Can you picture this?: A member of your family, or a dear friend, has been taken by ICE and locked in Alligator Auschwitz. Do you have someone specific in your mind? Okay.

You’re incredibly worried about them, of course. You get a lawyer, and you check the ICE database every day to see if there is any news of them.

Then, one day, they aren’t in the database. You check to see if you had a typo. No. They just aren’t there. You call your lawyer. The lawyer can’t get any more information than you can. This person you love has disappeared. Been Disappeared by the US government.

Mtenaespinoza, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The spray paint says “No one deserves to disappear,” and the heading in red before his name and other information says “Until we find you!!!”

You are desperate for someone to help you–to do something–to force the administration to tell you where they are.

Now what happens? Either thousands, millions, of your fellow-citizens demand answers, pressuring their representatives and senators to demand hearings and ask the administration tough questions, keep shining a light into this dark corner of the country until whatever is hidden there becomes visible–

–or they don’t. There is no help. You and your beloved family member are left to suffer alone.

We’re not going to let that happen. We’re calling our members of Congress, now (or using the contact forms on their websites). We’re doing it again tomorrow, and again the day after that. We’re putting it on our to-do lists, and we won’t stop, because the life of someone’s father, sister, husband, best friend, child, grandson is at stake. And we know if one day it is our beloved who disappears, we will need the solidarity of our sibling-citizens to save them.