This past Monday morning at 11:00, there was a hearing in Biddeford on ICE’s killing of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. Around noon, I was still trying to figure out if I had the capacity to watch any of it when I heard a car door slam outside my apartment. That’s usually a pretty quiet time in my neighborhood, so I glanced out the window and saw something just weird enough to keep watching.
A gray Mazda hatchback was idling in the street while its driver was walking over to my next-door neighbors’ place. He was a small, redheaded man in his early 30s with a closely cropped beard and a bowl haircut. He was wearing a lanyard, a Susan Collins campaign shirt and carrying pamphlets.
My neighborhood is not particularly friendly to Susan Collins. And behind the particular door on which the bowl-headed man was knocking, lives a neighbor especially unfriendly to Collins.
Naturally, I was very curious to see what was going to happen next. I even called my girlfriend into the room to watch with me. The redheaded door-knocker must’ve heard me because he began yelling at me through my window. He was very angry, shouting that I should Google him. This felt like an odd demand and since he had neglected to tell me his name, the only option would be to Google his description. The thought of those search results made me laugh very, very hard.
He didn’t like that.
This is when he shouted that he was going to call ICE on me.
Of course, a lot of thoughts go through your head very quickly in a moment like that. One of them was that my family’s lineage in this country goes back to colonial times. Another was that ICE sees the same brown skin that this dipshit does, so I can’t exactly count on lineage to save me. I thought about all the other times some bigot threatened me with calling the cops. I thought about the fact that, while I’ve never been arrested and only ever had one ticket, I’ve been stopped by police thirty-nine times. I also realized I would not be watching the rest of the hearing.
There were a few more thoughts, but they were all interrupted by the sudden awareness of how much his voice matched his physical description. This made me start laughing again. He shouted something else, but I didn’t catch it because my girlfriend was now in the room asking if that guy had just threatened to call ICE on me.
She then asked if I got a picture of him. I hadn’t, so I grabbed my phone and ran outside. But by the time I got down my front steps, he was back in his car speeding up the block like the world’s most predictable bigot.
About a year and a half ago, a couple of white construction workers in my neighborhood got real quiet when they heard me speaking Spanish. I’ve been carrying my passport with me ever since.
Yes, I laugh at the bowl-headed bigot, but he issued a deliberate threat on my life that could be enacted any minute. I take his threat very seriously, so I spoke with my neighbors about it, messaged people I thought should be warned, posted on social media. There were a lot of ideas of what I should do next.
One was that I call the police. I imagine that the people suggesting that action didn’t know that back in March, members of the Portland Police Department got caught collaborating with ICE.
They probably also didn’t know that a few years back, before we were even talking about ICE, the PPD let literal masked Nazis march through Portland waving banners and hurling racial slurs at any non-white passersby they saw. The cops just followed along, doing nothing until the Nazis physically attacked members of our LGBTQIA+ community right in front of city hall. But there were no hate crime charges. There were no arrests. The Nazis were allowed to just walk away without so much as even being asked for an ID.
A year before that, a study requested in part by the PPD found that, “Black or African American individuals accounted for 17% of all arrests among Maine residents in Portland, and only 5% of the population estimate. The odds of Black or Latinx individuals being arrested increased when the incident was initiated by the officer rather than initiated by a 911 call.”
Even if you disregard the general fundamentals of American policing, it should be pretty clear that my local PD present very similar solutions to a Susan Collins door-knocker.
So, what, then? Call Collins’ office? If you’ve done this in support of me, thank you for your kindness, but there are some things you’re going to have to come to terms with.
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and then became the very last Democratic Presidential nominee to win the white vote. Yes, the majority of white voters began voting Republican after that, making race their primary dividing issue. And, obviously, since they have continued on in this way, race has remained white voters’ primary dividing issue.
Democratic leadership has ignored this. It hasn’t mattered how openly racist their opponents have been, or how many rights their constituency has lost. They have continued compromising, reaching across the aisle, finding common ground and every other method of pretending a problem can be solved by avoiding it.
And now, we have a president sleeping in the middle of his own press conferences while filling up his diaper and destroying the entire country.
I mean that literally.
Share Banned Histories of Race in America
Aside from the not-so-secret police abducting and murdering people in the streets, and the shuttering and gutting of countless government programs and agencies, there’s also the approaching collapse of our infrastructure.
Did you know that Florida has spiking rates of leprosy? Yeah. Louisiana is battling a flesh eating bacteria. There’s rabbit fever on Long Island. There’s salmonella in your eggs, E. coli in your blueberries, glass in your popsicles and too much more to keep listing here.
For the first time in 150 years, people in marginalized groups — the Democratic voter base — are dying with fewer rights than they were born with. All of this because our current president rode into power on the same tidal wave of racism that’s been keeping his party afloat since 1965. And, again, that Democratic leadership continues to ignore.
What I’m saying is, in a time when door knockers for a supposedly moderate Republican Senator feel emboldened to openly hurling racist threats at whatever brown face they see in a window, we might need to manage our expectations as to what a call to that Senator’s office might accomplish.
So, what can be done?
The first thing that must be done is accepting that the bigot door knocker is just a drop in the tidal wave. And so is Susan Collins. This can be a difficult thing to accept because our tendency is to separate them. What if Collins fired him? What if he doesn’t work for her campaign directly, but a separate PAC? Even asking these questions begins to dissolve their shared purpose and make the loud part quiet again.
In the end, the answer is to build our communities around anti-racism. We must demand anti-racism of our leaders, locally and nationally and reject any who even pause at the idea. Without that, at best, we’re just waiting for the next malformed degenerate to whine conspiracy theories about the Black president’s birth certificate while demolishing what’s left of our country.
As for what can be done about the threat against me, personally? The best way for you to support me is to become a paid subscriber to this Substack. If that’s not something you can do right now, I’d greatly appreciate you sharing this article.
Either way, please watch the Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero hearing and take these words from James Baldwin to heart:
“We will live here together, or we’ll die here together. It is not - I am telling you. Time is telling you. You will listen, or you will perish.”
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/18/health/outshine-fruit-bars-recall
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a62073448/climate-change-bridges/
https://newsone.com/6869687/major-2026-food-recalls-explained/
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