# If ICE takes me

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-nuance-diaries-7119430/if-ice-takes-me
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-nuance-diaries-7119430/if-ice-takes-me.md
Podcast: [The Nuance Diaries](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-nuance-diaries-7119430)
Published: 2026-01-30T22:32:01+00:00
Episode link: https://thenuancediaries.substack.com/p/if-ice-takes-me
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/186345052/7e09d532121231234b4c661cdf11ecf1.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-nuance-diaries-7119430/episodes/if-ice-takes-me
Duration seconds: 1406

## Resource

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…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-nuance-diaries-7119430/episodes/if-ice-takes-me/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-nuance-diaries-7119430/if-ice-takes-me.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.