[1] In August, my daughter and I flew into Boston for a brief vacation in Western Massachusetts before I drove her to a university in Rhode Island. We spent one night in a town called Revere, not far from the airport. The next day, we began our journey to a vacation village in Hancock, a town in the Berkshires named for John Hancock, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.<\/p>\n
[2] The three-hour drive carried us through towns bearing the names of the early founders, etched into the map as reminders of democracy\u2019s promise.<\/p>\n
[3] They imagined a new experiment in freedom. But today we live under a president who bends the Constitution rather than upholds it, with the highest court in the land too often enabling that undoing. Those names along the road are not just markers of geography. They are warnings of what could be lost.<\/p>\n
[4] And so the name Revere lingered with me. Paul Revere\u2014the hero of grade-school history books, galloping through the night with his lantern, crying out, \u201cThe British are coming! The British are coming!\u201d That story has been stitched into America\u2019s imagination. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made sure of it in 1860: \u201cListen, my children, and you shall hear. Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.\u201d<\/p>\n
[5] As a child, I was told he was brave, a patriot risking his life to warn his people. But standing in Revere, Massachusetts, decades later, I found myself asking: who exactly were \u201chis people\u201d? Who was protected by his warning\u2014and who was erased? While Revere rode through colonial towns, Indigenous nations\u2014the Wampanoag, the Massachusett, the Pawtucket\u2014were being forced from their homelands, their stories buried beneath the march of settlers. That same impulse toward erasure now threatens immigrant communities who have built our country, paid into it, and loved it.<\/p>\n
[6] Undocumented immigrants are part of the backbone of this nation. They labor in kitchens, care for our children and elders, keep hospitals and schools running, and contribute billions in income and payroll taxes. Yet their removal isn\u2019t just enforcement\u2014it is disappearance. It is pretending that communities who have shaped America\u2019s fabric were never here.<\/p>\n
[7] That\u2019s the source of my wake-up flash: the midnight rider still has power, but the cry needs to be recast. Today, the warning is not: \u201cThe British are coming.\u201d It is: \u201cThe ICE is coming.\u201d<\/p>\n
[8] Imagine riders warning immigrant families that raids are imminent\u2014neighbors might be shackled, detained, deported. Imagine that cry coursing through our streets\u2014not to spread fear, but to stir courage so families are not caught unprepared.<\/p>\n
[9] This is not fantasy. It is moral imagination. Longfellow\u2019s poem summoned courage on the eve of national upheaval. We can use it to summon courage against today\u2019s moral crisis. His poem, like our role now, is not history\u2014it is a rallying cry.<\/p>\n
[10] America remembers warnings that protect settlers, but silences the ones meant to protect the displaced. We recite poetry about liberty while immigrant families are erased; we cast statues in bronze, while raids carve away bodies and dreams.<\/p>\n
[11] In Chicago itself, we saw how quickly that erasure can happen. This winter, as children were dropped off at school in Little Village, ICE agents arrested a man\u2014captured on video moments later\u2014sending a wave of immediate panic through families and schools. The wall between home and work shattered in the instant parents were taken in front of children.<\/p>\n
[12] Here in our city, the urgency has sharpened. President Trump has pledged to flood Chicago with ICE agents, even deploying the National Guard. Governor J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson have made it clear: We will not cooperate with ICE raids. We will not allow troops to patrol our neighborhoods. Yet if precedent holds, he may act anyway.<\/p>\n
[13] Then, who rides for us? Who will tell undocumented residents in Little Village, Albany Park, and Back of the Yards that they must prepare? Who will alert children walking to school that their parents might vanish before they get home? This is our moral test.<\/p>\n
[14] The danger is erasure. But there is another truth: even as forces of power try to erase, immigrant communities leave marks that cannot be rubbed out. Their food flavors our tables, their music fills our streets, their labor sustains our cities, their languages widen our imaginations. These stories are not marginal\u2014they are central. The history of immigrants in America is one of resilience and renewal, and it is still being written in real time. It is a story strong enough to withstand raids and deportations\u2014but only if the rest of us refuse to let silence bury it.<\/p>\n
[15] Chicago knows quiet courage. Public schools pledge sanctuary. Rapid-response teams hand out \u201cKnow Your Rights\u201d cards. Churches, neighbors, and volunteers stand watch at bus stops and answer midnight calls\u2014even if the riders come on foot rather than horse.<\/p>\n
[16] To honor Paul Revere is not to cling to myth but to repurpose the message. Let the hoofbeats echo again\u2014not to protect the privileged from empire, but to shield the vulnerable from erasure.<\/p>\n
[17] The ICE is coming. The ICE is coming. The question is: will we answer the call? Will we be the riders now\u2014refusing silence, guarding our neighbors, refusing to let erasure win? If Longfellow\u2019s poem will live again, let it live not as a nostalgic legend but as a prophetic summons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[1] In August, my daughter and I flew into Boston for a brief vacation in Western Massachusetts before I drove her to a university in Rhode Island. We spent one night in a town called Revere, not far from the airport. The next day, we began our journey to a vacation village in Hancock, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-immigration-refugee-issues"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n