Dear President Biden,
My name is Illimani Ferreira and I am a Green Card holding immigrant currently living in your home state of Delaware.
I immigrated to the United States from Brazil in order to share a life with my husband. In the four and a half year I’ve been living in the US, I had the chance to enjoy a happy private life despite a public sphere that made me feel undesirable and unsure about what kind of engagement or positive input I could offer to American society, fueled by the toxic rhetoric and dismantling of the immigration institutions carried on by your predecessor’s administration. The conditions that ensured my stay in this country felt flimsy. The witnessing of men, women and even children being treated like animals by the American government for the sole reason of seeking existential realization through residence in this country – like I did – depressed me. One of the outlets for such existential pain was through my writing, through which I attempt to use Science-Fiction to investigate, among other pressing social issues, the ordeal of the failing and unfair American immigration system.
I am aware that, in the current social landscape, being allowed to write fiction is the product of a certain privilege that has been denied to other immigrants, particularly those who are being held by ICE and submitted to inhuman conditions of detention that are more akin to a Police State than to a Democratic Republic. I was happy to see your campaign, last year, promising to tackle the most immoral operational aspects of the Department of Homeland Security, such as the detention of migrant families and their subsequent separation. However, it is with great disappointment that I’ve been noticing a suboptimal result on this front since your administration started.
To fulfill the need to be part of this society, I need this society to respect and value the sheer humanity of people like me: as a green card holder I am no less an immigrant or human than an undocumented person.
For these reasons, it’s urgent that your administration and the Democrats in Congress stick to your promise to carry out immigration reform, end family detention by ICE, reunite separated families and hold the Trump administration, including their operators, accountable for their brutal human rights violations.
Respectfully,
Mister Illimani Ferreira
Rehoboth Beach, DE
This letter was written as part of Raices Texas’ Keep the Promise campaign to urge the current administration to stick to their campaign promises regarding Immigration. If you’d like to do your part to hold the Biden administration accountable on that matter, feel free to write your own letter here. The letters will be sent at the end of June.
Illimani Ferreira 