When the world met for the first time Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga, here in Philadelphia three and a half years ago, the feisty Honduran-born mother was a living example of why elections matter in a story that seemed to have a happy ending.

In 2018, after her brother became her fourth sibling killed amid gang violence in her Central American homeland, Gonzáles Brebe fled north with two of her teenage sons. Crossing into Mexico, the family was detained by the US Border Patrol, then broken up under cruel Donald Trump-the politics of the era known as family separation. For much of the two years he spent in a detention facility in El Paso, Texas, Gonzáles Brebe didn’t know where Erick — 13 at the time of the crossing — and Mino, 15, were, let alone if they were safe. In the end, the mother was deported and the boys were released to a relative in Philadelphia Kensington section.

Four years ago this week, Joe Biden was elected president on a promise to undo the damage done by Trump’s immigration policies. In May 2021, Gonzáles Brebe was one of the first four migrants injured by family separation to receive so-called humanitarian parole—a special three-year permit to come to the United States. The cameras were rolling as she surprised her two children by arriving at their Philadelphia apartment for a joyous and emotional reunion.

But that was not the end of her story. The next US presidential election is on Tuesday, and it could matter even more.

Speaking in Spanish in a recording translated by a colleague, Gonzáles Brebe told me this week that at the end of 2024, her immigration status remains unsettled. She said she hopes she and her family will get legal protection after her husband — who came to the United States without documents before her 2018 border ordeal — was told he would get a so-called “T visa“, awarded to alleged victims of human trafficking.

Gonzáles Brebe — a devout Christian active in her church in Philadelphia, whose sons graduated from high school here, according to her supporters — is keenly aware that Trump’s re-election and core campaign promise an extensive program of mass deportation could overturn everything. “I think if Donald Trump won … for us it would be a problem,” she said this week, adding that “it would be a problem because he can … is willing to deport a lot of people.”

She’s almost alone. And yet with seemingly dead-heat elections between the GOP’s Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris just days away, most voters are focused on what has become a form of tribal warfare between two equal factions that often speak in apocalyptic but abstract terms about what victory or defeat means for the future of American democracy. We don’t talk as much as we should about the life-changing experience that a Trump win could mean for real people like Gonzáles Brebe, who could be put on a plane and transported to a place where he could be killed.

Certainly, all 336 million Americans would face significant changes if Democrats vacate the House as Trump returns to power, especially if Republicans also gain more influence on Capitol Hill. Consider Trump’s economic scheme for a massive increase in fares. If a Trump 47 administration can push this — a big if, to be sure — economists warned American families would likely pay several thousand dollars more each year for consumer goods.

Beyond this, there are large groups of citizens who could face life-altering risks depending on their future circumstances. That includes millions of women in red states that imposed near-total abortion bans after a Trump-flavored US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wadeguarantee of reproduction rights. A GOP victory Tuesday maintains the status quo of denying health care that — as we’ve learned in recent days — has led to the deaths of women like Josselli Barnica, Amber Thurman or Candi Miller and that pose a similar threat to others who are not yet pregnant.

Voters should remember that some people have everything riding on the outcome — and not just immigrants who lack documents or are in bureaucratic limbo like Gonzáles Brebe. Consider the people on Trump the ever-growing list of enemieswhich includes leading democratsformer GOP allies who turned against the 45th president, judges and prosecutors in his criminal and civil cases, or high-profile journalists who outed Trump. If returned to power, Trump has promised to use Department of Justice or even the army against what he calls “the enemy within.”

this summer, a remarkable episode of the NPR show This American Life spoke to some of those whom Trump considers domestic enemies — his former press secretary Stephanie Grisham, anti-Trump Lincoln Project leader Fred Wellman and the prosecution’s first witness Alexander Vindman — about their fears of prosecution or, in Grisham’s cases and Wellman – their rather advanced conversations about leaving the United States if Trump wins. The echoes of those who fled Europe in the 1930s to escape persecution were unmistakable – yet millions more could leave against their will.

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Trump’s main commitment is his scheme for mass deportation of 15 million people currently in the US, which is even higher than the best estimate of 11 million undocumented immigrants. It could include those here on temporary protections — like Gonzáles Brebe or many of the Haitians today in communities like Springfield, Ohio or Charleroi, Pa. — or the so-called “dreamer” that were brought here by little children. They have been told to expect door-to-door immigration raids, perhaps aided by the military, transport to large, makeshift detention camps and then a deportation flight to a country they may have fled because of deadly violence or that maybe not no. i don’t even know Even before the votes are counted, immigrant communities report high levels of anxiety.

Peter Pedemonti, co-leader of the Philadelphia company The New Sanctuary Movement who works with the city’s large immigrant population from Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean and Asia, said those communities are wary of Trump’s potential return but are also dismayed by polls that show nearly half of Americans also support “.militarized mass deportation” of the undocumented. He said they are alarmed that neighbors “don’t see them as human beings and they don’t see them for the jobs they do and as a father or a husband.”

Pedemonti put me in touch with a leader in Philadelphia large Indonesian-American community — who asked me to use only his first name, Rudy, even though he and his wife eventually gained permanent resident status after coming here on a tourist visa in 2006 — who said that those who have not yet they have documents, they didn’t forget intensified enforcement during Trump’s 45th presidency. He said he worries “if they can go somewhere without fear — without fear that the next time they go out someone is going to grab them and put them in a car, that the next time someone is going to put them on a plane.”

When I think about the stakes of Tuesday’s election – and those are the only things that matter, the stake not the odds — I keep thinking about something Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said on the campaign trail in 2020, addressing rallies that were often packed with mostly white progressives from deep-blue cities and suburbs. he asked: “Are you willing to fight for a person you don’t know as much as you are willing to fight for yourself?”

I don’t know Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga and neither do you. But the thought that the US government would take her from her new home and her church and throw her in a car, headed for a barbed-wire choked detention camp, before a plane would drop her back into place where gangs killed his brothers, is morally unacceptable. .

If you haven’t voted yet, are you willing to think about Gonzáles Brebe and the millions like her – people for whom the outcome of the election is not just a statement about our values, but a verdict on whether they will live in hope or face it? suffering, possibly even death? The future of American democracy ultimately depends on whether we are willing to fight for people we do not know.

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