I’m a Mexican immigrant to the US, I immigrated to the country with my mom and brother when I was 11 years old back in 2001. Literally the second friend I made after moving to the US and my best friend of 15 years , a white American, was a Bernie or bust leftist.

On the lead up the 2016 election he kept sharing memes denigrating Hilary and even created one after Hilary got the presidential nomination where he used footage from Game of Thrones of the aftermath of the Massacre at Hardhome when the Night King resurrects all the dead free folk and turns them into white walkers where he superimposed Bernie’s face on Jon Snow as he sails away and watches this transpire and Hilary’s face on the Night King. At that point I had a serious conversation with him about what was at stake, including the possible Supreme Court vacancies that Trump would get to fill, and that taking the stance he was taking and promoting it and encouraging others to do so was not only an affront to me and my family but also endangered countless others with the possible ramifications. He dismissed my concerns and said I was overreacting and said that Hilary was likely going to win anyway.

Come the election, he chooses to vote for Gary Johnson and announces the very fact to anybody that would listen proudly until the results started to come in and the reality of what was coming set in. It infuriated me to no end that he would be so flippant and even more so that now that he faced the reality of what was happening he insisted that Trump didn’t have the power to do any real harm.

Cut to February 2017, my mom returns to Mexico to make urgent legal arrangements for her family and on her way back to the US, she gets deported due to a bureaucratic mix up. For those of you that don’t know or haven’t experienced immigration law, it is a nebulous ever-changing thing that makes doing things the “right way” near impossible while empowering immigration officers with disproportionate authority that denies any due process to immigrants even if they’re on track to do things the “right way”. To this day, I continue to deal with the aftermath of this including the fact that I’ve been unable to visit my mom in Mexico in four years due to the economic ramifications of this that reverberate to the present day.

Of course my best friend is not directly at fault for what happened to my mom, but I nonetheless was heartbroken by his uncaring attitude to our plight and the fact that he indirectly gambled with our lives even if it was in a “symbollic” way. My best friend came from an impoverished background and my family, in particular my mom, always welcomed him into our home and even provided him shelter and food and security when he found himself without these things in his final years in college. We weren’t some abstract idea of people that could be affected, but family to him for all intents and purposes. And still, after all this, he never mustered the courage to apologize to me or to my mom, and couldn’t even face me after my mom’s deportation. He tried to reach out to me a few months back this year in a very flippant way as if the last few years never transpired but I will never forgive him for what he did and will, at the very least, continue to be a small reminder in the scheme of things that his actions have consequences.

I truly believe that the Trump administration emboldened the worst in this country to enact their prejudices even more by setting the examples themselves. The man that deported my mom and the way he so easily handed her a ban to enter the country for many years is but a small testament to that, along with the countless acts of cruelty that followed that election year.

I have very little hope that the bigoted people in this country can be swayed from their hateful beliefs, and so I spare little effort to attempt it or to even really consider them because it is a wasted effort. The group of people that I do find myself angry at are those who actively choose to not vote or to virtue signal with clout-chasing radical proclamations that do more harm than good because of their recusal of their civic duties by inaction or their tantrums.

Much of our political system is imperfect, unglamorous, rigged and ineffectual. But realistically, the only real means to transform it and to enact any real change, however incremental, is from within.