Episode
If ICE takes me
- Podcast
- The Nuance Diaries
- Published
- Jan 30, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1406
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://thenuancediaries.substack.com/p/if-ice-takes-me
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Summary
I want to tell you a story. It is 2018, and I am a recent college graduate. I’m 23 years old. My high school best friend and I decide to take a little trip to Montreal. We’ve never been. It seems like a really fun idea. She knows French. It felt like a cool thing to do. And we’re in New York City, so it’s a short flight. We get on the plane early in the morning. It’s a very full flight. Boarding was hectic. I remember it being really hard to get our overhead storage and throw things in. Whatever, it was a short flight. We arrive in Montreal, and it’s still very early. Maybe 8 AM. We get to customs, and we’re about to show our passports to the gate person. And I can’t find mine. I can’t find my passport. And I know I have it, because I wouldn’t have been allowed on the plane without it. They checked our passports coming into the airport in New York, and then again at the gate. I know I have it. I got on the plane with this passport. I know that. But I don’t have it now. I don’t have my passport. I’ll remind you again that it is 2018 and I am an African American woman. Trump had just been elected during the fall semester of my senior year at Vassar, which I wrote about here. It’s 2018, and we are two years into Trump’s first administration and I am an African American woman in a different country than I was born in without my passport. I am losing my shit. I am having what I now know is a panic attack. My friend, thankfully, was able to keep it together and made sure that I had WhatsApp installed on my phone so that we could communicate after she went through customs and I went back to the plane to look for my passport. I don’t even really remember the gate number where we got deplaned, but I’m just sprinting through the airport with my carry-on, and I’m probably crying…