Its no small thing to build a life and a home and a community. Let alone doing it again. And again.

I cannot convince my trans friends living in danger to come live with me because they have roots, older fam, various types of kin etc. A life. that they feel they’d be abandoning. They’d rather stay and fight on their feet or at least stubbornly resist until its off to the camps at gunpoint.

And some of these people are witnessing their friends being rounded up by ICE, had family deported under the first Trump admin etc, they are not completely delusional to the reality that may face them.

I imagine this is a sentiment adjacent to that felt by many who you’d think might voluntarily emigrate to escape the American nightmare. There’s a lot of romantic notions many peoples heads. Maybe it would feel like a betrayal to leave if your parents or grandparents risked their lives to get you a slice of that American pie.

The couple of documentaries I’ve seen about Tongan and Samoan deportees working a plot of land in what looks like paradise to me show people who are getting by but treated forever as foreign outsiders, shunned, suspected of being inherently criminal, raised without shared local language and customs etc. Perpetual outsiders.

Its still fucked even when they find relative prosperity. That’s the impression I get.