Cathy’s voice breaks. She apologizes because she promised herself she wouldn’t cry on the phone. She takes a beat, breathes, and continues her story.
She recalls emigrating from Nigeria in 2012, and how she has spent the fourteen years since making herself the kind of person any country would want to welcome. She is a federal cybersecurity specialist working in healthcare to protect everyday people’s sensitive personal data from attack by online criminals and hostile foreign powers.
“Honestly, this is torture,” she says of the immigration freeze that has now thrown her future into total uncertainty. “It’s not right that we’re being punished,” she goes on. “You can see they’re trying to get at your mental health, your self-esteem, so that you’ll just be like, ‘you know what, I’m just going to leave.’ It’s their method for trying to get people out of here.”
Set up a “Google Alert” for your own name to monitor if your personal details appear on public forums or paste-sites associated with recent data breaches.