Leading up to graduation each year, comically large white tents begin to populate Yale’s campus. It’s a departure from the otherwise gothic architecture that Yale had become known for, the campus changing as the community prepares to bid farewell to its newest soon-to-be graduates.
Perhaps it’s because my graduating class was kicked off campus halfway through our freshman year due to the pandemic, but my time at Yale was marked by having to move on to the next class year before feeling completely ready. When choosing classes for my sophomore fall while debating whether to stay pre-med, I remember joking that I felt like I still needed my first-year counselor.
A new school year marked the beginning of the same pilgrimage: marveling at the empty fireplace mantel and the white walls of a vacant room but slowly growing acquainted with the space, filling it with English seminar books, House of Naan receipts, and vintage postcards I’d found at EBM Vintage. I built up spaces and routines, only for them to be ripped away. A few months later, I had to build a new world—new dorm, new friends, new love interests.
The night after commencement, we all gathered under the large white tent in the center of the Davenport courtyard for the “Davenport Cry:” where all seniors rallied together to imbibe all of their unfinished alcohol from the previous year. Taught to make the most out of every opportunity, the night felt oddly hedonistic as we binged potential futures—reopening the door to lost connections, making amends with people we judged too quickly during first year. We’d set up our homes in college, and this was the final night before we’d lose access to home and the people who made it so.
Because after leaving, we’d be stripped of the shared “college student” identity that connected us. While there was the new-found joint identity of being recent graduates that now united us, the identity felt more fractured as we started our real adult lives scattered all over the world.
The next afternoon, as I brought the last Ziploc Storage tote into my Mom’s car, I went back to my dorm’s entryway where I tapped the back of my phone—which held my yellowing college ID—to the card reader. The small LED light flashed red; I gave the door a quick tug.
Nothing.
I turned back, retracing the same steps I’d taken through Cross Campus over the last four years, and I walked back to the car to return to West New York.
A few weeks ago—at around 8 am—ICE agents apprehended a Hispanic male on 61st Street and Harrison Place.1 I lived three blocks away while I was in high school.
The video captures the lead-up to the raid from behind a living room window. There are federal police officers in green tactical vests standing behind the back doors of a white van. It’s nearly silent except for the soft chirp of birds. The video zooming in, we see the expressions of the officers. Blurry from behind the window pane, there’s a rehearsed solemnity on their faces.
As I rewatch the video, I search for a moment where I can see their humanity—perhaps their expression breaking as they prepare to remove a man from his home. One federal agent bows her head a bit, and I take that to mean that she feels remorse. Maybe I imagined it; I hope I didn’t.
Witnessing the forced removal of undocumented people from my community, I am reminded of Hannah Arendt—a Jewish humanist and scholar who lived through Nazi Germany. After moving to New York City, she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism where she detailed some of the causes of Nazism and Stalinism. Within her book, she describes how one of the methods used to facilitate a culture of nationalism is through the creation of the “alien”—an individual who exists in the outside world.2
In designating someone as an outsider, there is a boundary created. This boundary—one that has been arbitrarily drawn—also implicitly designates someone else as the insider. As increasingly more individuals are cast away as outsiders and aliens, a tangible boundary is created and reinforced: the schism between insider and outsider. Those who are considered insiders consecrate their bonds through the habitual expulsion of the outsider.
Eight years ago, when Trump was last elected, I remember hearing the sniffles of students in the hallways as I walked to Mr. Argondizza’s US History I Honors class. A few months later, after a rumor that ICE agents would be raiding our high school, many students chose not to come to school. ICE never came, but the hallways—where students played reggaeton on Bluetooth speakers as they walked from class to class—were eerily quiet.
While I am not directly worried about my own safety when it comes to being deported, I feel the effects of deportation reverberate in my community. Once known for the sound of dembow as cars race down Bergenline Avenue and the sight of grandmothers leaning out their front porches as they gossip loudly with one another, one of the most densely populated towns in the country now feels somber.
People are scared; it doesn’t feel like home.
Thinking of the current state of politics, I can’t help but return to Arendt and her description of the alien: “a frightening symbol [… that] indicates those realms in which man cannot change […] and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy.”3 In their existence, the alien cannot be controlled by those who exist within the boundary. Because they are cast away, the outsider is no longer within the grasp of the insider. Ideologically, this offers the outsider a sense of autonomy, as it threatens the power of hegemonic structures. This autonomy of the other is a threat to a controlling government. Thus, according to the tyrannical leader, the outsider must be eradicated. Through this violence, power is maintained.
Henry David Thoreau was an American naturalist and philosopher, known for moving to Walden Pond—near Concord, Massachusetts—and living in a small cabin for two years that he’d built himself. Writing in the mid-19th Century, he was an abolitionist who thought a lot about civil disobedience and the role it plays within American politics. In his essay “Walking,” Thoreau meditates on his relationship to walking and the outdoors, asking readers to reconsider our concepts of the “wild” as a space where we must “acknowledge the autonomy and otherness of the things and creatures around us.”4 He and Hannah Arendt share the same sentiment as they discuss the role of the “wild” and the “alien”—spaces that are external to our immediate surroundings and the people who inhabit them.
When I think of the wild, I cannot untether it from my relationship to the outdoors. I think about high school cross country practices in the late morning August heat when we ran down the narrow gravel paths of Garret Mountain Reservation but were forced to stop when a deer blocked the way. Sometimes I think about the small grey fox that Laurel and I saw on our first day of backpacking through the Smoky Mountains—or a few hours later as dusk approached and we heard the soft huffing of bears as they scampered off the trail.
Yet, the outdoors is more than public lands or a trail—“for wildness (as opposed to wilderness) can be found anywhere.”5 I experience wildness as I step out of my apartment and onto the sidewalk, and I see the small oak tree growing on a plot on the sidewalk and the weeds sprouting from the neighbor’s front porch. I experience wildness as I sit down with a cortado at the local coffee shop and the barista offers me a small plate of blueberries after we talk about dealing with seasonal depression. For wildness exists external to me and it exists with all things that I have no agency over. I see wildness when Circe—my cat—curls up under my Berkeley College blanket while I read a book, and I see it as the boiling pasta water overflows onto the stovetop, leaving behind a grey starchy residue on the pot.
Our body is our home—it is all we will ever have control over.
But what happens if you lose that control, feeling the control ripped from you, as an ICE agent handcuffs you and pulls you into their van as your neighbor records from behind a living room window? What happens as you are transported against your will and as your body yearns and heaves to go home? What happens as you’ve been objectified by the law—when it feels like you’ve lost your personhood? Has your body become wild unto itself? Have you lost the very home that you were promised you’d never lose?
To be ripped from your home, to have your body reduced to an object of the law, is to be cast into wildness—made foreign in a place that was always yours. In moments like these, I like to think that wildness does not necessarily mean emptiness. It can be a promise—one that exists beyond the insider’s grasp. It is a force for change and a threat to the borders drawn to contain it.
“ICE Activity in West New York Amid New Executive Order,” HudPost, February 17, 2025.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951), 301.
Ibid.
Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 1862
Ibid.
I wonder how we can examine this idea of wilderness with common racist tropes of depicting POCs as savages or untamed or wild or themselves. This idea of “the other” historically has been tied with wilderness so lots of really interesting thoughts here in a rather scary time
Everything feels like being ripped out of stability too soon