Chapter 3: YOUR NUMBER HAS BEEN CALLED

Everything that made who you are is behind you now. Your name. Your street. The way your daughter says Papi with the accent on the wrong syllable. Gone. You are a number. A ball in a bin. Sorted by nothing meaningful. Not by guilt. Not by innocence. It doesn’t matter if you’re a teacher who shaped a thousand minds or a surgeon who saves lives every Monday morning. It doesn’t matter if you built a business from a garage, paid every tax, coached every season, and never missed a single parent-teacher conference. Documented. Undocumented. None of it matters here. Maybe you were at a protest because you believed in the First Amendment, the way you were taught. But your passion ran hot, and the moment ran hotter. The armchair quarterbacks say you deserved it. You yelled too loudly. Spit words too close to a face that wasn’t trained for this. Shoved someone with a gun because the emotion took your body before your mind could catch it. Maybe all you did was hold up a phone, and the man w