BE NOT AFRAID!
"Y
ou just never know,” my mom told me over the phone repeatedly, our faces reduced to an amalgamation of pixels. It was the third month into the Trump administration, and I had just told her that I had booked my ticket to go home. Back in the Philippines, my grandmother was old and dying. I wanted to see her. But to leave America was to risk being gone.
It was to risk being held at the border, being detained, to risk having my parents’ and my green cards revoked, both of whom were also traveling back home. To risk never again seeing my family spread all over the West and the Midwest because of the global north’s labour demands. It was to risk not seeing my nieces, both of whom were born possessing an American passport. It was to risk never seeing them grow up, or attending any of their birthdays or graduations. It was to risk being barred from entering this country, which held the possibilities of another life. The border was a portal I wasn’t sure I could uncross.
“I know,” I told her, trying to ease her anxiety with a courage I did not have. For the past few weeks, she had been sending me news clips over Messenger about mass deportations and immigrants sent to El Salvadoran prisons. She sent me a video about Lewelyn Dixon, a Filipina green card holder who was arrested at the Seattle airport and detained by ICE. She’s a 64-year-old healthcare worker who has lived in America for 50 years and was held because of a non-violent conviction for embezzlement in 2001.
My port of entry to the US when I come back from the Philippines will be Seattle. It was the cheapest flight I could find. It will have a connecting flight to Chicago, the closest international airport to my parents. But then, I wondered how my parents could reach me if they detained me in Washington and how far that would be from everyone I knew. I wondered how I would finish my degree or pay rent or move out of my room in New York. I wondered what it would mean to go home and start over again. I wondered about being in exile again, but this time from a past in America, and if that would ultimately deliver me from my yearning for home. I wondered what life would be like if we were an ocean away from each other. I wondered what it would mean to love them through the distance, and if it would even be possible. I wondered about my nieces and what it would be like for them to grow up speaking and learning only one language. I wondered if they would eventually forget me. I wondered at what cost I had wanted to see my grandmother and my home, that I would leave the country at such a volatile time. I wondered about the motherland and what it would mean to return now, when the government is corrupt, and American military bases are built on our land, and Chinese vessels terrorize our oceans, and the ecological devastation brought about by the climate crisis disproportionately affects my people. I wondered about what home would be when our house in Manila was demolished because of gentrification. I wondered if it would be easier to just stay in America despite it all.
I did not tell my mother about my fears because she had told me hers already. She told me, “Para akong nauupos na kandila.” I am like a candle burning out, she said. She reminded me to bring my school ID to the airport, to update my address on the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website, and to carry around my green card whenever I step outside of the house. I knew better than to tell her to stop worrying. She is my mother after all. And so, I told her yes. I knew she understood the danger
Roughly one in four Filipinos in America is undocumented. Ate Tess is one of them. I met her during her last week in America, as she was getting ready to leave out of fear of being picked up by ICE. She came to America to work as a caregiver for almost two decades. She would usually pick up shifts to take care of elderly clients, but with the administration’s immigration crackdown, Ate Tess has not been able to go to work. She hasn’t even stepped outside of her apartment for weeks.
“It’s better to leave instead of being deported,” said Babe Romualdez, Philippine Ambassador to the United States, in a text message to Inquirer. In a time when many undocumented Filipino immigrants were afraid and had risked everything to be heard, he wanted them to turn themselves in and just get out of the country.
There is one narrative pushed down the throats of Filipinos: leave.
It is estimated that over one million Filipinos leave the Philippines each year in search of economic opportunities. It is the only way to make a living and leave poverty. Back home, migrant workers like Ate Tess are called “modern heroes,” people who have sacrificed much to provide for their families back home. In 2024, they sent a record-breaking $38.34 billion in remittances from the U.S. alone. The Philippines is the fourth-highest remittance recipient in the world, behind India, Mexico, and China. The Philippine economy is built on the backs of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). But the moment they need help, they are met with silence by the local government, the embassy, and the ambassadors.
Ate Tess had decided that it wasn’t worth risking living here anymore. It was too risky. Kuya Dominik De Jesus, the Secretary General of Migrante New York, had invited members of GABRIELA New York to check in with her before she left, to make sure she felt supported as she went back home. I joined GABRIELA in the fall of last year, a few months after I had moved to the city and around the same time Trump was elected to power. GABRIELA and Migrante are a part of the Tanggol Migrante Network, a nationwide coalition of Filipino organizations and allies to protect migrants through Know Your Rights training and resourcing. The movement has kept my faith as the shiny veneer of empire crumbled all around us.
We squeezed into Ate Tess’s apartment, surrounded by balikbayan boxes and things that she was leaving behind—a television set, a coat rack, a handheld vacuum cleaner, a sofa, a dresser, a folding shopping cart, bags of clothes, glass containers for food, cooking pans, bowls, plates, and notebooks. Before we could even talk about how she was doing and her plans when she returned to the Philippines, she had already started handing us her stuff.
She sent us away with so much of her stuff, which she had paid for with her own hard labour. We said goodbye and exchanged emails. I told her we should see each other when I come home for the summer. I dragged a shopping cart full of her things down to the subway and back to my house, tapping in with the OMNY card she gave me. I stowed away the huge neon green container with rice she gave me in my kitchen cabinet. I stowed away the grey scarf at the bottom of my dresser. I stowed away the beige water jug, the glass containers for food, and the handheld vacuum cleaner.
I kept all of these heirlooms as if Ate Tess was my kin, like we were tethered by blood. Up to her last moments in America, she gave away so much.
“We should take our graduation pictures here,” Amrutha said, “if we don’t get deported.”
I laughed. The white cherry blossom trees at Washington Square Park were starkly bright against the leafless ones yet to bloom, with only the small yellow-green buds on their branches. They swayed with the cool spring wind at nine in the morning. It was beautiful. I took a picture of Amrutha standing next to the flowering tree.
We were here on a writing assignment and asked to report on any event in the park. But all I could think about was the news.
Left and right, international students’ visas were getting revoked at different universities around the country. The causes ranged from participating in a pro-Palestine protest to having a minor driving violation. On March 8, Mahmoud Kahlil was detained by ICE officers for participating in the pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University, and is currently facing possible deportation. On March 26, Rumeysa Ozturk was detained by ICE officers for her essay criticizing Tufts University’s refusal to acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.
I watched the videos of their arrests almost obsessively on Instagram, replaying the moment where the officers laid their hands on them, zooming into the surveillance footage. I remember Mahmoud’s pregnant wife taking a video of her husband being taken away by the officers dressed in civilian clothes. I remember her voice behind the phone, on the verge of tears. Mahmoud remains in a detention centre in Louisiana. Like him, I hold a green card. We are resident aliens.
There are moments when I am reminded of my alienness, and it is especially salient when I see things I wouldn’t otherwise see at home. Exhibit A: cherry blossoms. At the park, I lifted my phone to take a selfie with Amrutha. Because she is an international student from India and I am from the Philippines, we are used to trees blooming and dying at once, unnoticed. Year-round, plants remained bright green. And because of that, we only knew drought and rainfall, not the in-between seasons where the leaves would turn auburn in the fall and the flowers would resurrect in the spring. But because we both got a full-ride to a graduate program in journalism, we found ourselves here.
I thought of how much I would miss her. In a few weeks, I would be leaving for the Philippines to visit my grandmother. I would be gone for four months, and many of my friends were worried that I might not be allowed to re-enter the US. Some had advised me not to leave, but I was going anyway so they had told me that if I am not allowed back in, they would go out and protest in the streets. Amrutha told me she would join them.
“They’ll deport you too.”
“I don’t care.”
We laughed. As sad as I was that Amrutha would not see home for our summer break, I was glad she would remain here, far from the scrutiny of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer. “It’s safer,” I told her, reminding her that at least her husband, Sam, is also here with her. We both await our program’s end and cherish the time we have in the same country. Amrutha put her arm around my shoulder and smiled. Behind us, the blossoms lived their short, beautiful life. In a week, they would be on the ground, trampled over, and forgotten.
A few miles from where we emptied out Ate Tess’s apartment, Kuya Dominik took a sip of black coffee as tears started welling up around his eyes. I cried, too.
Here is an abridged list of things that may have triggered it: Filipino immigrants leave the country because of the Philippines’ long history of being plundered by colonizers, and its long history of having a corrupt local government run by oligarchs and political dynasties, and as a result, finding a job that pays a living wage is impossible, and many people don’t have a choice but to go abroad even when that means being out-of-status, and then you come here, and leave your family behind, and work yourself to the bone to send money back, but then your employer, who hired you to be a caregiver, asks you to clean his house too, even though it was not a part of your job description, and then he withholds your wages, and then he makes sexual advances toward you, and makes you feel like you cannot fight back because you are undocumented, and there is no way to get sponsored for a visa, and you miss your family but you can’t visit them because you can’t leave the country because how else could you get back in, and you live in an apartment as a bedspacer with a family of five and it’s uncomfortable but you stay anyway because you can’t secure a place of your own because you need a Social Security Number to do that, and you work and work and work and then you get sick but you can’t take a day off because how else would you pay for your rent and your bills and your family back home asks you to send more money because the price of things are also rising there, and then the agency that brought you here who promised you a green card turns out to be a trafficker and abandons you, and you pay for an immigration lawyer who is Filipino and you have hope and you give all of your hard-earned money to them, but then they disappear, and you have no one to go to, and then the presidents change from Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump and all of them want to deport you, and the Philippine Embassy tells you to self-deport, and then you see the news of ICE spottings in your neighbourhood, and you can’t leave the house to get groceries or do laundry or use the subway because they might see you and ask for your immigration papers, and you wonder if you should just marry someone for a green card but what if they were abusive, and what if they didn’t allow you to send money to your family, and then the Philippine government calls you a modern hero, and thanks you for all of your sacrifice while giving you absolutely nothing for it, and at the same time, giving American military men free reign to prepare for a war with China on your shores.
“If you think about all of it, you’ll go crazy,” Kuya Dominik said. We took another sip of the lukewarm coffee, to keep ourselves from crying.
A few miles from where we sat, there was the Dunkin’ Donuts that my undocumented aunt and uncle had worked at for years. For the longest time, I didn’t know that they had come here using the visas of people who had looked like them. This was the era of people overstaying on tourist visas and using “baklas,” or tampered, passports. I didn’t know yet how hard, expensive, and impossible it was to move to America, let alone stay here. When my dad told my uncle I was studying at New York University for free, my uncle cried. “Akalain mo … may Agustin din parang makakapag-aral diyan,” he said with joy, recalling the days when he used to pass by the university while driving the delivery truck for the Elmhurst Dunkin’. He said he used to buy bagels from the Jewish people in his neighbourhood. Whenever we were on the phone together, he would remind me not to be out too late because the subway is dangerous.
My aunt, who once worked at the concessions booth of the Circle K Boatline, told me about when my mom first visited them in the city. The two of them walked down Fifth Avenue, around Times Square, and in Central Park. They lived the American dream in all its glamour, and I saw it in photos of them trying on synthetic fur coats at Macy’s, which I found while perusing through family photo albums in my grandparents’ house in the barrio. My roots in this country ran deep. It was part of a longer story of displacement. My aunt and uncle were ratted out by a Filipino co-worker, who called the cops and gave away their status. They raided the Dunkin’. They begged the officer, who, by some miracle, let them go. They only self-deported after my grandmother could no longer take care of my three cousins. It was around the same time my uncle decided that his time in America was up. When he got here, he knew he wouldn’t stay forever. It was only a matter of time.
“A green card holder, even if I may like that green card holder, doesn’t have an indefinite right to be in the United States of America, right?” Vice President J.D. Vance said in an interview with Fox News in response to the imminent deportation of Mahmoud Khalil. The Department of Homeland Security has accused him of being involved in “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” and are trying to get him deported.
It took my family 12 years to get our green cards. My mother first filed in 2006, shortly after passing the NCLEX, the nationwide examination for licensing of nurses. She had flown from the Philippines, like many Filipino nurses have been doing since the ’50s. But when the recession happened in 2008, our papers were stopped and didn’t get processed until 2018. My sister, who was 21 by that time, was almost too old to be petitioned as a dependent for immigration. Having the US Embassy’s stamp of approval on our papers despite all of it was a miracle. We came to America, where we have lived for the past six years, but now, we do not have a definite right to stay. And although living in the imperial core has afforded us some privileges, I wished I didn’t have to leave home in order to have a life that was liveable.
“Sa Pinas, namamatay kang dilat kakatrabaho,” my mom would always tell me when I tell her I want to go home. And when she says that, I would remember all of the chants we would say on the streets during protests: Proteksyon, hindi Deportasyon! Trabaho sa Pinas, hindi sa labas! Protection, not deportation. Jobs inside the Philippines, not outside of it!
When I pray for my family at night, I list all of the places my families are in—Canada, Australia, Cagayan, Manila, California, Hawaii, UK, Greece, Germany. My intercessions are a world map, and my love is an archipelago scattered all over it, spanning oceans. The non-sequitured nature of our residences could only be explained by one thing: we were vomited out of the motherland.
“They were no longer afraid of death,” said the Filipino priest on Easter Sunday, referring to the women who showed up at Jesus’s tomb after his death.
I was sitting on the pews of the church space rented by the Queens chapter of Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI), where my friend from GABRIELA had invited me for service. She was playing the violin for mass. I walked into the sanctuary with the burgundy carpet and the flags of different countries hanging from the walls—Guyana, Barbados, Jamaica, Panama, and the Philippines, among others. I could not help but think of how all of these countries represented in the walls of that church have had a long history of colonialism, and how that plunder eventually led to these communities being displaced to this foreign land. Since we were talking about death anyway, the decor seemed fitting.
I couldn’t stop staring at the stained glass windows, and the sun haloing the face of Christ dying on the cross. Having grown up in the church, I was told that his love for his friends and the world brought him to the crucifixion. He was willing to die at the hands of empire. I wondered if I had enough love in my heart to be that daring and audacious and willing to lay down my own life for the sake of those around me. I thought of my mother, Amrutha, Ate Tess, Kuya Dominik, and my undocumented aunt and uncle who were once here. To love them was to choose to step outside of my myopic anxieties and instead take a long, hard look at them. My rage toward America and all its imperial machinations could not take away the love that I had for these people. Liberation was near. I no longer wanted to be afraid.
After the sermon, communion, and benediction, all of the IFI congregants went down to the church basement. There was a long table with trays filled with food—palabok, pancit, dinuguan, embutido, kaldereta, ginataang bilo-bilo, carbonara, rice, and a cheese yema cake. Someone was blasting ’80s Filipino hits on a Bluetooth speaker and children were running around while everyone chatted among themselves in between mouthfuls of food. Whatever side of the Pacific we were on, we couldn’t stop ourselves from celebrating. No weapon could take that away from us.
Even though I came to this country with much grief, I could not help but think about the grief of leaving it forever. To be barred from this country is to go through exile all over again—something I have felt as an immigrant to America who was, for various reasons, unable to even visit the Philippines for five years. I have peered into that life through a looking glass so many times since I left that I forget I have spent a quarter of my life here. That fate has created possibilities that wouldn’t have otherwise existed if I had not come to America. It isn’t to say that I am embracing the American dream. It is to say that to leave is to unfurl another future, one far away from the love I have known here. It is to start over again, in some sense, even though I will never leave the home of my body. It is to leave behind the memories of cherry blossoms, my comrades, and afternoons of burying my feet in the sand of Brighton Beach with Amrutha.
“You’ll be okay,” she told me. On a warm and sunny afternoon after class, we took the B to the south shore of Brooklyn for the first time. Amrutha grew up in the coastal town of Visakhapatnam, and I, a few oceans over, ran down the coast of Ilocos with my cousins during the summer. We had vivid memories of submerging our younger bodies into the water, battling against the waves, hair stuck together by seasalt. We had visions of home whenever we saw the ocean, smelled the salt air, and saw the sunlight sparkling over it. Although the motherland was far, somehow it was also alive here, in the reminiscence of our former lives, and in the beauty that gripped our eyes. Amrutha walked closer to the water to take a picture.
I wanted to believe my friend. Her words rang in my head even inside Brighton Beach public bathroom, where a kitschy poster that hung on the wall said, “The greatest sin … Fear.”
It was in black sans serif text on a white background. It was so clear and authoritative that there was no debating it. I wish it were easy not to sin. But then, I also thought of the passage I would hear at church all the time growing up, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” Although it was written in the context of the fear of divine punishment, I believed it was also applicable in the way many kinds of love drove out many kinds of fear.
“Makibaka! Huwag matakot!”
I remember chanting alongside comrades in front of the Philippine Consulate in the hustle and bustle of midtown Manhattan. There, we called for the release of the assistance-to-nationals fund to help Dhenmark and Jovi, two Filipino nursing assistants who were detained by ICE. A patient threw a table at Dhenmark while working at the care facility in New Jersey, but when the two acted in self-defence, they were accused of assault.
Although the charges were eventually dropped, they were not released from the ICE detention centres, where they lacked potable water and fresh food, were bossed around by the officers, and slept in freezing temperatures during the winter. This rage kept us warm that cold Sunday morning when we were out in the streets. The people yelled, “Makibaka! Huwag matakot!” or “Fight! Be not afraid!” It was the same battle cry of the masses in the ’70s against the fascist dictatorship of the Marcos regime. The movement has had a long history of turning fear into fighting power. I believe that this, too, is love.
Love pulls me outside of myself and gives me a reason to come back to this country. It also awaits me when I go back to the homeland—through my grandmother in Manila, my sister in Cavite, my churchmates in Cagayan. Love awaits me through my friends who have already been making plans for us to go to the beach. Love awaits me in the possibility of seeing Ate Tess again, and the other migrant workers who have been a part of Migrante. And with that, fear left as quickly as it swept over my soul. It was worth the risk. The colossal existence of fear was broken by the even more colossal existence of love, which was present back home and in this home.
Amrutha walked back to where I was sitting on the sand. Her smile was as incandescent as the sun. There, at last, I believed.
