“When I accompany asylum-seekers to the US border, I know things can go wrong. It was my fourth time doing it when I approached the Lukeville Port of Entry in Arizona with Reneé last month. None of the previous times had gone smoothly.

But what I did not expect was to get arrested. I’d talked to lawyers up and down the border for months about risks, and getting locked up was never on the menu. Even as our constitutional rights are stripped away in service of the president’s anti-immigrant fearmongering, no one had ever been arrested for accompanying an asylum-seeker before. So, no, I did not expect to be declared a smuggler, stripped of my belt and shoes, and thrown in a concrete cell to be held “as long as we want to hold you” that day.” Read more at Buzzfeed News here.