on ICE and worries and feeling not enough but saying things anyway

I grab my phone and look at news. I see headline after headline with new rising numbers of ICE detainees, many of whom are American citizens. I open Instagram. I see post after post of new and horrifying ways ICE is terrorizing these same citizens and those trying to protect them. It is hard to escape current events, not that I want to escape them entirely, but breaks are healthy.

I vacillate between posting, witnessing, attempting to create anything even if it’s irrelevant to the news, resting. I try not to beat myself up for not being good at something. I try to be realistic about my capacity to all of these things. I make myself sick with new and interesting symptoms trying to decide where to put my efforts.

I keep thinking back to when I was in high school and learning about WWII and dumbfounded about how anyone could have allowed it to happen. I think about learning about the civil rights era and how I was so sure I knew what I would do if I were alive then. Then I start thinking about all the gaps still in my learning about US History and how little I knew until only a few years ago.

I think about how the last 5 to 6 years for me have been relearning how our country was really founded (read: stolen) and how the violence abroad that I was taught in high school was actually just a replication of the way the United States treated indigenous populations, the stolen populations of Black Americans, and all immigrants that attempted to come here and achieve the White American Dream.

I have little aptitude to remember the specifics of history: dates, names, chronology. It all blurs together. Most of my last 5-6 years of study has been relearning things I already read in the hope that I could remember these things. BUT the themes that have remained clear are:

1. The United States has gone to great lengths to control the narrative public school students are taught.

2. The United States basically wrote the playbook for genocide.

3. There will always be people who would rather not learn or be reminded that what they were taught was inaccurate.

4. Privilege is a hell of a drug.

5. The goal is to overwhelm the populace so they are too frozen to act. Every time. At every stage in history.

I am watching, in real time, as the United States government, under the guidance of the Trump administration, militarizes a hyper-violent army of so-called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in what appears to be an effort to clear the streets of anyone they don't like.

According to this CBS News article published on January 16, 2026 "ICE was holding about 73,000 individuals facing deportation in its custody across the country, the highest level recorded by the agency and an 84% increase from the same time in 2025, when its detention population hovered below 40,000, the internal statistics show." Trump's goal was 100,000 detainees by this time and he doesn't seem to be slowing down. This is just one of many articles explaining the publicly available government data showcasing ICE's horrific surge in detaining civilians.

I open Instagram and am easily flooded with account after account sharing first hand accounts of ICE in their neighborhoods, their schools, their homes. I've given myself migraines trying to stay informed (not only from social media).

It is easy to freeze. To turn off my phone and pretend it's not going to reach me. But it will and it has and I refuse to let the United States government or Trump's regime silence me. So I may not know what to say or how to act, I may hesitate as my pen hovers above my sketchbook and be at a loss of how to make art at a time like this, my voice might shake while I'm on the phone in an attempt to make any sort of difference in my world, and I for sure will not be perfect in my actions, but I will say *something* ANYTHING rather than sit in silence and just watch this happen.

I keep pulling on reiki to hold me up and keep me centered so I can witness. Some days that's more than I can do. I call on reiki to give me strength to get the words out. To share the resources. To be at all visible in this fight, even in what feels like minuscule ways. I send reiki to the areas of highest unrest to support those who can physically act. I use the resources I have to contribute and I build myself up and continue to search for more ways I can help.

I don't even know if this writing makes any sense. I don't even care anymore. I keep staring at an empty document caught between the voices saying it won't matter and the voices saying anything helps. At the end of the day I live by my silly little philosophy and I'll be damned if a silly little guy sits idly by and just lets the bad guy tell them what to do.

So I don't have any answers. I don't have a call to action. I don't know what I'll do about it tomorrow. But today I'm publishing my words, my thoughts, and maybe someone will read them and know its okay to not know what to do but that doing something is better than doing nothing.