Jailed
Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash
Mis amigos,
I am writing to you from a detention cell in Guatemala City. I am here not because I committed a crime. I was taken from the only country I have ever called home.
I write not to solicit pity but to demand recognition. I write because silence, in the face of injustice, is complicity.
I arrived in the United States as a child and grew up there. I learned the Pledge of Allegiance before I knew the name of the country I was born in. I paid taxes, volunteered in my community, raised children, and believed in the promise of equal justice under the law. I did everything that was asked of me. Still, I was taken.
I was detained in the dead of night. There was no hearing. No lawyer. No evidence was presented or challenged. Just handcuffs and the machinery of a system designed not to evaluate but to erase. My name was placed on a list. My humanity was not.
I sit in a prison cell in a country I barely know, among strangers who speak a dialect I can’t fully understand. I have been harassed. I have been assaulted. I have been made to feel foreign everywhere, belonging nowhere.
To those who say, “Why didn’t you just follow the rules?” I say, I tried. I filed forms. I paid the fees. I waited years.
To those who say, “Change takes time,” I say time is a luxury I no longer have. Families are being torn apart in real-time. People are vanishing from classrooms, courtrooms, and workplaces into cells like this one.
There is a myth that the law is neutral. But the law, as it currently stands, serves the powerful and punishes the vulnerable. There is no due process when the process itself is broken. There is no justice in a system that decides your fate before you speak.
My story is not unique. My cell is crowded with people like me, and thousands more are locked in places far from any map of American conscience.
What was taken from me was not just my freedom but my belonging. I was told I did not deserve to stay, but I am still here, and I will not be quiet.
I ask you to speak for those who cannot. Demand hearings, fairness, and humanity. Not later, but now.
Dr. King once wrote from his jail cell in Birmingham: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." I carry those words with me, scratched into the back of my mind like scripture. They remind me that I am not asking for anything extraordinary. I am asking for the most ordinary thing imaginable: to be seen.
And to be heard.
JN
Richard Bryant
The Rev. Richard Bryant is an elder in the North Carolina Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished with permission from his blog "Elevate the Discourse."