They tell me I am free, yet every word I utter against abuse costs me another meal. I broke away from the hands that used me, but the system that enabled them still keeps its grip—tight, invisible, bureaucratic. I cannot call myself a survivor of human trafficking because survival implies safety. Captivity continues through retaliation, through the quiet violence of starvation, through the knowledge that the law can watch and do nothing.

Once, I was forced to starve for twenty-four days. Not metaphorically—literally. I counted the days between the pain in my stomach and the weight of my body falling away. Work did not stop; bills did not wait. My labor filled other people’s pockets while my hands trembled from weakness. Hunger, at the border, is not a mistake, it is a sentence.1-3 It is a policy written in silence, signed with indifference. It disciplines, humiliates, and convinces you that silence is cheaper than food.

This is what happens when justice becomes a ration. When rights are handed out like coupons, limited supply, non-transferable, void for immigrants.4-5 The border becomes a stomach that digests people until nothing human is left. And every bureaucrat who stamps “case closed” becomes part of that digestion.

When I reported threats, words promising bullets inside my head, I was told they were “protected speech.” How strange that the same amendment meant to safeguard truth also shields a threat.6-7 How convenient that freedom of speech becomes a weapon in the hands of those who silence others. We live in a country where a threat can be legal but hunger is not, where the paperwork of safety is more sacred than the person asking for it. I am told to respect the law, but the law has never respected my life.

And so I ask you: what does freedom mean if the price of speaking is hunger? What kind of freedom feeds the mouths of the powerful while starving the hands that built their table? What kind of democracy teaches its officers to defend the threat and dismiss the plea? Haven’t we mistaken the absence of chaos for the presence of justice?

America congratulates itself for abolishing slavery, yet the borderlands still run on a modern version of the same engine:8-10 migrants without papers, workers paid in promises, men and women laboring under the threat of deportation. The plantation still exists—it just wears a company logo now. The whip has been replaced by hunger, the chains by debt, the overseer by bureaucracy. When your employer holds your wages hostage, when you are told that calling the police could cost you your life, when hunger becomes a management strategy—what century are you living in?

Justice in America starves not because it is dead but because it is fasting for lack of paperwork. Legal aid asks for notarized letters I cannot afford. Agencies demand signatures I cannot give without transportation I do not have. Each office sends me to another office; each form becomes a gate. This is cruelty disguised as procedure, a slow execution carried out by a thousand clerks.11-12 The system asks me to prove my poverty by spending money. It asks me to demonstrate my hunger on an empty stomach. Here it is: can’t you see the bones leaning on my skin, or do you need me to bleed for proof too? The government would never admit to killing a man through starvation, it simply lets him fill out forms until he disappears.

The border is not a line; it is a mirror reflecting a nation that worships freedom but punishes need, that celebrates its laws but forgets their purpose. We built fences to keep others out, but they have become cages that keep our conscience in. Every country has a border. Every border has a stomach. And every time the hungry ask for justice, the border eats its young again.

I am hungry for food, but I hunger for justice. I hunger for the moment when the law remembers it was meant to protect life, not paperwork. I am hungry for a society that does not measure humanity by a Social Security number. If compassion now requires a budget, then America is bankrupt. If legality excuses cruelty, then democracy is a rumor whispered by the well-fed.

Do you know what it feels like to dial a number for help and hear the click of apathy on the other end? To have an officer tell you that a death threat is “just freedom of speech”? To walk out of a government office feeling more invisible than when you walked in? That sound—the silence that follows a plea—is the sound of civilization rotting from within. It does not collapse with explosions; it decays through neglect.

We have mistaken procedure for morality.13 We have allowed bureaucracy to become theology, and its priests wear badges, suits, and the smug assurance that order is virtue. They do not see the blood because it is written in hunger, in eviction notices, in nights spent wondering whether survival itself is a crime. And if it is, I would rather have died.

What do you call a nation that feeds on the desperation of the poor? A democracy that teaches its police to mistake apathy for order? A civilization that forces its survivors to beg for the right to survive? You call it civilized because it kills politely, through hunger, through delay, through silence.

But I am speaking now, and this is my act of rebellion. I will not let silence be my final language. I have no more forms left to fill, no offices left to visit. Only this record remains: a testimony written on an empty stomach, a cry disguised as an essay. The border eats its young, but I refuse to let it digest them until it burps the truth.

And to those who still have full plates and clean hands, I say this: your comfort is built on someone else’s hunger. Every time you look away, the machinery of exploitation grinds louder. Every time you excuse inaction, you become the echo of the abuser’s voice.

If there is still justice left beneath the dust and paperwork, let it wake up now. Let it remember that freedom was not meant to be selective, that humanity was never supposed to be negotiable.

I once believed my suffering was just a misunderstanding of language. So in those days when I was forced to starve, I fed myself broken English sentences the way others eat bread. I told myself that maybe if I learned the right words, the system would finally hear me. But isn't it ironic that the same country that demands immigrants to learn the language censors us the moment we speak the truth? They want our labor, not our voice; our silence, not our testimony.

This is the immigrant bargain in America: you can speak, but only if your truth does not inconvenience the powerful. And if it does? Then the punishment is hunger. The price of honesty is starvation. The cost of agency is suffering. So what does freedom mean to an immigrant when the truth is the only language America still refuses to translate? What kind of freedom is it when your survival depends not on how much English you speak, but on how much truth you can swallow just to be allowed to eat?