cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43460008
Abdellatif Hafraoui sits at a small dining table in the Bayonne apartment he shares with his wife, Sandra, sipping his morning coffee — a ritual unchanged over their 15 years of marriage.
Since August, however, that routine has been shadowed by months in ICE detention and the black ankle monitor now strapped around his leg.
…
The arrest forced Sandra to reconsider assumptions she had long held about immigration enforcement. “To think we were MAGA!,” Sandra proclaimed. The couple even attended a Trump rally in Las Vegas in 2020.
Sandra voted for Trump three times, believing enforcement would focus on people with criminal records — not individuals like her husband.
Asked what she would say to him now, she paused. “You said you were going after the worst of the worst, but instead you ruined our life,” she said.
These stories have a kind of surreal quality, like a Kafka novel. They feel fake because it’s difficult to imagine how a person could be this delusional. We explain our experience by generating an internal narrative and this woman’s narrative diverged from reality a very great deal while she watched fox news and then came crashing back in the form of a giant legal bill and an unemployed husband. Could have been much worse.