A few weeks ago, I had my two-year follow-up appointment relating to my kidney donation. Technically, it was sort of a two-year-and-four-months follow-up, because I kept forgetting to schedule it; most days I forget I only have one kidney now.

I’m happy to report that my solo kidney (aka Ren Solo, short for Renal Solo) is functioning well with an endless supply of seltzer water. My happy kidney mood was ruined, however, by reading a news story about a transplant nephrologist from Rhode Island, Dr. Rasha Alawieh. She was held for 36 hours by Customs and Border Patrol and then deported back to Lebanon, where she had been visiting family, despite a) having a visa that was b) sponsored by her employer, Brown University, and c) a judge having ordered that she not be deported until a hearing was held.

The government claims it did not receive notice of the order on time. Yeah, right. So now we’re at the point where government operatives are saying, “Oops, didn’t see this text until just now” to federal judges. That doesn’t seem great for the rule of law.

Transplant nephrology is a specialty within a specialty in the medical field. Many organizations desperately rely on doctors from other countries. My nephrologist was also not from America originally. So you can understand this case scaring the crap out of me personally. I rely on my doctor to keep my one remaining kidney healthy, especially since having one kidney puts me at a higher risk of pregnancy complications.

If he wasn’t there — if I had to go on a waitlist and something happened — I don’t even want to think about it. Currently, the state of Rhode Island (which serves patients from parts of Connecticut and Massachusetts) only has three transplant nephrologists. With the deportation of Dr. Alawieh, it is down to two.

Brown University alone has between 300 and 400 patients waiting for kidney transplants, who need regular appointments and care. Now those patients have exactly two doctors to do that. As of this writing, the government claims Dr. Alawieh attended the funeral of a Hezbollah leader (which took place in a stadium, with a crowd of tens of thousands of people) while in Lebanon. The government has offered no proof of this.

The government has not said if Dr. Alawieh has been accused of a crime or even an immigration violation. She received no due process, which, according to the copy of the American Constitution that I carry in my purse, she is granted. I’m not surprised that the Trump administration is breaking the law in order to deport immigrants. They clearly don’t see immigrants — or any nonwhite American, really — as entirely human, as people who deserve equal rights and due process like anyone else.

Note the videos of the deportation flights that the White House posts on its social media, mocking the suffering of captives; “Ha ha, look at these people in pain, they are beneath you, they are beneath us. Behold our power.” The people in charge of our government and the Americans cheering them on are cruel, hard, little bitter people.

But the case of Dr. Alawieh surprised me at first. I figured the Trump administration would warm up Americans to the idea of stripping away constitutional rights and protections by making their first victims people who racist Americans would easily believe are “gang members” or “dangerous criminals” — tough-looking guys in their 20s and 30s with tattoos.

And the government has already sent dozens of those immigrants to a labor prison camp in El Salvador without due process, without a hearing before a judge, without giving the accused the opportunity to prove that they aren’t criminals or gang members or whatever the latest excuse the government is using to ethnically cleanse our country. Sending Venezuelans to a labor camp in El Salvador isn’t even “deportation,” technically. Deportation is being sent to a person’s country of origin. What the federal government is doing now is closer to trafficking.

Dr. Alawieh is what most people would consider the perfect immigrant. She is highly educated and has a well-paying job literally saving American lives every day. Even the most racist MAGA devotee can’t possibly think that getting rid of her helps America in any way, shape or form. But then I realized, that’s the point.

This is the Trump administration sending a message to other immigrants, saying, “It doesn’t matter how educated you are, what sort of job you have, it doesn’t matter whether you save American lives every day. We can get rid of you if we want to and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

And if the government can accuse a visa holder of being a national security threat and deport them without even a court hearing, what’s to stop them from doing it to citizens? Are our birth certificates supposed to protect us? They’re just pieces of paper. We need to stand with our immigrant neighbors. We need to do that not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because any one of us could be next.