Dear President Trump,

Last night the illegal fireworks were relentless. They started around 7pm and went until at least 1am. Once they really got going there were long bursts of ten or fifteen rounds every five minutes and there were more different types of scary, percussive sounds than any of us can remember ever hearing before. At one point a blast was so close and so strong it shook the house. Our dogs were completely freaked out.

As I lay in bed willing myself not to get crazy angry, I thought about how I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be in Syria living through real bombardments. How can people cope with that kind of situation at all? What is happening to the surviving children there? With our firework situation the only real dangers were to those setting them off and the possibility of a stray spark starting a brush fire. Even though it felt assaultive, no one was actually trying to harm anyone. So really, it was nothing.

What is something is what’s going on in Syria and dozens of other countries every day where large swaths of those populations are in mortal danger of being caught in warring factions’ crossfire. And what is something is that we are actively, cruelly barring virtually all those people from seeking refuge here. What is something else is that we are actively, cruelly sending people back to their unlivable, mortally dangerous homelands and now we are keeping their children hostage here.

I learned today that you’ve added two more strategies to your repertoire for making immigrants’ lives hellish: 1) discharging immigrants from the military and revoking the promise of citizenship they’d counted on, and 2) forming a denaturalization taskforce to hunt through millions of naturalized citizens’ paperwork to find any you can say lied or made a mistake on their applications.

What is wrong with you? It’s like you are hell bent on becoming Al Qaeda’s best recruiter. Are you getting kickbacks and finder’s fees? You must have your minions working overtime to come up with these things. Seriously, is whatever Vladimir is promising you really worth all this?

May we see that your America-first crap is making us far less safe.
May we be happy (or at least willing) to see that people would prefer to stay in their homes.
May we get that they are weighing unthinkable contingencies about their family’s health and well-being in deciding whether to stay or go.
May we stop adding to the conflict and strife.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson