I’m glad to be writing a blog post again! So much to catch up on and write about as always. Today my wife and I have finally started some house cleaning and simplifying which is still incomplete, but much better! I’m hoping to finish up loose ends tomorrow.

This last week, I was especially touched by the ongoing, generous, and expert help from my amazing aunt who is our immigration lawyer (my dad’s older brother’s 3rd wife).

I’m still processing my wife’s green card approval this week. We caught up so much regarding both immigration policy and my relatives from her trip here. I soaked up all the fascinating, niche info like a sponge!

My wife and I had our USCIS green card interview this week at the Portland, Oregon field office, where my aunt attended as our counsel. Despite our two hour wait past our scheduled time, the flamboyant, friendly, and young Latino officer approved us with a short interview—an easy approval that would have all but certainly happened without an interview under any other administration. It’s a real shame that applicants are effectively treated as guilty until proven innocent by our system. What a stark deviation from the supposed “American” value of innocent until proven guilty—the way immigration benefits SHOULD be adjudicated. That said, our bona fide innocence was indeed proven. Proven, as in substantiated with what felt like two reams of paper worth of evidence!

The interview was a good reminder that even in big, dysfunctional institutions like USCIS under the oppressive leadership of xenophobic dickheads like Joseph Edlow and Stephen Miller, many civil servants in these dark times quietly keep their heads down, and still try to do right by immigrants and their U.S. citizen family members.

For my wife, it is a total identity shift she’s still processing (and indirectly, I suppose me too). From my experience, I feel like I’ve upheld my civic duty as an American at least as much, and maybe even more than the virtues of voting or jury duty, by petitioning someone I love. With a green card, we both can freely travel internationally, and never have to worry about insecure, short-term immigration status again. I know my wife can apply for citizenship in the future, and have a potential path to eventually get her parents and sister permanent status, even in the worst possible case of our marriage failing.

I’d be remiss not to mention, albeit a day late, the infamous quadranscentennial of what changed our immigration system for the worse. I’m among the oldest in the post-9/11 generation, as everyone I know my age and younger than me, has the fortune of not remembering, while everyone older than me does. I’m confident that we’d otherwise still correctly treat immigration as a civil rights issue with the INS still under the DOJ, rather than a national security issue under the DHS, if it had not happened. I know ICE would never have been established alongside DHS in 2003. I’d imagine some meaningful immigration reform would have actually happened—imperfect sure, but light years better than the status quo. In fact, I don’t remember the U.S. ever really being “great” or exceptional the way older people do. It seems all the more justifiably true for all of Gen Z, than for younger Millennials like me.

It was a total timing coincidence on the calendar that my first Dougy Center orientation took place yesterday—an organization dedicated to helping people, especially children, cope with grief from death, particularly of a caregiver or sibling. I volunteered to be a facilitator, at the ongoing recommendation of my individual therapist. It was nothing short of touching and inspiring to learn, in-person, with 40 or so others, the impactful work they do. Although I won’t be able to fully join as a facilitator until early in 2027 due to this Fall’s scheduling conflicts, I’m proud to have officially started the process. I look forward to having this service to humanity as a meaningful way to experience connection higher than myself, and speaking more on this soon!