It was a deeply personal—and deeply political—decision rooted in the lived reality that people like me are facing in this moment in America.

We’ve entered a nightmare realm—one where U.S. citizens of color have already been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), stripped of their rights, denied due process, and held without cause.

Being born and raised in Hawaii, I couldn’t escape the fact that I was born in the waning shadows of a very American brand of apartheid.

I was the disruption. I was the resistance. I was a quiet revolution walking into a world too accustomed to its own noise.

Hakeem Jeffries is more interested in decorum than democracy, more preoccupied with optics than with offense.

Everything we’ve fought for, marched for, been arrested for, and died for is under siege.