It’s hard to understand the coldness I see in so many of my fellow citizens. People speak of deportation as though it were housekeeping, as if families could simply be swept away without consequence. They call them lawbreakers. They use the word illegal like a period at the end of empathy. Yet many of these people have lived here for decades. They’ve worked, paid taxes, built lives. Their children are citizens. Their roots are deep. But to so many Americans, none of that matters. What matters is that, at some distant point in time, they crossed a border unlawfully.