This Is What Terror Sounds Like
Reading Time: 3 minutes
By Lisa Hayes for Confluence Daily
Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
First, there was the click of the cuffs.
Not in secret. Not in shadow.
They wanted you to hear it.
The clink of restraint, the choke of authority tightening around one man’s wrists—so you would know it could be your wrists next.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia wasn’t a criminal. He wasn’t a ghost slipping through borders.
He had lived in the U.S. since he was a child. He had a job, a family, and a court order to protect him from deportation.
But none of that mattered.
Because Donald Trump doesn’t need law.
He is the law now.
When Kilmar was taken—snatched, disappeared, dragged onto a plane bound for El Salvador in direct defiance of tge law—Trump didn’t just violate the Constitution.
He declared war on it.
This wasn’t immigration enforcement.
This was an act of terror.
This was a calculated display of power meant to paralyze a nation into silence.
To make you watch, and flinch, and say,
“Thank God it wasn’t me.”
We are all saying it. We are all more afraid than we were before.
This was a message:
No one is safe now. And you know it.
You feel it.
It’s visceral.
The sound of the cuffs.
The soft, confused cry of a child watching his father vanish.
The sobbing of a family that had done everything right.
The flat roar of an engine that drowns out justice.
The silence of a courtroom rendered impotent.
The echo of concrete walls in a Salvadoran prison built to cage hope itself.
That is what democracy sounds like—as it dies.
And if you think you’re protected, if you think you’re one of the “real” Americans,
know this:
Being detained by immigration and put on a plane in 2025 is the moral equivalent of being loaded onto a train in 1935.
The mechanisms are different.
The outcome is the same.
You are not safe because of your passport.
You are not safe because of your whiteness, your papers, your silence.
That safety is a story you were told so you wouldn’t see the furnace being built around you.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was not deported.
He was offered up as a warning.
He is fascisms sacrificial lamb on the altar of terrorism at the hands of our President.
And the only question now is this:
Will you kneel and whisper your thanks for being spared,
or will you rise and scream that this ends here?
If the homegrowns—those of us raised on the myth of liberty—don’t come to the front now,
there will be no one left to fight.
And no one left to hear the sound
when the last dream of democracy finally goes silent.
This moment in history will be remembered as the beginning OR the end.
Lisa Hayes is a life coach, writer, and editor of Confluence Daily, specializing in social issues, political issues, and mental health. Her work has appeared in publications like Huffington Post and Real Simple. She is also the Communications Director for a local fire department in Mexico and runs a life coach training program called The Coaching Guild.
