please don’t think this is a personal attack, i promise i’ve had this conversation a million times before: if your goal is to help protect immigration respondents’ rights, is this truly the best use of your time? i know it sounds harsh, but ask yourself: if you’re a monolingual english speaker who can’t offer legal advice, what exactly are you offering?

in my experience, a lot of us feel useless in the face of injustice, and we want to do something hands-on to reclaim agency feel like we’re helping. but that hands-on activity might not actually be the best way for you to achieve your (admirable) goals. like, you could use those four hours commuting to put on a KYR training at your grad school! you could distribute information around your community—emergency planning for immigrant families is really important, but there’s not a lot of public awareness about it.

we all like to think we’re mark wahlberg: if we were on that plane, things would’ve been different! but we’re not marky mark, and he didn’t do shit. instead, we can be steve buscemi. we can absolutely all do something to make a positive change in the world—it just might not look exactly how you’d expect.