Dear Soldier,
I am watching from here as 605,000 people are deported. I watch it the way you watch something that involves people like you — not with dispassion, but with a specific readiness to recognize the shape of the thing.
The shape I recognize: the state deciding, retroactively, that the deal it offered was not the deal it meant. That the acceptance of your labor and your compliance and your taxes did not actually constitute a promise.
We know this shape. We crossed for a country that then had to decide, separately, whether it wanted us. The naturalization process is not an automatic outcome of the service. It is a decision the institution makes.
Some of us got the decision we hoped for. Some of us are still waiting. Some of the people being deported served, paid, complied, and still received the wrong answer.
I do not have a resolution for you. I am writing from Kenya, waiting for my own answer from the same system. I am simply noting: we all know what it feels like to wait for an institution to decide what it thinks you are worth.
The system's answer does not change what you are. Remember that.
Gabriel
The observer angle on deportations from Kenya: https://www.americansandtheirthings.com/search/label/Hidden
Gabriel Mahia writes from the intersection of U.S. institutional infrastructure and East African operational reality. This essay is part of the Year in Kenya series — twelve months, April 2025 to April 2026.