It was the last Saturday before the migration—before our kids, all four under one roof for the final stretch of summer, scattered again. One to the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, two back to their campus in Providence. And soon, the youngest will take her place as part of the freshman class at her college in Manhattan. The packing lists were still mostly theoretical, and the air was hot in that hazy, aggressive way Philadelphia gets in August, when the concrete heats your sneaker soles like a diner griddle. We found ourselves on Chelten Avenue in Germantown, standing shoulder to shoulder with people we didn’t know, holding signs with slogans that felt both necessary and insufficient.

Reclaim Philadelphia and AAPI Philly had organized the rally, but the gathering felt more like a neighborhood emergency. A 45-year-old Laotian man—he lived in the U.S. since he was five—had been detained by ICE. No warning, no fanfare, just disappeared into the machinery. It was the kind of story I was used to reading about with a terrible mix of sadness and distance, the kind that makes you mutter, God, that’s awful, before turning the page. But this time, there was no turning away. It happened here.

A teenage girl handed out water bottles. A toddler in a straw hat clutched her mother’s hand. There were clergy in clerical collars and organizers with bullhorns. An elder read a poem in three languages, and people cried, openly. At one point someone started chanting, and the crowd joined in—not with the mechanical rhythm of performance activism, but with a shaky, sincere urgency. Everyone seemed aware of the fact that we were not just attending something. We were implicated in it.

I kept thinking about how surreal it was—ICE, here, in Germantown. Where I shop for produce. Where we’ve picked up takeout on weeknights. Close to where we’ve stood in line for the library. I kept looking around and thinking, They could come for anyone. I think we all did. That’s what the rally was trying to say, in part: no one is safe if someone like him—decades in the country, a life built, community ties, family—isn’t.

I stood there with my children, trying to absorb what it meant to be raising them in a world where this could happen. And yet—I was also thinking ahead to our youngest, who is heading to New York. How the things that used to seem “urban,” that used to belong only to the big city’s pulse and worry, now feel like they’re reaching into every place, my place. I had imagined danger as something that belonged elsewhere. But now, in a neighborhood I know like my own skin, the boundary between “far” and “close” has disappeared.

There’s something terrifying about the way injustice becomes visible only when it knocks on your own door. And something shameful in how long it can take to see it clearly. There’s a part of me that wants to write that it was beautiful, the way people came together, how the community stood up—but that would feel like a conclusion, and nothing about this feels concluded. The man is still detained. His family is still shattered. His neighbors are still trying to raise bail, to raise awareness, to raise hell.

As the afternoon stretched on, I noticed how people didn’t seem eager to leave, even as the sun got more punishing. We stayed. We sweated. We listened. Maybe because we knew there’s no going back to a version of Germantown where this didn’t happen. Maybe because we knew that when our children leave again, they’ll be walking into a world where they, too, will have to choose what they can live with. Maybe because we wanted them to remember this moment—not as a tragic anomaly, but as a turning point. Or maybe just because we needed each other, in the heat, in the sorrow, in the uneasy recognition that none of this is hypothetical anymore.