Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

That morning, my phone pinged with a text message at 9:59 a.m. The sender, an immigrant rights leader, wrote, “Sorry to bother u on Sunday morning but we have an Iranian student detained at the airport. She goes to [a Georgia university] on a student visa. She’s going to be deported today.” Again, I quickly acknowledged the message and began calling Democrats in Georgia’s congressional delegation, and they agreed to help. Before they could intervene, though, the young woman was deported back to Iran, away from her studies and her friends. In Boston, in New York, across the country, similar deportations sent students, doctors, and others away from the lives they’d built here. All on the orders of an American president in the twenty-first century.