On the day that my daughter’s adenoids were removed, my husband became an American citizen. H was nine years old, and her enlarged adenoids were blocking 75% of her nasal airway, enough that the surgeon recommended removal. Art was a 51-year-old Polish green card holder who had lived in the States since kindergarten, but the 2025 political climate was threatening enough that he felt compelled to secure his status.
My husband had no choice about the date of the final ceremony. He was instructed to show up on the same Tuesday of the adenoidectomy. We wanted to be with him, and he wanted to be with us. But instead, that morning, at the same hour on a hot August day, a surgeon guided a heated wire through my daughter’s mouth to cauterize and remove tissue while my husband put his hand over his heart to recite the Pledge of Allegiance on the other side of Pittsburgh.
For reasons known only to my neurons, on the drive to the hospital, I thought of a sermon I’d heard in a nearby Episcopal church roughly 30 years prior. The pastor was a pale, egg-headed man whom I imagined as a more robust Arthur Dimmesdale. From his pulpit raised above the congregation, the distance amplified by his own tallness, he preached long, tedious sermons, about which I remember nothing. Except for one. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.” This verse from the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament was his text one morning. He also preached about five or so verses that followed, but his main thrust was on that first line, which he recited at least six times. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.” Maybe that rhetorical tack was the reason the sentence lodged in my brain. I don’t know. Maybe the story, which is about the prophet Isaiah guiding a nation in turmoil, felt timely. I don’t think it was as logical as all that. But somehow, as I thought about my daughter and husband’s unusual pairing of events that day, the sentence structure echoed. On the day that my daughter’s adenoids were removed, my husband became an American citizen. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.
Nobody wanted to be doing what they were doing on surgery-citizenship day. My daughter was scared of pain. She didn’t see why her chronic mouth breathing was a problem, but her ENT doctor and her orthodontist did. Art (Artur Tadeusz) was proud of his Polish heritage, content to be the permanent resident he’d been for years, and glad to hold an E.U. passport. But after Trump’s inauguration in January of 2025, he had also been reading almost daily about immigrants being arrested, denied entry, or removed to detention centers without due process.
“At least Art is the ‘right’ color,” people dismissed us with knowing air quotes. “He doesn’t have to worry.”
He did worry.
On March 7, 2025, a permanent resident named Fabian Schmidt returned from a 10-day trip to see his family in Germany when Customs and Border Protection agents detained him at the airport. He was the “right”/white color and completely fluent in English (and three other languages). His family had moved to the States when he was 16, and he’d held a green card since he was a teenager. He was not released from detention for 58 days.1
In that same month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “No one has a right to a green card.”2 While technically true, since the status is a privilege rather than a right, his statement was jarring, especially, I’m guessing, for the 12.8 million green card holders in the United States.
The next day, Vice President Vance opined that green card holders did not have an “indefinite right to be in the United States of America, right?” He mused to a Fox News reporter, “…who do we as an American public decide who gets to join our national community? And if the Secretary of State and the President decide, ‘This person shouldn’t be in America, and they have no legal right to stay here,’ it’s as simple as that.”3
Legally, it is not as simple as that, but then again, after Trump was inaugurated in January, legality seemed a less useful distinction. So, Art filed the documents for citizenship in March, and he was given an appointment to appear at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to jump through his first hoop in June.
1 https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2025/06/17/he-thought-a-decade-old-misdemeanor-was-behind-him-then-he-took-a-vacation-in-europe/
2 https://www.state.gov/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-remarks-to-press
3 https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/22/us/green-card-visa-holders-deportation-fears-cec
Until my daughter stopped breathing through her nose, I might’ve been hard-pressed to tell an adenoid from an adrenal. After she had allergy testing and ear infections, and one actual case of Scarlet Fever that sent me into a Little Women spiral, the professionals finally said it was time to get rid of the adenoids. The glands had finished the dirty work of fighting off childhood germs, the doctor said. As soon as she explained how expendable the adenoids were, my imagination clicked weirdly: I started to picture migrant workers in the back of H’s throat, harvesting the fruit that no one else wanted to pick, doing the backbreaking work of nourishing a nation. No surprise this is where my mind went: in the news that spring, I saw near-daily pictures of migrant families being separated or men languishing in an El Salvadoran detention center or students being snatched off the streets. Rhetoric of removal was heavy in the air.
The first medical notation of adenoids was likely in 1661, by a German scientist named Conrad Victor Schneider. By the 1800s, the glands were being removed to alleviate some ear problems, and eventually to treat things like cognitive issues, sleep apnea, and speech difficulties. No anesthesia was used during the surgery until the 1920s, and early tools for removal included the bare fingernail, a detail I cannot type without retching.4
My 21st-century daughter, on the other hand, was dressed in scrubs with puppies on them, knocked out, given IV anesthesia, and fed slushies immediately upon waking.
Unlike tonsils, adenoids shrink until they disappear by adulthood. H’s were bigger to start with, and not shrinking yet, and now basically just sitting in her mouth, taking up space. When the doctor described them as such dead weight, I again thought of the ways that people sometimes talk about immigrants sitting in the Home Depot parking lot, looking for work. Are they contributing anything? They’ve overstayed their welcome. Are they even supposed to be here?
How do we know who is supposed to be where?
The Center for Inclusion and Belonging at the American Immigration Council, along with an organization called Over Zero, published a study called The Belonging Barometer: The State of Belonging in America in 2023. This new measure, with its wonderful name, reported findings from a national survey that “demonstrated the connections between belonging and critical life outcomes,” which are many. It describes belonging as “a more general inference, drawn from cues, events, experiences, and relationships, about the quality of fit or potential fit between oneself and a setting.”5 No surprise that humans are hard-wired to find community and thrive when they do.
The Barometer describes “fit” in five life settings: family, friends, workplace, local community, and the nation. And belonging is not synonymous with social relationships. A person can feel like they belong in a place where they don’t have friends; a person can feel lonely in a place where they belong; in some settings, a person can feel like they don’t belong, even in a room full of friends. Belonging also doesn’t always have to do with people at all. A person can feel belonging in relation to a landscape, a country, a church.
If you spent a lifetime hearing hymns on Sundays like I did, you might know what it can mean to belong to a church. There is immense, binding power in standing with a group of people, facing the same direction, and singing. This is true in any choir, but in church, the music is infused with lyrics about heaven and hope and glory and God. You feel the heavy offering plate pass through your hands as it moves among the congregation, you throw back a tiny cup of grape juice with a hundred or more people in unison, you see the same little biddies sitting in the same pew week after week, with jaunty hats and pin curls.
I grew up in these congregations, so I tried to find one when I moved out on my own. The first was an Episcopal church, where I heard the tall, bald pastor. This church practiced even more grandiose rituals of worship than I was used to, but I met some friends and found a spot I liked on the left side of the sanctuary, and I led the music a time or two with several other adults who were clearly wary of letting someone new into the fold. But my voice was sweet and strong at the same time, one of them said, so I could help.
The King Uzziah sermon was one of the last I heard in that Episcopal church, because I was asked to stop taking communion when the staff found out I’d never been baptized. It’s not official Episcopal doctrine, but in this church, only people who’d been formally baptized were welcome to receive the bread and wine. In other words, only people who had followed the letter of the law were allowed to commune with the creator of the universe. I was encouraged to get baptized and then resume taking communion; of course, they said, they still wanted me to be part of the church family. Nothing about it felt like family anymore. I was in my early twenties then, a post-college newborn trying to figure out who I was. In the midst of my wandering and wondering, though, I was pretty sure that if God existed and someone approached the table in an effort to connect, God wouldn’t be too interested in checking papers.
4 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28543437/
5 The Belonging Barometer https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/the-belonging-barometer/ p 58
In June, Art had driven out to the USCIS field office in the suburbs for an interview and test. In the waiting room of a nondescript office building, videos of ICE agents arresting immigrants played on a loop. Within the first 100 days of Trump’s inauguration, 369 people had been arrested at the field offices themselves.6 A Columbia student named Mohsen Mahdawi was included in that group and was arrested even though he was in the literal act of taking his citizenship oath.
When Art was summoned down the hall into a room behind a closed door, the immigration officer said, in accented English, “So you finally decided to come in!”
After Art took an oath to tell the truth, he watched the officer read through a file of information and type it into a computer. The file contained a childhood picture Art had never seen of himself. He was not allowed to hold it. He was not allowed to read the papers in the file.
He was required to answer questions that were on the naturalization form, all of which he answered with a no:
Are you a member of the Communist Party?
Have you ever been affiliated with a terrorist organization?
Have you been convicted of any crime?
Have you ever failed to pay your taxes?
Have you sold or manufactured drugs?
He had to write the answer to Where does the President of the United States live? on a digitized pad to prove he knew how to write letters.
Have you been guilty of any moral turpitude? “Cheating on your wife, for example?” the officer suggested. He went on, “I see you were married previously. Now I need to know your ex-wife’s full name, the exact day of your marriage, the reason you got divorced, and the exact date of your divorce.”
“Can I give you a ballpark?” Art said.
“I want you to try really hard to remember everything,” the officer said, handing Art a small piece of blank notepaper. So he wrote down as many dates and motives as he could remember from almost 30 years prior, and the officer stapled that paper to the back of his file.
Then the questions shifted:
Are you willing to serve in the army?
“I registered for the draft when I was 18, and I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t want me at this age.” I’m sure Art was laughing at his own joke then, but the officer was not.
“In a non-combat role.”
“Yes.”
Are you ready to take the oath?
Art raised his right hand and repeated his vows, which I later looked up:
I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.
When asked why he had decided to become a citizen on this day, Art gave an unspecific answer about the “way things are going” and the choice “seeming like the right thing to do.” He did not talk about fear of being detained if he were to travel, or fear of being denied his social security, or fear of being more carefully surveilled because he was only a permanent resident. He said nothing about the fear of being separated from his wife and nine-year-old daughter.
At some point during the appointment, he’d been given a short test, which asked him to name one of Benjamin Franklin’s contributions to America.
“I said the library,” he’d told me when he got home.
“Not the Declaration of Independence or the whole kite electricity thing?”
He shrugged and laughed a little. “Libraries seemed like a good choice.”
Franklin himself would have agreed. In his Autobiography, he bragged that his invention had made farmers as intelligent as anyone else and concluded that “These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans.”
Not many of the loudest voices in 2025 seemed to have visited a library in a very, very long time.
6 https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/mass-deportation-trump-democracy/
Is citizenship an act of inclusion or exclusion? According to The Belonging Barometer study, differentiating between “us” and “them” can create a stronger sense of belonging for those within the “us.” But moving closer to one group can create more distance from another, even if it’s not designated as “them.” This tells us, the study says, that “belonging is not just dynamic (always changing) but sometimes also compensatory (e.g., in a life of limited time and energy, an increased investment and experience of belonging in one life setting may mean a decreased sense of belonging in another).“7
Noncitizens don’t just apply for status once and kick up their feet. It takes time and energy. They have to renew green cards and visas, stay on top of work permits, and resubmit biometrics for fingerprints (in case they change?) Art had maintained his green card for something like 45 years. He’d filed the right paperwork, sent in hundreds of dollars every ten years, and dutifully kept the card in his wallet. He paid taxes. Registered for the draft. Avoided moral turpitude. But he never applied for citizenship. When our daughter was born, we started the paperwork to secure dual citizenship for her, but that process halted when COVID started and the Polish consulate shut its doors.
Do I have to explain why a person might want to remain a citizen of his own country even if he’s grown up in another? Art’s mother brought him to Connecticut when he was four years old, after President Carter expanded the Family Reunification Program. They had waited years to be allowed to join Art’s father, who was already working in a tool and die shop in Hartford. Art did not choose to be born in Communist Poland to Polish parents, who would speak their language to him, nor did he choose to switch to American kindergarten, where his teachers and peers taught him a new language. One is his history and culture; the other is his home. Why would a person want to choose? What actually changes with the ritual of citizenship? For Art, the biggest change would be the right to vote, but there was another, more amorphous shift that he hadn’t been willing to make until now.
The Belonging Barometer might be a beautiful metric, but I’m not sure it can explain the reasons that people feel patriotic or not, the reasons that people do or don’t want an official paper to define them, the reasons some wave a new flag with joy and some are content to remain strangers in a strange land.
7 The Belonging Barometer https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/the-belonging-barometer/ p 4
During his vision of God after King Uzziah dies, Isaiah laments the fact that he’s not worthy. In a moment reminiscent of Wayne and Garth meeting Alice Cooper, he cries, “I am a man of unclean lips!”
Then, an angel flies toward him with a hot coal between tongs. Isaiah writes, “With it he touched my mouth and said, ‘See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.’”8
The hot coal is the metaphor for mercy, or the antidote to “We’re not worthy!” These days, it’s baptism that represents atonement for sin. It’s the normative point of entry into Christianity. Sprinkled, poured, or dunked: whatever the method, a person must be washed in water during the sacrament of baptism, symbolizing that they have died and then been raised to a new life in Christ.
Vice President Vance, the same one who wants to say who gets to be an American and who doesn’t, was baptized in the Catholic church in 2019 after a lifetime meandering between evangelical Christianity and atheism. Some of his writing recounts his shift: “I slowly began to see Catholicism as the closest expression of [my grandmother’s] kind of Christianity: obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive.”9 Unless, I guess, those meek and poor are Haitian refugees in Ohio. Those people, he said, eat cats.
For Vance, the conversion to Catholicism happened incrementally, without an “ah-ha” moment. Book by book, encounter by encounter, he became convinced that he needed “to become Catholic, not merely to think about it.”10
People often make citizenship decisions in these same slow ways. One of my first cousins married a Filipino man who eventually obtained citizenship because of the depressing reality that he’d be paid more as an American. My cousin also encouraged him because she wanted them to both have an irrevocable right to live together in the same country.
Another cousin married a Honduran woman who obtained citizenship after eighteen years in the States. She did it because she’d had an H1 Visa for years and already felt like a citizen, and because she wanted to vote, and because it made traveling easier. She did it because she fell in love with my cousin and had a green card through their marriage, because she loves this nation, and because, she says, it was God’s plan.
Art was next in line. It happened incrementally. News story by news story, fear by fear, he became convinced that a green card was not sufficient to protect him in America 2025. He needed, in other words, to become an American, not merely to think about it.
Vance became a Catholic in a private ceremony, probably much like the one we held when Art wanted to baptize H as an infant. Just friends and family, a priest, and a sacrament. Our hillbillly Vice President probably received a certificate just as our daughter did. I don’t know what these types of papers mean. Oh, I know what they symbolize. But I don’t really know what they really are. Who is official, who is not? Who is legal, real, legitimate? What is irrevocable? Who belongs?
Vance writes that he worried a bit about the choice to convert. He worried until the voice of his dead grandmother rang in his ears, saying, eloquently, “Time to shit or get off the pot.”
Art worried, too. My mother offered to accompany him to the ceremony. He declined. “I want to be there by myself,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m doing it. The whole thing just makes me sad.”
On the drive to the hospital in the early morning, when I was thinking about King Uzziah and adenoids, H and I had been at a stoplight downtown, heading onto the parkway, and I saw a male pigeon mount a female pigeon. He was puffed up; she seemed annoyed. He stood atop her back, talons on her head, as she squished down onto the sidewalk. The whole act was over in seconds. I don’t know more than the average person about pigeon reproduction, but it looked like she was submitting begrudgingly, at best. Rolling her eyes at this forced ritual. I laughed, because her face made me think of Art.
The first 36 or so hours after the surgery, my daughter seemed sleepy and pain-free, but late the second day, the pain kicked in, and nobody was laughing. Sore throat, headache, earaches. The symptoms were especially bad in the mornings, when she would wake up and croak at me, “It hurts.” She was crying giant tears on the third day post-surgery. “Why did I have to do this? I wish I didn’t have to do this.”
The condition of her adenoids was not life-threatening, but I wanted to focus on why we chose to do it, rather than the fact that she didn’t really have to. “You’ll breathe so much better,” I told her. “You’ll sleep better. You won’t be congested so often.”
“But it hurts!” she sobbed.
“Sometimes we have to do hard things for a short time to make things better for a long time.” I compared it to flu shots and my own recent knee replacement. I did not compare it to becoming an American citizen. Regardless, she cried.
8 Isaiah 6:1-7 NIV
9 https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-i-joined-the-resistance
10 ibid.
As Emma Lazarus tells us in her 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus,” our American immigrants are welcomed by a woman, the Statue of Liberty, the Mother of Exiles.
When Art and his mother arrived in Connecticut in 1978, I can imagine that they were tired. Traveling across the ocean with a four-year-old would be tiring for anyone, immigrant or not. They were poor. Yearning to breathe free of Communist control.
America was not supposed to be a father who looked down his nose at their broken English. America was supposed to be a mother who gathered them to her home.
“The New Colossus” was mounted on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal in 1903, during a monumental, decades-long wave of immigration to the United States. Three years later, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a team of doctors removed the adenoids of a group of Eastern European immigrant students in Public School 110, en masse. Given medical understanding at the time, doctors were concerned that the adenoids were impeding the students’ breathing and thus learning, so they sent home permission slips (some of which parents signed with a letter X), and then they cut out the adenoids of 83 children in 88 minutes. The children were given ice cream to celebrate.
The relationship between the medical establishment and the immigrant community has often been fraught. Parents were not convinced that the procedure had been necessary, especially those parents whose kids returned from school with bloody mouths. Like a phrase in a game of telephone, the news of the adenoidectomies that June became garbled with each retelling, until many families in the crowded Lower East Side tenements were afraid that school officials were poised to slit their children’s throats. A Jewish mother from Poland at that time might have come to Manhattan to escape Russian persecution—the Białystok pogroms earlier that month had killed almost 100 residents, in fact, many women and children. It was not beyond reason to fear that the authorities might murder schoolchildren.
So, on June 28, the mothers revolted. Several thousand women marched on twelve public schools, throwing rocks and vegetables, and screaming for the children’s release. School staff were attacked, the police were called, someone pulled out a pistol, and the crowd calmed only when the children were brought outside so that their parents could see them whole and well and gather their babies to their arms. These were the Adenoid Riots of 1906.
It’s hard enough to see your kid operated on in a modern facility with minimal risk; I can’t imagine sending my child to school and worrying she might have her throat sliced open in a surgery we didn’t choose. I would have protested, too. Now, worrying that she might be huddled in the corner of her classroom with her friends while an American teen armed with an AR-15 swaggers down the halls of her school? That one I can imagine. Worrying that my daughter’s Mexican friends down the street will be playing hopscotch outside with their little dog when ICE comes to arrest their mom? That one I can also imagine.
For obvious reasons, my husband doesn’t go to any protests these days. But I do, given the endless number of worries in 2025. I take H with me. We make our own signs, and I try to explain what other people’s handmade signs mean, those colorful pleas and warnings.
Your ancestors were immigrants too
Protect kids not guns
Crush ICE Not Dreams
Keep hate out of healthcare
If Jesus returned, Trump would deport him
Stop tearing families apart
They’re almost like modern-day versions of the prophet Isaiah’s words: “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.”
I suppose these times are not as unprecedented as we think. There is always something to protest. Always someone powerful deciding what can be taken.
Always an us and a them.
Children’s Tylenol and Motrin are flavored like bubble gum or grape or whatever syrupy flavor will entice kids, but my daughter hated them. She’d wake up each morning feeling wretched—throat sore, mouth dry—but cried at the thought of swallowing the purple cup of pain reliever. One morning, H was particularly upset, and Art and I were trying to find ways to distract her. Our little dog Phil jumped on the bed.
“I know!” I said, “Phil loves to lick toes. How about he licks your feet while you gulp down the medicine? It’ll distract you.”
Art nodded and patted the mattress by H’s feet. “Yes! Come on, Phil.”
My daughter was smiling while we put four-pound-Phil next to her bare toes. But Phil wasn’t interested that day, no matter how many times we encouraged him.
“Okay, what if I lick your feet?”
H and Art stared at me. I wasn’t sure why I’d said it, but I reiterated my offer. “If I lick your big toe, will you swig this cup of Tylenol?”
H looked at me like I’d offered her a unicorn in exchange for a fart.
“Oh yes, I will,” she grinned.
I tried not to think of the cosmopolis of bacteria that were certainly living on her summer feet.
“On the count of three: one…two…three.”
She gulped down the whole dose of medicine, at the same time that I leaned over and stuck the tip of my tongue onto the bottom of her salty, grimy big toe.
Art was giving me a look that said, “I will never kiss you again.”
H was laughing wildly, and I ran to the bathroom to rinse out my mouth.
“Why did you do that, mama!?” she called to me.
“Because parents will do anything for their kids!” I called back.
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. Uzziah had become king when he was 16 years old, ruled like a champ, led the nation of Judah to prosperity, but then got a little too full of himself and was struck with leprosy by God as punishment. When he died, the nation was set adrift. In the midst of that turmoil, Isaiah had a vision of God on the throne and was called to serve as God’s messenger. He went on to prophesy the birth of Christ, write the book of Isaiah, and meet a painful end, possibly by being sawn in half. Unclear. Yet, the story of his vision is interpreted as a reminder that even in times when a nation is in freefall, some higher power is bigger than all of it.
This general sense of deference to a higher power was perhaps reflected in the Obama administration’s 2011 memo that formalized protections against ICE enforcement actions at “sensitive locations.” Arrests, interviews, searches, and surveillance were prohibited from occurring at schools, hospitals, public demonstrations, and institutions of worship. In 2021, the Biden administration issued a memo that expanded these protected areas to include sites such as crisis centers, playgrounds, food banks, graveside ceremonies—places people gather to find resources and community. Places where they find belonging. The guidance was not always followed, but in January of 2025, the Trump administration rescinded the entire policy regarding protected areas. Enforcement at such places would happen on a case-by-case basis.
Wilson Velásquez was one of the first people to be arrested at church. He and his family had left Honduras in 2022 to seek asylum in the United States. Velásquez had applied for a work permit, gotten a job at a tire shop in Atlanta, joined a church, and then helped start another congregation. He was in that church on January 26, 2025, when he was summoned by ICE and taken away from his wife and three children.
On June 11, 2025, a Latino man was detained in the parking lot of Downey Memorial Christian Church. The five men did not identify their agency, names, or badges, or show a warrant, but they did point a rifle at the pastor of the church as they put the man into an SUV with tinted windows.
Countless Christian individuals and congregations have provided refuge for immigrants. The Sanctuary Movement was founded in 1980 by two Quakers and a Presbyterian minister to aid Central American refugees with no legal documentation. The original movement dissolved and has been replaced with the current New Sanctuary Movement, which is a network of faith-based organizations—Lutheran, Catholic, Unitarian, Jewish, and more—who support immigrants threatened by deportation. These are the Mothers of Exile who gather the newcomers into their arms. If only this could be said of all religious practitioners.
Individuals at the final naturalization ceremony at USCIS have to show a letter proving that they have permission to be there. As if headed through airport security, Art emptied his pockets, took off his belt, walked through the metal detector, and showed his ID and letter. His green card, which USCIS refers to as an “alien” card, had to be handed over and put into a box. He was funneled into a glass-walled waiting room with the other immigrants, packed together like so many weary travelers.
Art doesn’t remember how many people were naturalized that day, but he guesses 50 or 60, maybe more. Maybe it was just a little fewer than the 83 immigrant students whose mass surgery sparked the Adenoid Riots of 1906. Thirty-six countries were represented. Paperwork had been filled out. Permission granted.
From the waiting room, applicants were ushered into the room where the ceremony would happen. Each seat was prepared with a manila envelope and an American flag. The group sat together and watched a video of Trump and a short documentary called “Faces of America.” Like a congregation in the church of the USA, they faced the same direction and sang God Bless America, and America the Beautiful, or maybe it was The Star-Spangled Banner—Art wasn’t sure, since the songs all sound kind of alike to him. And then, in unison, the newly minted citizens of the United States put their hands over their hearts and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.
I hope they felt the power of belonging rather than the sting of nebulous loss. I hope this choice felt like theirs.
And I hope that if they sang God Bless America, they sang all the verses.
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
After adenoids are removed, the back of the throat is white with scabs. These scabs smell like a rotten egg rolled in mothballs lying in a morgue. Art and I had to turn our faces to the side and gag each time H needed a hug after her surgery. The doctor estimated that the scabs would fall off in a week or so and assured us that this side effect was just part of the healing process. On day seven or eight, H was back at school—I’d sent her with a tin of Altoids and casually suggested that she chew them all day long. When I picked her up in the afternoon, she announced that the scabs were gone.
“I swallowed them,” she said, her face contorted into disgust. “I didn’t want to do that.”
It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder how they would fall off, but then I couldn’t imagine another way it could have gone.
“Will they hurt me?” she asked.
“No,” I guessed confidently. “Your body made them to help you heal, and now they’re done. I guess they’re where they belong. Totally fine.”
And just like that, the face-melting odor was gone.
The prior week at the oath ceremony, Art had met a gentleman from Afghanistan who had been a translator for the US in the Iraq War. This very chatty man took a picture of my husband once they were both official citizens. In the photo, Art is standing next to an American flag that’s taller than he is, in front of a poster that says “Celebrate Citizens, Celebrate America.” The Statue of Liberty photo on the poster is positioned at an angle that makes it look like she’s asking Art to smell her armpit. My husband’s hands are clasped in front of him in a way he rarely poses. He is smiling in the picture, even if begrudgingly. Maybe that’s because he’s got one extra layer around his life in Pittsburgh with his family. He did what he had to do. Maybe he feels like he belongs more now. Or maybe he has just a little more room to breathe.
"In the year that King Uzziah died" is a prepositional phrase acting as an adverbial modifier; it explains when “I saw the Lord.” Within that prepositional phrase is a dependent clause “that King Uzziah died,” which is a restrictive relative clause. What’s important about that, if you’re not reveling in the beauty of the sentence diagram itself, is that all parts before the comma need each other, and all work to make the rest of the sentence more meaningful. Following the comma, “I saw the Lord” is the independent clause, which is the only kind of clause that can stand alone.
Maybe the sentence should have started with “On the day that my husband became an American citizen.” Then that phrase would be the modifier working to make the rest of the sentence more meaningful. As in, on the day my husband sacrificed some sense of self, or shifted his status of belonging, or obtained whatever it is that citizenship bestows upon a human, on that same day, my daughter was taken care of by medical professionals whom we trusted, and who, with precision, removed one obstacle to her thriving, in a procedure paid for by the health insurance her father obtains through his work at an American company.
But I think my original syntax was right. On the day that my daughter’s adenoids were removed, my husband became an American citizen. Then the extraction of the adenoids is the modifier, somehow directing meaning. The angel flying toward my daughter with the hot coal between tongs, touching her mouth, removing the lazy adenoids. Are they even supposed to be here? On the day of this removal, my husband became an American citizen. He had decided on his own to do so, yet the choice felt forced. Some higher power got to choose who joined our national community, and in the end, they chose my husband, the “right” color person, to belong.
Irony, then, that the last part of the sentence is the independent clause. The only one that doesn’t need anything else to make it complete.
Life for immigrants is only going to get worse in the United States. The one Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in July of 2025 is a firehose of funds into ICE, which will now operate with more money than most countries’ military forces.11
More detention centers. More ICE agents. Fewer people with Temporary Protected Status. More people with lifetimes in the US, with families, with jobs, with myriad ways of belonging, whose lives will be upturned. And now a president threatening to deny green cards, to denaturalize those who aren’t sufficiently supportive of him, and even to revoke the citizenship of Americans born in the United States.
Art retains his Polish citizenship. But now he also has an 8.5x11 gilded certificate of US citizenship that costs $500 to replace if lost or damaged. He has filed it in a safe place. Although he relinquished his alien card, the certificate still contains his alien number. The immigration officer told him to cover that number if he held it up in the photos after the ceremony.
On paper, my husband belongs to two countries; in his heart, the math is less clear. He’s legally part of whatever this country has become, though. And the outcome he’s most excited about now is voting: a right and a privilege.
The Belonging Barometer study knew this would happen. Researchers found that a greater sense of national belonging was associated with support for democracy rather than a non-democratic government.12 Maybe this is the reason for hope. Maybe belonging is itself hope. In any case, researchers found that individuals who felt that they belonged in America were less likely to agree with the statement that “our democracy is beyond repair.”13
11 https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/mass-deportation-trump-democracy/
12 The Belonging Barometer https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/the-belonging-barometer/ p 38
13 The Belonging Barometer https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/the-belonging-barometer/ p 38
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