This is a story I have been sitting on since last Tuesday. It is impossible to make sense of what has happened here locally.

I do not personally know the young woman or her family, but hearing this family’s story on WSOC-TV in Charlotte stopped me in my tracks. I have not been able to get the report off my mind.

Her family fled violence in Honduras in 2013 when Allison Bustillo was eight years old. They found a home in North Carolina. Allison studied hard. No one in the family ever broke the law, except for staying in the United States without proper documentation.

Allison wants to be a nurse. At 20 years old, she was studying nursing on a scholarship at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, until February 2025 – the day ICE agents showed up at her house. They were looking for someone who did not live there but, in the process, they took Allison from her home. This was traumatic for her family, which includes her brother who is on the autism spectrum.

Allison was taken 350 miles from her home to the ICE Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. She tried to get released. She had broken no laws. She had been brought into the United States as an eight-year-old child.

The Stewart Detention Center is operated by CoreCivic. CoreCivic contracted with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to operate the prison, which has an official capacity of 1,752 inmates.

The ICE agents who arrested Allison Bustillo did not have to identify themselves. They didn’t have to show a badge or an identification. They didn’t have to show their faces. But Allison Bustillo was not allowed those privileges, so without warning or due process she was taken from her home and placed in a federal detention center hundreds of miles from her family.

But no one in the Trump Administration cared. Not even after her family secured the services of an attorney.

One of the ironies is that Allison was not eligible for voluntary deportation, but she was stuck in that detention center for six months. Imagine! Six months!

Her attorney was finally able to get permission for her to leave the detention center and leave the country without a deportation order. She will board (or already has boarded) a commercial flight to Honduras. Alone.

A 20-year-old nursing student returning to the country she fled 12 years ago as a child whose family sought a safe life.

Allison’s mother said, “The only memory my daughter has of Honduras is when someone put a gun to our heads.”

Here is a link to the local news report I saw last Tuesday, in case it is still accessible: https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/shelby-woman-forced-leave-us-after-months-ice-custody/RLPE6QKWOVGLXC6KHNEXT2Q5OU/.

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My thoughts

I am embarrassed to be an American in 2025.

Trump was elected partly because he promised to get the illegal alien criminals out of our country. Perhaps some of the people who voted for him thought he would use legal means to accomplish that. Perhaps they thought he would only remove the hardened criminals.

They were horribly mistaken.

He has repeatedly said that only “the worst of the worst criminals” will be arrested and deported. That is a lie. Plain and simple.

A case in point is the Guatemalan minor children he tried to deport in the middle of the night this weekend. Fortunately, a judge put a stop to that. Trump needs to understand that even an undocumented child from Guatemala has the right to due process in the United States of America.

What happened to “Give me your tired, your poor… your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” that the high school chorus used to sing?

What happened to “the land of the free and the home of the brave” from our national anthem? We have failed our national anthem this year… or, I suppose we failed it on election day last November. I don’t think I can sing it anymore.

What happened to the Republican Party?

What happened to common decency?

What happened to my country?

God, help us!

Janet