American Woke Nightmare

Masked protesters confront ICE deportation terror in Trump's America—where citizenship means nothing and brown bodies disappear behind American flags.

This morning I woke in a sweat. My body shivering. Caught in a nightmare that felt like prophecy.

The shock didn’t come from the dream itself. It came after—when my racing heart slowed and I realized none of it had happened. That realization should have brought relief. Instead, it settled in my chest like a stone.

My subconscious is a dark country these days. My mind threatening to split open. Life is doing what life does. But this nightmare was different. It didn’t fade with the morning light. It clung to my skin like smoke, like my body was trying to speak a truth my waking mind refused to hear.

The dream started where all my dreams start now: on stage.

My solo show. The one I’ve been bleeding over for months. Every word a wound turned to art. Every gesture a testimony. The show was flying—better than flying. The audience breathed when I breathed, laughed when I needed them to laugh, went silent when I needed them to break. I could feel them holding space for my truth.

When I walked out the stage door, family and fans waited. Their faces bright. Proud. I was smiling so hard my face hurt. This was it. The blood, the sweat, the years of being told I was too much and not enough—all of it had paid off.

Then the truck pulled up.

It cut through the crowd like a knife through water. Masked men emerged moving with that particular efficiency that turns blood to ice. The kind of efficiency that says: we’ve done this before.

My heart dropped. Confusion flooded my chest so fast I couldn’t breathe. What is happening?

They asked for my ID.

I didn’t have it. Who brings their wallet to a stage door? But I had pictures on my phone—passport, driver’s license, all the papers that are supposed to matter. I held up the screen with shaking hands, trying to stay calm, trying to be compliant, trying to be one of the good ones.

It didn’t matter.

The violence came quick. They shoved me down. My face met concrete. I heard my fans screaming. Heard phones clicking, recording, trying to capture proof of something that shouldn’t be happening. Someone shouted, “He didn’t do anything! He’s an actor! He just finished a show!”

The men didn’t care.

They kicked. They dragged. They treated me like I was nothing. Like my art meant nothing. Like my humanity was a lie I’d been telling myself.

They threw me into the back of a van. I hit the metal floor hard. The cold bit through my clothes. I was crying—not the pretty crying you see in movies, but the kind that rips through your chest, that makes you sound like an animal. I had just been on stage. Just been celebrated. Just been seen.

And now I was in chains.

Like my ancestors before me on slave boats crossing an ocean they didn’t choose.

The masked men laughed in the front seat. The slurs came easy. “F**t.” “Spic.” “Brown n*a.” Each word surgical. Designed to strip away personhood. To reduce a human being to waste. To something that doesn’t belong.

I tried to breathe. My lungs wouldn’t open. Panic wrapped around my throat. I wasn’t in flow anymore. I was drowning on dry land.

When they finally pulled me out, the smell hit first.

Sweat. Fear. Desperation. The particular scent of terror in an enclosed space.

Then I saw the bodies.

A hundred of them. Brown like me. Packed into a cell that couldn’t hold twenty. Families. Children. Elders. People whose only crime was existing in the wrong skin. In the wrong America.

That’s when I understood: ICE.

They’d come for me.

“I’m legal!” I screamed it. My voice cracking, desperate. “I was born here! My mother was born here! My grandmother—my great-grandmother—we go back!”

The laugh that came back was worse than the slurs.

It said: your papers don’t matter here. Your lineage is a fairy tale. You were never really American. You were just visiting.

The conditions weren’t conditions. They were designed cruelty. No beds. No privacy. Just bodies breathing recycled air. Sharing the same terror. My bougie ass had never known this kind of powerlessness. But in that cell, we were all the same. All somebody’s child. All somebody’s dream.

My whole life, I’ve been ethnically ambiguous. A quarter Puerto Rican, a quarter white, the rest Black American. Black AF-always first and foremost. I could fit so many molds. During 9/11, I feared walking through airports, bracing for the extra checks, the extra questions. My face could be mistaken for Middle Eastern, and I watched what happened to people who looked like they might be Muslim—the profiling, the discrimination, the suspicion. My face has always been whatever threat they needed it to be that day. A chameleon of their hatred. But in that cell, none of that mattered anymore. The ambiguity that once felt like protection became just another layer of erasure.

All just numbers now.

Time stopped meaning anything in that darkness.

Could have been days. Could have been weeks. Then they came for me again. Dragged me to a car. Then a plane. A bag over my head the entire flight. Like I was a hostage. Like I was the threat.

When the plane landed, they shoved me forward. My legs barely held me. Then they ripped the bag off.

Sunlight exploded across my vision. I blinked, trying to see, trying to understand.

Venezuela.

The cruelty of it didn’t register at first. Just confusion. Why here? I’d never lived in Venezuela. Had no family there. No home. No history. Then I remembered what I’d seen on the news before the nightmare started. Trump talking about “running Venezuela.” About sending U.S. oil companies to “spend billions of dollars” taking control of the country’s oil. About “taking out a tremendous amount of wealth” and getting “reimbursement” for what Venezuela allegedly stole from America.

The irony cut through me like glass.

They’d deported me—a U.S. citizen—to a country the U.S. was actively colonizing. To a place Trump claimed America would “run” like property. Like Venezuela wasn’t a sovereign nation but American territory that had been temporarily misplaced. I was standing on occupied ground. Land that was supposedly mine by birthright now, because America said so.

Except I didn’t belong here either.

I was a citizen with no country. Deported to a country being stripped for parts.

The nightmare had turned me into a refugee twice over. Expelled from the country that birthed me. Dumped in a country my government was treating like a gas station to loot.

That’s when I woke up.

Gasping. Shaking. Sheets soaked through.

I’ve been thinking about that moment all day. The one right before I opened my eyes. When I was standing on occupied soil, bag finally off my head, sun burning my face, and I understood with perfect clarity that everything I thought protected me—my birth certificate, my passport, my American voice, my art—none of it had mattered.

They’d erased me anyway.

And they’d sent me to a place they were erasing too.

I keep thinking about the people still in that cell. The ones who aren’t waking up. The ones for whom this isn’t a nightmare but Tuesday. Wednesday. Every day.

I keep thinking about the masked men laughing.

I keep thinking about how easy it was. How quick. How a person can go from stage lights to chains in the time it takes to smile for a photograph.

There’s a violence in that ease. In how smoothly a human being can be transformed into a problem to be solved. Into waste to be disposed of. Into a body that doesn’t belong anywhere—not even in the country being conquered in your name.

The nightmare is over for me.

I woke up in my own bed. In my own country. Still citizen. Still here.

But the fear didn’t leave with the dream.

Because somewhere right now, someone is living my nightmare. Someone is being shoved into a van. Someone is screaming “I’m legal” to men who are already laughing. Someone is breathing recycled air in a cell built for twenty that’s holding a hundred. Someone is being treated like a hostage on a plane to a country that’s being stripped for oil while they’re being stripped of citizenship.

And tomorrow, I’ll go back to rehearsal. I’ll perform my truth for people who will clap and smile and tell me how powerful my voice is.

And I’ll remember that voice almost wasn’t mine to use.

My soul will break from the sound of a country being run like a business. Where brown bodies are inconvenient. Where oil matters more than sovereignty. Where citizenship is a courtesy that can be revoked. Where even the countries we’re deported to aren’t safe from being colonized.

I woke up.

But the dream is still happening.

To Venezuela. To migrants. To anyone who believed their papers would save them. To the children ripped from their parents’ arms at the border, screaming in processing centers that smell like disinfectant and despair. To the mothers clutching photographs of disappeared sons and daughters, removed from ICE’s locator like they never existed. To the father deported so fast his daughter came home from school to an empty house, his coffee still warm on the table. To the undocumented workers who built this country’s infrastructure, picked its fruit, cleaned its hotels, raised its children—now hunted like criminals for surviving. To the asylum seekers who fled death squads only to find America’s cruelty is just more efficient, more bureaucratic, wrapped in flags and legal language. To the families torn apart in parking lots, at traffic stops, outside churches. To the people who did everything right and still lost everything. To the ones learning right now that their humanity was always negotiable.

I woke up. They didn't.

And I don't know how to make it stop.