On the day that my daughter’s adenoids were removed, my husband became an American citizen. H was nine years old, and her enlarged adenoids were blocking 75% of her nasal airway, enough that the surgeon recommended removal. Art was a 51-year-old Polish green card holder who had lived in the States since kindergarten, but the 2025 political climate was threatening enough that he felt compelled to secure his status.
My husband had no choice about the date of the final ceremony. He was instructed to show up on the same Tuesday of the adenoidectomy. We wanted to be with him, and he wanted to be with us. But instead, that morning, at the same hour on a hot August day, a surgeon guided a heated wire through my daughter’s mouth to cauterize and remove tissue while my husband put his hand over his heart to recite the Pledge of Allegiance on the other side of Pittsburgh.
For reasons known only to my neurons, on the drive to the hospital, I thought of a sermon I’d heard in a nearby Episcopal church roughly 30 years prior. The pastor was a pale, egg-headed man whom I imagined as a more robust Arthur Dimmesdale. From his pulpit raised above the congregation, the distance amplified by his own tallness, he preached long, tedious sermons, about which I remember nothing. Except for one. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.” This verse from the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament was his text one morning. He also preached about five or so verses that followed, but his main thrust was on that first line, which he recited at least six times. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.” Maybe that rhetorical tack was the reason the sentence lodged in my brain. I don’t know. Maybe the story, which is about the prophet Isaiah guiding a nation in turmoil, felt timely. I don’t think it was as logical as all that. But somehow, as I thought about my daughter and husband’s unusual pairing of events that day, the sentence structure echoed. On the day that my daughter’s adenoids were removed, my husband became an American citizen. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.
Nobody wanted to be doing what they were doing on surgery-citizenship day. My daughter was scared of pain. She didn’t see why her chronic mouth breathing was a problem, but her ENT doctor and her orthodontist did. Art (Artur Tadeusz) was proud of his Polish heritage, content to be the permanent resident he’d been for years, and glad to hold an E.U. passport. But after Trump’s inauguration in January of 2025, he had also been reading almost daily about immigrants being arrested, denied entry, or removed to detention centers without due process.
“At least Art is the ‘right’ color,” people dismissed us with knowing air quotes. “He doesn’t have to worry.”
He did worry.
On March 7, 2025, a permanent resident named Fabian Schmidt returned from a 10-day trip to see his family in Germany when Customs and Border Protection agents detained him at the airport. He was the “right”/white color and completely fluent in English (and three other languages). His family had moved to the States when he was 16, and he’d held a green card since he was a teenager. He was not released from detention for 58 days.1
In that same month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “No one has a right to a green card.”2 While technically true, since the status is a privilege rather than a right, his statement was jarring, especially, I’m guessing, for the 12.8 million green card holders in the United States.
The next day, Vice President Vance opined that green card holders did not have an “indefinite right to be in the United States of America, right?” He mused to a Fox News reporter, “…who do we as an American public decide who gets to join our national community? And if the Secretary of State and the President decide, ‘This person shouldn’t be in America, and they have no legal right to stay here,’ it’s as simple as that.”3
Legally, it is not as simple as that, but then again, after Trump was inaugurated in January, legality seemed a less useful distinction. So, Art filed the documents for citizenship in March, and he was given an appointment to appear at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to jump through his first hoop in June.
1 https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2025/06/17/he-thought-a-decade-old-misdemeanor-was-behind-him-then-he-took-a-vacation-in-europe/
2 https://www.state.gov/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-remarks-to-press
3 https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/22/us/green-card-visa-holders-deportation-fears-cec
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