Matthew Tzuker is a writer who lives in Portland.

News that a Portland family was taken by ICE to a detention facility in Texas hit my family as we were traveling in California. The juxtaposition was startling: the freedom with which we move around this gorgeous country at our pleasure vs. the restriction, and now confinement, experienced by a family just trying to find a home.

They fled civil war in the Congo and saw their child drown in a river along the way. We were concerned about the traffic we might experience on the way to Sacramento.

Being far away from our community, it would be easy to feel merely an abstract pang of empathy, except my middle school daughter knows the family’s youngest daughter. Her text threads were lighting up with shock.

They are two grades apart — not friends but friendly. My daughter described her schoolmate as kind and upbeat, a talented artist who would often gift her teachers with her paintings, some of which still hang on their walls a year later.

Last spring, the two girls were in a middle school production of “The Wizard of Oz” together, in the ensemble singing “Merry Old Land of Oz.” That play — full of terrors, paradises and hopes — must have held a truth to a daughter of recent immigrants that most of the other kids, born here in the Emerald City, couldn’t have understood.

But the family must have felt the welcome mat of America being yanked from underneath their feet. According to the Portland Press Herald, they had attempted to move their asylum claim to Canada and were detained by ICE after our friendly neighbors to the north turned them away. The family now languishes in the belly of our beastly immigration detention system, waiting to be spit out who knows where after who knows how long. 

It may sound hokey in our post-woke world, but Portland Public Schools is a tapestry woven together by many different threads. It’s often messy — as a parent of two children who attend, it’s often messier than I would like — but it holds together beautifully. I don’t know much about weaving or sewing, but I know you can’t just yank out a few threads and expect a garment to hold its shape.   

The immigration debate is so intractable because at its heart are two different visions of America that our legislators cannot reconcile. But surely we can agree that children in school, no matter how they got there, should not get disappeared from class by their government.

If it must be done, is there not a way to do it that is more just and careful? And surely we can agree that children should not have their friends disappeared by their government. What kind of adults will grow from children accustomed to such things?

To me, allowing the family from Congo to stay in a community that had room for them would seem more in the public interest than kicking them out. Yet those who side with the administration on this will claim that the family was here illegally and the law must stand firm because beyond that wall lies chaos.

I would ask those folks to think about a teenage girl who fled horrors most of us couldn’t imagine, landed here in Maine to dance and sing onstage in a great American story about seeking safety in a turbulent and terrifying world, while finding magic and spreading joy along the way. 

Then think of that girl, sitting in a cell in Texas while you reveled in the bounties of your good fortune on Thanksgiving. Sit with that for a moment. And if you still feel that this is just, then I don’t know how to say this more gently or clearly: Your heart is too small and has grown too cold. Perhaps there is a wizard you can see about that.