Op-ed: A truly scary story

By Madeline Bodin
©2025 Telegraph Publishing LLC

When I was in sixth grade, our teacher gathered us to tell us a scary story on the school day closest to Halloween. He said that he had been a night security guard at a mansion in town. This spooky house had a mausoleum in the basement. Late one night, on his rounds, he heard a baby crying. The sound came from the basement.

He crept down the stairs, and saw that one of the drawer-like mausoleum vaults was open a crack. The baby’s cries came from that vault. He heaved the vault open to rescue the baby, but out jumped the devil, big and red and fanged. The devil clawed at him with his hooves. The teacher ran and ran.

Honestly, I don’t know what happened after that, because when he shouted that the devil jumped out, about half the kids in the class screamed. It felt like the oxygen was sucked from the room. I was suffocating. When my classmates ran for the door, I ran too, relieved to find myself in the sweet, cool air of an October afternoon.

For three nights, I shook in my bed. For three nights, I fell asleep only when exhaustion overtook me. To this day, I push closed any drawer that is open, even if it’s just a crack. This single scary story haunted me for years, but it wasn’t until decades later that I realized what is truly horrifying about this tale.

It took other horrors to help me see it, especially the tragedy happening to immigrants in the United States today. Americans have always had mixed feelings about immigrants. We’ve had these feelings in spite of the fact that every white person in America is descended from immigrants.

At the beginning of the 21^st century, the DREAM Act was created to give people who had been brought to this country as children without documents a legal pathway to becoming citizens of the United States. It got a majority of votes in the U.S. Senate several times — from both parties, but a minority was able to filibuster it out of existence.

In 2012, President Barack Obama supported a compromise. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals was not a path to citizenship, but it allowed people who had been brought to the country as children to stay for two years and work legally. The permission could be renewed.

Anyone signing up for DACA was making themselves vulnerable. The federal government would have their information. Could it be trusted? Many people thought the vulnerability was too great. People wouldn’t sign up for the program, they said, because it required applicants to expose themselves as in the country illegally. But people heaped their trust on the federal government. Nearly a million people have applied.

During his first term, President Donald Trump tried to dismantle DACA. And this summer, President Trump told  DACA recipients to self-deport. Recently, DACA recipients were targeted for arrest by ICE in Texas.

But DACA participants aren’t the only people who trusted the U.S. government who are now under attack. In 1973, when the U.S. military pulled out of Vietnam, it left behind thousands of Vietnamese who had worked with them as translators, embassy employees and military allies. Individual U.S. citizens,  soldiers and veterans worked quickly to rescue their colleagues from a regime that wanted to punish them as U.S. collaborators.  When the U.S. military pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021, the same thing happened.

Even today, Vietnamese and Afghanis who worked for the U.S. military and other U.S. organizations and Afghanistan have been subjected to the same illegal and chaotic punishments as other kinds of immigrants.

The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says, “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” In other words, if the federal government wants to fine you, put you in prison, deport you, or otherwise mess with you, there has to be a hearing.

Remember “innocent until proven guilty?” People being thrown out of the country are presumed innocent until proven otherwise. Our country is throwing innocent people – including U.S. citizens and those in the country legally — out of the country or into prisons.

ICE stakes out courtrooms where immigrants show up to fulfill their legal duty. Even a Wisconsin judge who showed an immigrant another courtroom door was arrested. These ICE seizures make obeying the law dangerous.

Punishing people who took a risk in trusting you or who put their lives at risk to help you is a special kind of evil. It’s the devil trying to kill the guy who came to save the baby.

That is what I finally realized was so disturbing about that scary story I heard in sixth grade. I’m used to stories where the bad are punished and the good are rewarded. Shouldn’t the devil tempt us with money or power or a vice of some kind? Why would the devil punish someone who was trying to do something kind?

The United States today is punishing the Dreamers who trusted their government when it said it would help them. It’s punishing refugees and asylum seekers who are in the country legally, following systems set up by the United Nations and international law. It’s punishing our allies who stood next to us in war when it was far easier to do nothing. It’s punishing people already in the legal system.

The jump scare might make you shake and keep you up at night, but it’s injustice that is truly terrifying. If you have a heart and you have a soul, it can haunt you for the rest of your life.