Just down the road in Dalton, a young woman named Ximena Arias-Cristobal was recently pulled into the machinery of a federal immigration system that is less interested in safety and far more invested in cruelty.
Ximena is a 19-year-old college student. She has lived in the United States since she was four years old, essentially her entire life. Her arrest was a mistake. She poses no threat to her community. Yet now, despite public outcry (in her deeply conservative town, no less!) and no history of criminal behavior, she is danger of being removed from the country she has called home her whole life.
To be clear, Ximena is not a criminal. She is not a danger to her neighbors. She is, in fact, everything America claims to value: hardworking, hopeful, and committed to building a better future through education. But none of that matters to a regime that has made clear, over and over again, that humanity is not its concern. The rule is not safety. The rule is pain.
The Trump administration’s immigration policies were not shaped by a coherent national security strategy. They were shaped by a desire to punish and dehumanize. From the very beginning, when candidate Trump descended his gilded escalator and declared Mexican immigrants to be rapists and criminals—cruelty was not the side effect. It was the point.
Deporting Ximena doesn’t make America safer. It doesn’t deter future migration. It simply inflicts pain on a young woman and sends a message to millions of others: you do not belong. It’s the same message encoded in the grotesque social media behavior of the Trump administration—memes mocking immigrants, gleeful photos of ICE raids, the boastful tone of press releases highlighting the detention of parents and students. These weren’t sober updates on national security. They were celebratory moments for an administration that has made cruelty its brand.
Ximena’s story is not an anomaly. It is a symptom of a larger moral disease—a system designed to break people, not protect them. And it raises a deeper question for the rest of us: what kind of country do we want to be?
I am hopeful that in the future, as a nation we will have regained our collective sanity and compassion. In that future, your grandchild may sit at your feet and ask you about this shameful era of U.S. history.
“What did you do when they were taking people like Ximena away?” You will have to answer. You will have to decide whether you stood by in silence or raised your voice. Whether you accepted the cruelty or pushed back against it.
History is watching. And so are future generations.
When the time comes to tell your story, which side will you say you were on?
Walker Rhodes