Despair and cruelty are on the rise. Hope and goodness is how we’ll persevere.
It’s profoundly troubling to hear the horror stories of immigration enforcement and intimidation taking place in the United States. A legal permanent resident and student activist was arrested at his citizenship interview after “signing a document pledging allegiance to the U.S. and to protecting and defending the Constitution.”[1] A woman from Haiti died while being held in a privately run detention facility in Broward County, Florida.[2] A family unjustly separated; a father deported to CECOT in El Salvador, a mother to Venezuela, and their 2-year-old daughter left behind in foster care in the United States.[3]
This week, the cruelty took another dark turn. In two different cases, three children who are naturalized American citizens were deported from the country without trial or a hearing.[4,5] One of the children, a four-year-old, had been receiving treatment for cancer and is presumably now without access to life-saving care. It’s factually unconstitutional and a violation of an individual’s human rights to deport or forcibly remove any citizen from their naturalized country under any circumstances. In both cases, the mothers were not naturalized citizens, presenting an opportunity for holistic compassion and reform. Instead, cases like these where American children have one or more parents who might be temporary or non-legal residents, are being exploited and vanishing from our communities.
Leaders of hope recognize we are fundamentally interconnected with shared rights to belong and live in peace.
Hope is the belief that a better tomorrow for everyone is not only possible but achievable. The patchwork of immigration laws, policies, and procedures over decades is indicative of the interwoven complexity that makes modern human flourishing both possible and challenging. Leaders of hope recognize we are fundamentally interconnected with shared rights to belong and live in peace. Therefore, it should not surprise us as the beneficiaries of a nation built on the principles of freedom and fair justice that the majority world desires it too. They, like our ancestors, long for hope and opportunity for themselves and their children.
However, the further in time we travel beyond our stories of origin where freedom was first achieved, the more at risk we are of forgetting our moral grounding and responsibility. White Americans are most at risk of becoming disconnected from that story and belonging. For the majority white population in America, our experience has been one of privilege, where freedom and equality have gone largely unchallenged or disrupted. This has been true for the last 100 years, when white Americans (mostly women) petitioned, marched, protested, and ultimately voted on the 19th Amendment, permitting the right of all citizens regardless of sex to vote. For Americans today, it’s unconscionable to deny a woman her right to vote or live freely in society, despite the inequalities that remain. Despite the sobering reality, those who inherit prosperity are often the most likely to squander or deny it for someone else.
White Americans have much to learn from our African American brothers and sisters. For them, their rights and freedoms were “legally” denied for generations and courageously earned at the cost of imprisonment, brutality, and unjust murder. The memory of the American Civil Rights movement is still with us, but it too, is fading from our social consciousness. The cruelty and racism done by the voices, hands, weapons, and power of others from the not-so-distant past is a haunting reminder of how privilege without humility corrupts.
Although America was founded on a racist past, the people have consistently pursued reform in the spirit of hope and change for a better tomorrow.
Subsequent generations owe themselves to remain connected to the present and our past. Sitting with others, listening to their stories, and understanding our unfiltered history is how human social consciousness grows and evolves. The enduring lessons are always timeless: pride, entitlement, and greed are the barriers to openness, compassion, and generosity. Although America was founded on a racist past by sanctioning slavery, displacing native people groups from their homelands, and codifying the dehumanization of blacks to three-fifths of a person, the people have consistently pursued reform in the spirit of hope and change for a better tomorrow.
We are embarking on another crossroads. With cruelty and despair on the rise for millions of innocent, freedom-seeking people, those in positions of inherited privilege and power have a responsibility to choose hope and goodness to inspire their fellow citizens to do likewise. Just as others have done for us, we owe it to the next generation to build a better tomorrow for them.
Just as others have done for us, we owe it to the next generation to build a better tomorrow for them.
Immigrants, refugees, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer communities are at imminent risk of danger to the full rights and privileges that we believe all persons are entitled to. Furthermore, we are witnessing the erosion and reversal of freedoms for black and brown people, women, and anyone who voices dissent from a future that emboldens and preserves the discrimination of others. Hope is a vision of the future where everyone has an opportunity to belong, discover the goodness within them, contribute to the common good, and create a beautifully diverse and inclusive world for everyone. Together, we can build a better tomorrow for everyone, everywhere.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/04/29/nx-s1-5377484/columbia-student-mohsen-mahdawi-citizenship-arrest
[2] https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article305336021.html
[4] https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/27/us/children-us-citizens-deported-honduras/index.html
Matt Till 