Forty-one years ago, I was a 25-year-old third-year student at the UCLA School of Law when I wrote a piece for what was then called the Chicano Law Review in response to factory raids. Dubbed with the Orwellian anodyne description of “surveys,” these workplace sweeps were designed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement—known at that time as the Immigration and Naturalization Service—to maximize the apprehension of undocumented immigrants considering the government’s limited resources.

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I argued that constitutional standards prohibited such tactics and that the United States Supreme Court should affirm a Ninth Circuit decision that followed well-entrenched Fourth Amendment legal precedent to protect factory workforces from unreasonable searches and seizures. The appellate court had held that the INS could not rely on these immigration sweeps but, rather, needed to articulate objective facts and rational inferences to support a reasonable suspicion that each person detained is undocumented.

But the Supreme Court reversed holding that the INS had not seized the entire workforce even though immigration agents were stationed near the factories’ exits and displayed badges, carried walkie-talkies, and were armed. The court found that the agents’ conduct consisted of “simply” questioning employees and arresting those they had probable cause to believe were undocumented. In essence, the court approved of what amounted to the INS’s reliance on racial profiling to seize entire workforces without individualized objective facts and rational inferences normally required under the Fourth Amendment for seizures of a person.

Forty-one years later, I am still writing about cruel and inhumane tactics employed by ICE. But I am writing not as an attorney. While I have been a state government lawyer for the last 35 years, I specialize in the enforcement of land-use, environmental, and affordable housing laws. For the last 25 years, however, I have relied on fiction, poetry, and playwriting to humanize ICE’s targets and to highlight the absurdity of mass deportations of people who are needed to keep the U.S. prosperous and functioning in the face of an aging population.

It is my relationship to undocumented immigrants and ICE that moved me to write my first play in 2019, Waiting for Godínez, which will be published in book form by the University of New Mexico Press this fall after enjoying several years of development in theater readings in New York and Los Angeles, and then a fully staged production in Sacramento last year.

In my reimagining of Samuel Beckett’s iconic absurdist play, Waiting for Godot, the forever waiting characters of Estragon and Vladimir are embodied in Jesús and Isabel, two Mexican friends living in the U.S. Each night ICE agents kidnap Jesús and throw him into a cage intending to deport him. But the agents forget to lock the cage, so Jesús escapes and makes his way back to Isabel as they wait for the mysterious Godínez in a city park.

At one point, Isabel looks upon her exhausted friend and laments: “What harm have you done to them? You are as much of this country as you are of México. But you are not home in either place. Ni de aquí, ni de allá.”

This play is not the first time I’ve used creative writing to speak truth to power with respect to our nation’s seemingly never-ending demonization of immigrants.

Last year saw the publication of my novel, Chicano Frankenstein—which was inspired by the anti-immigrant political rhetoric of the 2022 midterm elections—where I imagined a near-future U.S. with 12 million reanimated people who have had their histories wiped before being reintroduced into the workforce to make up for the aging population. All the while, a far-right President Mary Beth Cadwallader fans anti-reanimated sentiment with the mantra, Make America Safe Again. By the end of the novel, she and her Vice President plan a series of executive orders aimed at so-called “stitchers” to take away their right to vote, marry, and live where they wish. Indeed, concentration camps prove to be a viable political option with a friendly Supreme Court ready to affirm President Cadwallader’s unprecedented use of executive orders.

I cannot remain silent as our country continues its quest to rid itself of immigrants while securing the economic benefit of those very same people it wishes to expel.

And in 2017, the title poem of my collection, Crossing the Border, satirized vigilante border patrols that hunt immigrants like animals. That same year, my story collection, The King of Lighting Fixtures, included a dystopian short story where a gaudy golden wall has been erected at the southern border by a President who also embellishes that wall with detention centers where children are separated from their undocumented parents who are herded into big black buses and sent to Mexico even if they originally came from a different Latin American country.

This is not to mention my other immigration-related short stories and essays that supplement the above-noted play, fiction, and poetry.

Forty-one years of writing about our country’s dysfunctional immigration system and its abuses, and here we are at the beginning of a second term for President Donald Trump who won reelection based on promises of mass deportations.

And I must ask myself: Am I merely howling into the wind? Are my literary efforts for naught, a waste of time and emotional energy? Perhaps I should surrender to the attitude of Beckett’s hapless Estragon and lament, “Nothing to be done.”

But as Elie Wiesel put it, “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”

So, I cannot remain silent as our country continues its quest to rid itself of immigrants while securing the economic benefit of those very same people it wishes to expel. By confronting such injustice through my writing, I can provide a voice for those who do not have the kind of public platforms that I enjoy.

All four of my grandparents came to California about a hundred years ago to escape the economic hardships and continuing violence in the wake of the decade-long Mexican Revolution that ostensibly ended in 1920. I have no idea if they were documented. But what I do know is that they made a home, worked hard, and had children. My parents’ lives were better than that of their immigrant parents. And my four siblings and I all have enjoyed even greater economic stability and education than our parents.

That is, after all, the American Dream.

And I will continue to speak out through my creative writing against all political tactics designed to turn that dream into a nightmare for millions of people who are only searching for safety and security for themselves and their families in the same way my grandparents did. Perhaps through my plays, fiction, and poetry, some minds might be changed, and a few hearts won over. My words might reach someone who can effect change in our system.

There is something to be done.

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Waiting for Godinez: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts by Daniel A. Olivas is available via University of New Mexico Press.