CAT CALL

the worst asthma he’d had in a while, and coming out shirtless didn’t help either. Directly after them came my uncle, who was barefoot and still in his work attire. Finally, my uncle who had a warrant came out with his forehead spurting blood. I decided to glance to my left and witnessed a horrible thing happening as my dad was being tossed on the ground and being cuffed some more while having rifles pointed to him. After my dad and my uncles were cuffed, the officials took us inside, and an official started interrogating us. He asked us about our education, our parents’ work, and plans for our future.

I answered mostly everything that didn’t involve our parents’ work because of the multiple times my mother had told us to not answer anything about her or my dad’s work. However, my siblings answered everything, even making the mistake of talking about our parents’ work, probably because they were intimidated by the treatment of our family and the rifles that the officials carried. During the questioning, my sister recollected in her memory that she had heard about children being locked and yelled at the officials,

“I’ve heard that you guys lock children up in cages.” One of the officials responded in a tame voice.

“Fake news,” I did not have my phone on me, so my dad had to call my mom to come and pick us up. However, a bilingual official seized the phone and asked my mom to pick us up or we would be sent to DFCS. She instead decided to call my brother’s girlfriend to pick us up, in fear that she too would be detained. However, even my brother’s girlfriend was taken as “Mexican” because of her darker skin color, even though she was white. She did not carry her papers with her, so she had to return to her place to obtain them, which left us even more in the hellish place. Once we arrived at her residence, my mother was there and she hugged us and started crying and yelling while trying to process why my siblings were so naive as to tell the officials about where she works. Later on that day, we went to Atlanta to receive consultations with lawyers.

CAT CALL

pencil Chadayzja Sims // 10

iliad

CLARITY