This Thing in My Pocket

I sank into the red sofa, too heavy to stand again. A small wooden table in front of me held a few books and my computer, connected to the TV by an HDMI cord. Aside from the faint buzzing in my ears, the silence was thick and expansive, almost devouring. It filled the living room more completely than it filled my mind. The vertical blinds offered a fragile kind of privacy, shielding me from the imagined gaze of anyone passing on the alleyway in the winter cold.

Today felt heavy—not only because of the work I do, but because of the temperature of Minnesota itself, heated by days of protest. People were talking about a shooting in Minneapolis: a woman killed by an immigration officer. The news has a way of colonizing the mind, leaving little room for anything but anxiety, for the deep, bodily fear that settles beneath language. I needed to slow down.

I wanted to unwind—from the long hours at work, from the relentless churn of online news. I stretched out my right arm and pulled my backpack closer. I took out a book and turned back to the table. No pen. I cannot read without one—without underlining, circling, leaving marks that prove I was there—so I went looking. I reached into the small front pocket of my backpack, certain a pen would be waiting. Instead, my fingers brushed against something smooth.

I knew immediately what it was: my passport.

A passport is a government-issued travel document, but lately it has taken on another meaning here in Minneapolis. We do not carry it for the airport. We carry it because of fear. My passport has become proof of a reality I would rather ignore but cannot—a precaution layered over many others.

The buzzing continues in my ears. My arm aches from remaining outstretched, my fingers still inside the backpack’s pocket. But my mind has drifted elsewhere, trying to remember how my passport came to rest there in the first place.

It ended up in my backpack after my last Thanksgiving trip—months before immigration officers began flexing their muscle and gun power across our state. It stayed in my bag afterward, not out of convenience but out of fear—fear of being stopped anywhere, at any time, and asked to prove I belonged. I know that when they ask for identification, they will not mean a driver’s license once they see my skin or hear my accent. They will want proof that I am allowed to be here. Proof that I understand this is not my country, that I am a guest.

The ID I previously held expired when my old visa ended. As soon as my new visa was approved, I applied to renew my REAL ID before leaving Minneapolis. At the DMV, there was no sign of trouble. The staff copied my approval notice. Everything appeared routine, procedural, almost kind.

A few days later, after moving, I visited the DMV in my new county—a small town—to update my address before the new ID was issued. Weeks passed. Then a letter arrived. My excitement dissolved as soon as I opened it: my REAL ID application had been denied.

How could I travel without it? There had to be a mistake.

The county office could not explain the denial. They suggested I visit the state DMV. I hesitated. No one casually visits the DMV. It is a place where time flattens and disappears, where you surrender hours without guarantee. I waited for a day light enough to absorb the loss.

At the state office, I was told I needed to present my visa. I handed them my approval notice. They shook their heads. They needed something printed or stamped inside my passport.

The problem was both simple and impossible. I could not have a visa printed in my passport—and would not anytime soon—because Haitian passports were subject to a travel ban. To leave the country to obtain one would mean risking being denied reentry. The only reason I had been granted a visa at all was that I was already inside the United States when the ban was imposed, not outside its borders.

None of this mattered. The clerk did not work in narratives. They worked from a checklist. If a document was missing—no matter the reason—the process stopped. Context was irrelevant. My story could be true and still insufficient.

Without a printed visa in my passport, I was told I qualified only for a standard driver’s license. Nothing more. I accepted because there was nothing else to do. It also meant that every time I flew, I would carry my passport.

Then came Thanksgiving. I traveled to Pennsylvania—my first domestic trip using my passport, my first since the administration imposed the travel ban. That morning, anxiety followed me through the airport, through security, through every fluorescent-lit corridor. What if my passport was flagged? What if they stopped me? What if—worse—I was deported?

When the TSA agent scanned my passport and then scanned it again, my heart began to race. My palms dampened. The pause lasted less than a minute, but it was long enough for fear to take command, long enough for my mind to draft its own endings.

I was afraid because my passport had become a marker. It announced that I was Haitian at a time when pride in that fact felt almost illicit—not because of anything we have done, but because we have been recast as people who do not belong.

I wished I had something else to hand them—something more official, something American. Something that would allow me to blend into the anonymity of the line instead of standing out beneath invisible light. But I had only my passport, a document that feels as if it carries a quiet stain: watch this one.

Sometimes I imagine bypassing the TSA altogether. The news is saturated with stories of migrant visas denied, revoked, canceled mid-course. Fear accumulates sediment. You become careful—about what you say, what you post, how visibly you inhabit your own life. You fear a knock at the door, an accusation based on laws you never knew you were breaking.

When the agent finally said, “Go ahead,” it felt like more than permission to board a plane. It felt like provisional mercy. Permission to cross an unseen border. Permission to breathe. Permission to remain—at least for now.

As the plane lifted into the air that belongs to no nation, I kept thinking about how essential my work is—to my patients, and to this country. I practice in a small town. People traveled up to two hours to see me. I care for the son struggling with substance use and the daughter who has survived a suicide attempt. I collaborate with the town’s only neurologist to treat grandparents—the grandfather with Parkinson’s disease, living with visual hallucinations; the grandmother with Alzheimer’s, fighting to regulate a mind that no longer obeys her. My work is not merely important. It is necessary. And yet I perform it under the shadow of fear—fear for myself, and fear for my community.

And yet this is what I have come to understand in rural America, in the heartland, in that so-called flyover expanse: despite how different many of my patients appear from me—despite the churches or political gatherings some attend where rhetoric can turn hostile toward people like me—we share far more than we are told.

My grandparents were farmers, people who lived from the land and by the weather’s mercy. Here, many of the people I care for are farmers too, or the children of farmers. Their children and grandchildren are often first-generation college students, as I was. The parallels are quiet but unmistakable. We share more than the media allows. If there were space to step back, to look carefully, they might recognize that I am no stranger to their burdens.

I may have been born elsewhere. I may speak with an accent that marks me before I introduce myself. But when my patients sit across from me in the clinic—or when we pass one another in the grocery store—their suffering is not foreign terrain. I recognize it. And I carry its language.

I am alone in my apartment. I do not stay inside because of the cold—though it is cold enough to split my lips, numb my ears, tighten my muscles against themselves. I stay inside because I want to avoid the police, to avoid anyone who represents the government. I do not want an encounter where a simple exchange could escalate, where a voice hardens, where a hand moves toward a weapon—because I am afraid that someone could be harmed, and that the someone would be me.

I never imagined I would feel compelled to carry such a document everywhere—not for a day, not for weeks, not for nearly two months. There were moments when I felt safer without it than with it, as if possession itself marked me for scrutiny.

But the passport carries no printed visa. And what if an immigration officer responded the way the DMV clerk had—no narrative required, no explanation entertained, only a missing stamp? What if they told me I must leave in order to return properly documented? My words would not matter. My words, as a psychiatrist, may steady a patient lost in depression or psychosis, but they would not steady an officer. In that exchange, I would not be the authority. I would be subject to it. Jurisdiction would extend over my body, over my time, over the architecture of my future.

I hold a book. I reach for a pen. Instead, my hand finds my passport, and I am pulled back to a place I do not want to inhabit—a state of mind that insists I am not from here, that I do not belong.

I rise from the sofa, pull my backpack toward me, slip my hand into the front pocket, and pinch the passport between my fingers. I stand, circle the small table with the computer and the books on it, walk into my bedroom, open the drawer, and place it inside.

There is no need for it, I tell myself. It is one of the most powerless passports in the world. If someone wished to send me back, it would not stop them. I cannot afford to lose it, and yet it offers no protection—only visibility. Not a shield, but a signal.

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