A Message From a US Escapee

by Tekoa da Silva
The Dollar Vigilante
Apr. 15, 2012

In 2006 I was woken up and pulled out of bed at 3:00 a.m. It must have been a Sunday or a Monday morning, I can’t remember. My bedroom door burst open with a loud voice yelling at me to get out of bed. When I opened my eyes, all I saw was a flashlight beaming in my face. I was taken out of my bedroom, and into my kitchen by a person in black SWAT-looking like gear. This stranger had a machine gun and was telling me what to do and where to go in my own home.

When I entered my kitchen, I walked into a crowd of easily fifteen police and “ICE” officers hanging out and strutting around my living room and kitchen, and in the living room lay the prize, my father, a small older man in his late fifties at the time, bound, handcuffed, and held by three officers twice his size.

What occurred that night was the planting of a seed of fear into my heart. It was the evolution of a series of events which had begun years earlier. The trauma of having my home raided by ICE agents, and watching my father being hauled off in the middle of the night set off a psychological countdown which I simply could not ignore. The survival instincts which I had been instructed to ignore by the “system” for years, had finally kicked in, and told me to get the hell out - which is what I did.

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