration camps. And there are going to be many more of them. And there is nothing, nothing at all, that I can do to stop this crisis from happening and getting worse, despite the fact that I would gladly give my life to make it go away. All I can do is watch it happen, and bear witness that it’s wrong. All I can do is write down over and over again that it’s wrong, and I denounce it, and I’d stop it if I could.

I heard that one of those warehouses was in Washington County, Maryland, just outside of Hagerstown.

And I was gutted, because I know Hagerstown very well. Hagerstown was where my mother grew up. I visited my grandparents there so many times. Innocent, pleasant images fill my mind every time I read  that name.

I remember my grandfather, the one who taught me to love gardening, taking me to the Hagerstown city park to feed the ducks. There must have been a thousand ducks in and around that pond. There was a sign saying “don’t feed the waterfowl” right next to a vendor selling cracked corn, and the ducks would come pouring out of the water to your feet if they saw you with a bag of corn in your hand. Grandpa taught me the names of the ducks: merganser. Mallard. Pin tail. Wigeon. Wood duck. The wood duck was so spectacularly colorful that it looked as if it couldn’t possibly be real. Surely, somebody painted a duck hunting decoy in ridiculous colors and floated it on the pond for a joke.

I remember standing in my grandparents’ great big farmhouse kitchen, watching my grandmother picking the meat off a gigantic pot of steamed crabs, to make crab cakes. I asked to taste a piece of plain crab meat. My cousin, who lived in another part of Maryland, marveled at me for never having eaten freshly steamed crab before. Granny gave us a stack of blue crabs and told us to go eat them on the picnic bench outside, so we wouldn’t make a mess. My cousin showed me how to break them open and find the meat. They were so delicious, we both sat there picking crabs for an hour until my lips were on fire with Old Bay spice.

I remember riding up and down their driveway, racing my cousins on big wheeled tricycles. Later, we’d go inside and race each other up the stairs, from the staircase in the foyer to the very top of the attic. Later still, I’d go to bed on a mattress in the attic, with that weird fiber optic night light that was made to look like a peacock with glowing feathers.

I remember looking at the shadow box full of bullet casings from the Antietam battlefield, just half a day’s march from Hagerstown. My grandmother kept the bullets in the spare bedroom, next to a bust of Abraham Lincoln, on a bookcase beside an antique desk.

This is what I want to think about, when I think about Hagerstown. I want to think about innocent and harmless childhood memories. I don’t want to think about a concentration camp. That’s all I want to tell you about Hagerstown. I want to tell you all the lovely memories I have of visiting there. But Hagerstown is getting a concentration camp.

This is what I want to think about, when I think about my family. But I know my family is much more complicated than that. I still remember trying to explain to them why I didn’t want to visit anymore, and they kept calling me spoiled and ungrateful. And, of course, they are MAGA.

This is what I want to think about America, as well.

I want to imagine we’re innocent, but we’re not.

I want to think we’re all decent people, innocent people, people who take their children to the duck pond and cook good meals and race each other up the stairs. I want to think we are a collection of ordinary families, who live in ordinary little towns with parks and houses, and never do anything terrible to anyone else. But of course, that’s not who we are. We are far more complicated than that. Fully a third of the people who live in this country either like the crimes being committed or don’t care whether they happen or not. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it’s true.

I want to tell you stories about the beautiful places I’ve known. I don’t want to warn you about concentration camps. But I didn’t choose the country I was born in or the time I live in. I live in an evil, dangerous time.

And all I can do is bear witness that it’s wrong.