Save this story for later.
On August 31, 2019, Nadia, a stoic thirty-nine-year-old in pigtails, heard a voice through a loudspeaker on a vehicle circling the Mudd, her tranquil neighborhood in the Bahamas. “Seek shelter!” the voice said. For days, Nadia’s two sons, aged six and ten, had been watching news reports about an incoming storm called Hurricane Dorian, which broadcasters warned would cause historic destruction on the islands. “Mom, a big one’s coming,” Nadia’s ten-year-old, a skinny, bright-eyed math whiz named Kesnel, said. “We’d better board up the windows.” The next day, as the storm descended, Nadia and her sons ran to a local church for refuge. Water rushed over the chapel’s floorboards and rose past the children’s knees. Nadia wished that she could have fled the Bahamas before Dorian hit, but, like several thousands of her fellow-Haitians living there, she was undocumented, and wouldn’t have been allowed to return. (To protect them from gover
Cartoon by Liana Finck
In the fall of 2017, Guttentag assembled a group of law students in a wood-panelled room at Yale. He proposed creating a communally sourced database of every change that Trump made to the immigration system. âSo many things have happened in year one of Trump that are already receding from our memory, because weâre looking at the latest disaster,â he said. âIf we donât keep track, it will take a new Administration years just to unearth everything thatâs happened.â They called it the Immigration Policy Tracking Project. Guttentag hoped that the database would prove useful to whoever succeeded Trump. âGoing forward, weâre going to capture everything,â he told the team. âSomeday weâll need a road map for reversing all this damage.â