This story comes from Knight Media’s Prospector Now, the student-run newspaper for Prospect High School in Prospect Mount, Illinois. Their staff reached out to The Heights Herald with an agreement to exchange student-written editorials in order to show solidarity and connect as two communities affected in similar (but also different) ways. Please take a moment to read their story below: a letter from their affected community to ours. Afterwards, read our editorial: an inside perspective on the ICE occupation in Minnesota. 

Before “Make America Great Again” there was Langston Hughes.

Hughes was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, present at the very forefront of the blossoming of Black American literature, art, music and culture. But America, even a century ago, had a penchant for longing for the “good old days” of its past. So Hughes addressed this head-on in his poem “Let America be America Again.”

First, it seems he’s one of many people waxing nostalgic. “Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain,” he writes, “seeking a home where he himself is free.”

But in the next stanza, with a single line tucked in restrained parentheses, he brings the fantasy crashing down: “America never was America to me.” 

Some like to imagine American-ness as an absolute quality — like you’re either a “full,” “true-blooded” American or no American at all. But as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sweeps the country and invades Minnesota, the lines between American and non-American have begun to blur. 

ICE has detained US citizens, green card holders, people with temporary protected status, people who have lived here for decades and people who have committed only the crime of following the law and showing up to immigration court like the government wants them to. ICE, in fumbling through who is and isn’t “okay” to deport, is being forced to navigate what “American” means.

 But what does “American” actually mean?

Americans live in a country that says “bring me your tired, your poor,” but deports them when they get here. America says it values protest and freedom of speech, but has repressed it from the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts to the 2025 ICE detention of Mahmoud Khalil. America is supposed to be a nation brought together by the protection of life, liberty and property — a nation held together not by blood, but by mere belief in itself. 

But the same values that are supposed to bring us together have always — even in America’s vaunted and idealized beginnings — been inconsistently applied.

“There’s never been equality for me,” Hughes’ poem continues. “Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’”

Yes, maybe some of the same founding fathers who pontificated on universal rights went home to wives who were 15 when they met and a mansion of the enslaved. Maybe a few of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, even as they put pen to paper as proof of their rebellion, signing their own death warrants in case of British victory all for the idea that “all men are created equal,” didn’t, in their heart of hearts, actually believe it. 

But long-dead leaders and current despots don’t get to determine what America means. They are not the ones who make America. 

You are.

In Minnesota, you are standing up. In the freezing cold, through pain and terror, at risk of being gunned down by masked men with no training or conscience, you are standing up. Even as Vice President JD Vance says you should only want to live near people who don’t “have a totally different culture,” you look at who the White House calls “garbage” and call them “neighbor.”

Because you know that a birth certificate doesn’t make someone an American. 

To be an American is to believe in America.

And protesting and standing up against injustice because you believe in this country and believe it can be better? That’s as American as it’s possible to be.

So keep going, Minnesota. Keep going and know that America is not the steel of the batons against your skulls or the leather of the federal boot on your back. It is the shriek of a whistle in the blue of the cold, the fire of a vigilside candle in thick-gloved hands, the strength in the shoulders of protestors with millions of times more bravery than armed thugs hiding behind the barrel of a gun. 

In short, it is you. And as long as you are surviving, it is too.

We, KnightMedia, believe Minnesota is proving to immigrants everywhere that they can be protected by a loving community, that there are still those who will accept them with open arms, echoing the Statue of Liberty’s exhortation: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore; / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me!”

We believe you are the embodiment of the promise near the end of Hughes’ poem: “O, yes, / I say it plain, / America never was America to me, / And yet I swear this oath— / America will be!”