For many people, Tuesday’s election is truly a life-or-death matter

When the world first met Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga here in Philadelphia some three-and-a-half years ago, the feisty Honduran-born mother was a living parable for why elections matter, in a story that seemed to come with a feel-good ending.

In 2018, after her brother became her fourth sibling murdered amid gang violence in her Central American homeland, Gonzáles Brebe fled north with two of her teenaged sons. Crossing into Mexico, the family was detained by U.S. Border Patrol, then ripped apart under the cruel Donald Trump-era policy known as family separation. For much of her two years in an El Paso, Texas detention facility, Gonzáles Brebe didn’t know where Erick — 13 at the time of their crossing — and Mino, 15, were located, let alone whether they were safe. Eventually, the mother was deported and the boys were released to a relative in Philadelphia’s Kensington section.

Four years ago this week, Joe Biden was elected president with a promise to undo the damage of Trump’s immigration policies. In May 2021, Gonzáles Brebe was one of the first four migrants harmed by family separation to be granted a so-called humanitarian parole — a three-year special permit to come to the United States. The cameras were rolling as she surprised her two kids by arriving at their Philadelphia apartment for a joyous and highly emotional reunion.

But it was not the end of her story. This Tuesday brings the next U.S. presidential election, and this one may matter even more.

Speaking in Spanish in a recording translated by a colleague, Gonzáles Brebe told me this week that in late 2024 her immigration status remains unsettled. She said she is hopeful that she and her family will gain legal protection after her husband — who had come to the United States without documentation ahead of her 2018 border ordeal — was told he will be receiving a so-called “T visa,” awarded to alleged victims of human trafficking.

Gonzáles Brebe — a devout Christian active in her Philadelphia church, whose sons have graduated from high school here, according to her advocates — is well aware that the reelection of Trump and his core campaign promise of a sweeping mass deportation program could upend everything. “I think if Donald Trump were to win … for us it would be a problem,” she said this week, adding “it’d be a problem because he can … he’s willing to deport many people.”

She’s hardly alone. And yet with the apparent dead-heat election between the GOP’s Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris just a few days away, most voters are focused on what’s become a form of tribal warfare between two equal factions that often talk in apocalyptic yet abstract terms about what victory or defeat means for the future of American democracy. We don’t talk as much as we should about the life-altering experience that a Trump win could mean for actual humans like Gonzáles Brebe, who could be put an a plane and shipped to a place where she could be killed.

To be sure, all 336 million or so Americans would face significant changes if Democrats vacate the While House and Trump returns to power, especially if Republicans also gain more clout on Capitol Hill. Consider Trump’s economic scheme for a massive increase in tariffs. If a Trump 47 administration can push that through — a big if, to be sure — economists have warned American families would likely pay several thousand dollars more every year for consumer goods.

Beyond that, there are large groups of citizens who could face life-altering risks, depending on their future circumstances. That includes millions of women in the red states that have imposed near-total abortion bans after a Trump-flavored U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade’s guarantee of reproductive rights. A GOP win Tuesday keeps the status quo of denying health care that — as we’ve learned in recent days — led to the death of women like Josselli Barnica, Amber Thurman or Candi Miller and that poses a similar threat to others not yet pregnant.

Voters should remember that some people have everything riding on the outcome — and not only immigrants who lack documents or are in bureaucratic limbo, like Gonzáles Brebe. Consider the people on Trump’s ever-growing enemies list, which includes top Democrats, former GOP allies who’ve turned against the 45th president, judges and prosecutors in his criminal and civil cases, or high-profile journalists who’ve crossed Trump. If he returns to power, Trump has promised to use the Justice Department or even the military against what he calls “the enemy from within.”

This summer, a remarkable episode of the NPR show This American Life spoke with some of those who Trump sees as domestic enemies — his former press secretary Stephanie Grisham, anti-Trump Lincoln Project leader Fred Wellman, and first impeachment witness Alexander Vindman — about their fears of prosecution or, in the cases of Grisham and Wellman — their fairly advanced conversations about leaving the United States if Trump wins. The echoes of those who fled Europe in the 1930s to avoid persecution were unmistakable — yet millions more could be leaving against their will.

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Trump’s main pledge is his scheme for the mass deportation of 15 million people currently on U.S. soil, which is even greater than the best estimate of 11 million undocumented immigrants. It could include those here on temporary protections — like Gonzáles Brebe or many of the Haitians now in communities like Springfield, Ohio, or Charleroi, Pa. — or so-called “Dreamers” who were brought here as small children. They have been told to expect door-to-door immigration raids, perhaps aided by the military, transport to large, makeshift detention camps, and then a deportation flight to a country that maybe they fled because of deadly violence, or that maybe they don’t even know. Even before the votes are counted, immigrant communities are reporting high levels of anxiety.

Peter Pedemonti, co-leader of the Philadelphia-based New Sanctuary Movement that works with the city’s large populations of immigrants from Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean and Asia, said these communities are wary of Trump’s potential return but also dismayed at the polls showing nearly half of Americans also support “militarized mass deportation” of the undocumented. He said they’re alarmed at neighbors not “seeing them as human beings and not seeing them for the jobs that they do, and as being a father, or a spouse.”

Pedemonti connected me with a leader in Philadelphia’s large Indonesian-American community — who asked to me to just use his first name of Rudy even though he and his wife eventually gained permanent resident status after coming here on a tourist visa in 2006 — who said those still lacking documentation haven’t forgotten stepped-up enforcement during Trump’s 45th presidency. He said they worry “whether they can go somewhere without fear — without the fear that the next time they go out someone will grab them and put them in a car, that next time someone will put them on a plane.”

When I think about the stakes in Tuesday’s election — and these are the only things that matter, the stakes not the odds — I keep thinking about something that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said on the campaign trail in 2020, addressing rallies that were often packed with mostly white progressives from deep blue cities and suburbs. He asked: “Are you willing to fight for a person you don’t know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?”

I don’t know Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga, and neither do you. But the thought of the U.S. government taking her from her new home and her church and throwing her into a car, headed for a sweltering barbed-wire detention camp before an airplane dumps her back in the place where gangs murdered her brothers, is morally unacceptable.

If you haven’t voted yet, are you willing to think about Gonzáles Brebe and the millions like her — people for whom the election outcome isn’t just a statement about our values, but a verdict on whether they will live in hope or face suffering, possibly even death? The future of American democracy ultimately depends on whether we are willing to fight for the people we don’t know.

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