The Joy and the Fight
One fuels the other, and we need them both now
“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left…”
This is the beginning of a poem by Mary Oliver that has become a sort of anthem for me, a constant reminder in all the years in which I’ve been reporting on some of the hardest things in the world. It’s called “Don’t Hesitate,” and it’s in her Swan: Poems and Prose Poems. She names the hypocrisies we live with every day, and concludes simply, “don’t be afraid / of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.”
A friend sent the poem to me years ago when I was reporting on the Syrian regime using weapons of mass destruction against children for Teen Vogue. I’ve memorized it, and I repeat it to myself sometimes when my joy feels at odds with the awful world around me. “Don’t hesitate,” Oliver commands me. “Give in to it.” The imperative tense helps me obey.
I repeated the lines to myself this past Friday night in LA.
My latest book, We Were Illegal, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in the Biography category. I got to go to the Oscars of book prizes, where they literally read the winners’ names off of envelopes. I didn’t win, but honestly, who cares?
I was in a room with friends and literary crushes wearing our California cocktail finest (we still have no idea what that means), and I felt good, honest joy.
“Don’t be afraid of its plenty,” I thought to myself, as I laughed till my face ached.
I called my husband from the airport and told him how I didn’t realize how much I needed this weekend until I looked at the photos, and saw that my face was lit up in a way I haven’t felt in a long time. I was with people who understand and care deeply about the hard things of the world. Many of the writers are committed to bringing others joy every day. Others have been reporting on injustice much longer than me. We commiserated and lingered and made dark jokes because we know it’s the only way to continue this work.
This is my reminder to you today, this good thing first: precisely because things are so hard and will be getting harder, don’t hesitate when joy comes. Give in to it. Obey Mary Oliver when she commands you to embrace its plenty.
That joy you embrace will fuel you when you need to fight.
In the author green room on Saturday, I chatted with someone I’d just met. In the last few months, I’ve noticed how often journalists get a different set of questions than we used to. It’s like doctors or meteorologists must feel in a social setting, except instead of diagnosing medical conditions or predicting the weather, people ask us to speak prophetically about our nation: “What do you think is really going to happen? Are things going to be OK? Will it get worse? Is it as bad as we fear?”
This time, because it was someone I really admire, I told the truth: yes, I think things are getting much worse quickly. That is in part because those of us who have been reporting on this for years are seeing things play out in the same ways as they did during the last Trump administration.
We so often forget—because we’re often made to forget, by a flood of disinformation and hyped up scandals—and I want you remind you of how things went during the first Trump presidency. They perfected a magician’s sleight of hand: poof, watch the smoke, and ignore what happens just out of sight.
As it did the last time, it’s beginning with vulnerable mothers and children.
In mid-2017, one of my favorite immigration reporters Lomi Kriel—who works for ProPublica, but was at the Houston Chronicle then—began hearing some rumors. As she later told Kristine Villanueva at the Center for Public Integrity, they were “disturbing accounts from public defenders who suddenly reported that their clients [asylum-seekers and undocumented immigrants] had come with their children, who were removed after the adults were charged with improper entry, and the parents did not know where they were.” She started digging, and on November 25, 2017, published a powerhouse story in the Chronicle: “Trump moves to end ‘catch and release,’ prosecuting parents and removing children who cross border.” It was a damning, searing report (and it shows why we need well-resourced, independent journalism now more than ever).
Six months before the family separation policy that would become official US policy, Kriel discovered what was already in place: the government’s active police to secretly remove children from their parents, sending them away to federal shelters or temporary foster homes with little to no effort made to track the children’s whereabouts.
Her reporting was later the basis of an ACLU lawsuit that helped stop the practice; it’s every journalists’ dream, that their reporting makes a material difference to stop injustice, and Kriel won the George Polk Award for her work.
She wasn’t the only one who reported on it, but her doggedness made her the first.
In the LA Times Festival green room, I told my new author friend the story of Kriel’s work, and said that I’m worried about what they’re doing behind the scenes now—what “six month” periods we’ve already entered that we won’t fully understand until later.
There has been public outcry against a lot of unjust immigration policies, and we’ve been covering them carefully at the Injustice Report. But we’re trying hard to keep an eye not just on individuals but on systems, on the big picture things that will affect a lot of people.
It has clearly become government policy to traffic not just legal residents but now US citizens out of the country. This week, according to the BBC, three young US citizen children were unexpectedly trafficked to Honduras when their mothers checked in for a routine ICE appointment.
That BBC article quotes Border Czar Tom Holman: “They weren't deported. We don't deport US citizens. Their parents made that decision, not the United States government.”
The families of these three children were living in Louisiana, which has recently made headlines as the site where Mahmoud Kahlil and others are being taken when their visas are unexpectedly revoked, to holding facilities and federal districts with judges that are presumably more sympathetic to Trump’s policies.
Judge Terry A. Doughty is the federal judge over one of the cases, which involves a two-year-old US citizen referred to in court documents as VML.
Doughty is a Republican appointed in 2018 by Trump. I’m not going to do the thing that happens so often, where people assume just because someone was appointed by Trump that they’re a stereotype. I know nothing about Doughty’s rulings or personal feelings. As a Texan who is sick of being mistyped, I’ve had enough of that.
At the same time, context matters: Doughty—in Monroe, Louisiana, appointed by this president during his last term—did not mince words. In his April 25, 2025 Memorandum Order (which is short and worth reading for yourself), Doughty wrote: “Of course, ‘It is illegal and unconstitutional to deport, detain for deportation, or recommend deportation of a U.S. citizen.,’” a fact he then goes on to explain through citing various court cases. Then he repeats Holman’s claim: “The Government contends that [removing VML] is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her.”
Doughty isn’t done however: “But the Court doesn’t know that.” He italicizes the word. He’s clearly salty.
Doughty lays out the timeline of how he tried to find out what exactly was happening to VML: he called counsel at 12:19 pm CST on April 24 to try to speak to the mother and find out what she really wanted. And meanwhile, he writes, “the Court was independently aware at the time that the plane, tail number N570TA, was above the Gulf of America.”
The use of ‘Gulf of America’ shows the judge’s political leanings, and even with all of that, Judge Doughty clearly thinks he’s being lied to. He concludes that he’s calling a hearing for May 16, “In the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
Two other US citizens were also trafficked out of Louisiana without due process last week, including a four-year-old with metastatic cancer, who was deported without medication or a doctor’s care, according to the family’s lawyer. This is now the second US citizen child with cancer (that we know of) deported to another country with no medical plan in place.
We’re seeing a new widespread policy playing out in real time. The cruelty is the point. Deportation without due process is trafficking.
A few months after Lomi Kriel and many other journalists began reporting on the family separation policy, I interviewed one family whose older daughters were taken from them when they crossed the border in Texas.
The young teen girls spent months in New York, while their Honduran family remained in Texas—though at the time, they no idea where the girls were. I spoke with the frantic mother before she found her daughters, right after she found them but couldn’t get them home, and then a few days after they returned.
It was one of the hardest set of interviews I’ve ever done. From me, that’s saying a lot.
I pitched the story to all kinds of places, but by then, it had become commonplace—there were dozens of families with the same heartbreaking tale. And frankly, while writing a book about a former refugee family whose separation broke something inside of them, I was already drowning in grief. Later, I recognized the secondary post traumatic stress that was consuming me. At the time, I didn’t have the words.
The interviews never went anywhere. I’ve just held their stories in my mind and in my heart for years since then. We text sometimes now. Their girls are growing up. But the damage they suffered was permanent.
We need bureaucratic solutions to immigration policies. And it is absolutely legal to cross the border and seek asylum, as this family did. Our country desperately needs immigration reform.
But instead, this administration is implementing a policy of trafficking legal residents and now US citizens without due process.
In one weekend, I felt both the deepest joy and the fiercest anger. I held them both; one fuels the other.
On Sunday night when I got back to my hotel room, social media had exploded with clips of a speech by Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker from a Democratic fundraiser in New Hampshire: “Standing for the idea that the government doesn’t have the right to kidnap you without due process is arguably the most effective campaign slogan in history. It’s the OG of political messaging.”
He issued what I hope will become a fiery call to action for all of us:“Cowardice always comes at a cost.” And, “cowardice can be contagious, but so too can courage…Courage born during times when complacency beckons like a siren call is the most important kind of all, just as the hope that we hold onto in the darkness shines with its own special light.”
The joy I felt this weekend was simple: We are not alone. There are so many of us. We care deeply about others. We care about this country. We care about the rule of law and due process. We care about children. We care about democracy and liberty and justice. And we are willing to fight so that children and asylum-seekers and legal residents and everyone will receive the due process that is still their right in this country.
Like Pritzker, “I’m willing…to fight for our democracy, for our liberty, for the opportunity for all of our people to live lives that are meaningful and free.” And I echo his final question to all of you: “Are you ready for the fight?”
Embrace the joy when it comes to you; create it with one another and in your communities. Use it to gain the courage you need. That courage is contagious. Speak the commonsense truth: our rights still matter. We all deserve due process.
And then fight like hell. Because the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness—pursuit of joy—of every single person in this nation is worth defending.