Borders Are Not Our Inheritance
a letter and invitation to my own
This letter is not easy to write because it’s for the people I love deeply: my collective people. The same people who taught me that we gather in community when someone has passed, who build gurdware from the ground up in towns where no one knows how to pronounce our names and remind me that we are meant to feed the collective. It’s for my elders who survived, my brothers who protect, my sisters who endure, and for those who quietly look away.
It’s also for the ones who voted for Trump, or stayed silent while others did. For the ones who continue to be unmoved when ICE raids our neighborhoods. For the ones who thought their tax bracket would shield them from the machinery of state violence. I write this out of love, yes. But also out of grief. And truthfully, out of rage.
Dear Punjabi and Sikh community members,
I have to ask, as our own are being detained, as our own are being deported, why is it that SOME of us act as if that could never happen to us? Some of us hide behind wealth or whiteness, thinking justice is a choice and that safety is something you can buy or vote into power. But guess what? It isn’t. And it never was.
I regret to inform you and as this conversation is more vital than ever, we cannot keep pretending that this is not our problem. When we do, we betray the very spirit of Sikhi. A tradition born in defiance of hierarchy. A history marked by refusal to bow, be it to Mughals, colonizers, or modern-day tyrants with police badges and government titles. We carry a lineage of resistance in our very names. So why are we so afraid to live it?
Have many of us have forgotten how we got here? Not just to this country, but to this place of comfort. We forget that many of our parents overstayed visas, worked under the table, applied for asylum with trembling hands. We forget that it wasn’t long ago we were called terrorists on the street, that our men were frisked at airports, that our mothers were laughed at in Walmart aisles for their salwar kameez. We forget because forgetting feels easier than confronting the truth: the security we think we have is fragile. And not everyone in our community has it. We’re comfortable not caring or thinking about it.
There is a kind of selective amnesia that wealth breeds. It tells you that your experience is universal. That because you are okay, everyone else should be too. But this is a dangerous lie, especially in a community where class disparities run so deep. There are Punjabi immigrants who own car dealerships and apartment complexes. And there are Punjabi immigrants sleeping six to a room, hoping their boss doesn’t ask too many questions. There are Sikhs with second homes in San Ramon. And Sikhs who haven’t seen their children in a decade because returning to India might mean death. There are women enduring domestic violence in silence because they fear deportation. There are queer and trans Punjabi folks kicked out of their families with no safety net. But when those with money speak, they often speak as if they speak for us all.
I write this not only as someone who cares deeply, but as an immigrant myself. I carry the memory of arriving. The fear in my mother’s eyes when papers were delayed. The stories my father still tells of waiting, and uncertainty. I have heard the whispered accounts in Punjabi of boat crossings, of hiding in the backs of trucks, of walking through jungles, and of buying one-way tickets with no promise of return. We all know someone who came here this way. Maybe we don’t talk about it at the dinner table, but we know. So how did we become a people so quick to forget the journey that brought us here?
And worse, why do we now hate our own for trying to do the same?
I have sat in rooms where aunties mocked new arrivals for their English. Where uncles laughed at the laborers who live five to a room. Where people with citizenship papers and property sneered at asylum seekers as if trauma has a hierarchy, as if worth can be measured in immigration status. It hurts to say this, but we have become participants in the very violence that once shaped us.
Our caste and class bias runs deeper than we want to admit. And it doesn’t stop at our own community. I have seen the disdain some Punjabi folks carry for Central American migrants, for undocumented Black and Brown neighbors, for anyone who doesn't match a narrow vision of worthiness. But we should know better. I know we do know better. Don’t we?
Every time we turn away, every time we say, “They didn’t come the right way,” what we are really saying is, “I got mine, and that’s enough.” That isn’t Sikhi. That’s settler logic. That’s empire speaking through us.
And still, even in all this movement, we must not forget where we have landed. We are settlers on stolen land. This country was never ours to inherit. It was taken violently from Indigenous people whose sovereignty continues to be denied, whose treaties have been broken, whose lands are still under occupation. While we grieve our own displacements, we must not ignore the ones our arrival helped perpetuate. The privilege of beginning again here often came at someone else’s expense.
And to live here with integrity means reckoning with that. It means learning whose land we are on. It means refusing to see ourselves as exceptional immigrants while Indigenous communities still fight for clean water, land back, and basic recognition. It means knowing that justice is not linear or selective, and that our freedom is bound to theirs.
More than ever, I am begging us to to understand that privilege does not absolve you from responsibility. It demands deeper accountability. Your ability to avoid the consequences of ICE, police, or poverty does not mean those systems are just. It means they are selective. And you, for now, are on the more comfortable side. But comfort is not safety and your silence is not protection.
I have even heard some of you say you voted for Trump because he was “good for business,” or because “Democrats don’t do anything either.” I hear you. But what is the cost of that decision? What did you buy with that vote? Tax cuts? A little more market stability? What you also bought were children in cages. Muslim bans. White supremacist dog whistles turned to sirens. And a deportation apparatus that did not blink before tearing families apart, including Sikh families.
Do not say you stand for justice if you only mean justice for people who look, act, and earn like you. And to those who still say, “We’re not like them”, and the “them” being undocumented, working class, poor, Black, queer, brown from other countries — I want to ask you, gently but firmly, who taught you to think this way? Because it wasn’t our Gurus.
Guru Nanak Dev Ji walked with the displaced. Guru Arjan Dev Ji gave his life for the right of others to worship. Guru Gobind Singh Ji created a Khalsa that rejected caste and class, that welcomed the barber and the water carrier alongside the warrior. We were never meant to gatekeep liberation. We were always meant to embody it.
I am writing this now because I see so many of us performing Sikhi on Sundays. We tie our best paghs, offer langar, bow before the Guru Granth Sahib Ji and yet forget that Sikhi lives between those acts too. In how we vote. In who we advocate for. In when we speak up, and when we don’t.
Some of you say politics doesn’t belong in the gurdwara. But our entire faith is political. Our very existence as a sovereign community is a challenge to oppression. There is no such thing as neutrality in Sikhi. There never was. Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji didn’t die for the right to remain silent. Mai Bhago didn’t take up arms so we could sit comfortably and call ourselves “apolitical.” You may not wear a uniform or a sword, but make no mistake: your silence is a position. And so is your vote.
When you support policies or people who criminalize migration, you criminalize our very history. Partition displaced us. The British empire scattered us. We came here, like so many others, seeking breath. You do not get to close the door behind you and say the house is full.
And to my brothers and sisters who still have doubts, who still say, “But they should have come the right way,” I offer this: the right way didn’t exist for us either. Not when we were being hunted. Not when we were fleeing poverty. Not when we arrived at borders with nothing but our faith and our fear.
We made our way through kindness. Through luck. Through loopholes. Through community. Through prayers answered in the form of strangers who didn’t ask us for proof, only presence. But not everyone makes it.
In 2019, Gurpreet Kaur, a six-year-old Punjabi Sikh girl, died alone in the Arizona desert. She and her mother had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, seeking asylum from India. They were fleeing violence, just like so many before them. When her mother went to search for water, Gurpreet was left behind in the scorching heat. Her small body was later found in a remote area known for death. Her story barely made the news, even in our own community.
But Gurpreet is not distant. She is ours. Her death is not a fluke of migration. It is the result of a system designed to make people disappear. It is the cost of borders. The cost of criminalizing survival. The cost of policies many of us supported, or ignored.
If we cannot grieve her collectively, if we cannot fight so that no other child suffers her fate, then what is the point of all our prayers? That is what Sikhi demands now. Not perfection. Not political purity. But presence. A willingness to see beyond our own homes and our own families.
I am not asking you to agree with every policy. I am asking you to care. I am asking you to break your silence when others cannot afford to. I am asking you to remember that the same state that deports the undocumented will not hesitate to surveil us again. That the same government that criminalizes Blackness will not hesitate to criminalize Punjabi people or Sikhs. That the same system that cages children will not stop to ask if they are Singh or Garcia. Will you change your name then? What will you change next after that?
To be Sikh is to be more than visible. It is to be accountable. So I write this to call you back, not to shame you, but to remind you. You come from warriors, poets, farmers, land laborers, fugitives, saints. You come from border crossers and boundary breakers. You come from people who refused to believe the world couldn’t be better.
Return to that memory. Return to that calling. Return to the truth. Because borders are not our inheritance. Justice is.
And if none of this moves you, if the cages don’t stir your heart, if the raids don’t raise your voice, if your Sikh neighbor being deported doesn’t ignite your spirit, then I have to ask:
Why call yourself Punjabi?
Why call yourself Sikh?
What does it mean to wear a pagh, to say Waheguru, to eat langar, to bow before our Guru, if you will not stand when it matters? If you will not speak when people are taken? If you will not show up when the same systems that once came for us now come for others?
Punjabi is not just a language. It is land and lineage and loss and resilience. Sikh is not just a religion. It is a rebellion of love. It is the refusal to leave anyone behind.
So if you claim these identities but deny the responsibilities that come with them, then maybe the word you’re looking for isn’t “Sikh.” It’s “spectator.”
And we were never meant to be spectators. We were meant to be the ones who shield the strangers, and who interrupt empire in whatever form it arrives. We are not a passive people.
So again if you will not stand for justice, if you will not stand for the undocumented, the displaced, the caged, the hunted, then what, truly, do you stand for?
Because Sikh is not a word you inherit. It is one you live.
If this stirred something in you, let it move you to action. And if you’ve made it this far, thank you. I know this letter was heavy. I did not write it to be comfortable. I wrote it to be honest. If it moved you, unsettled you, challenged you: sit with that. Share it. Talk about it with your parents. Ask your gurdwara committee what they’re doing to support undocumented sangat. Bring it up in your group chat, even if a family member gets mad.
We cannot be free until we are all free. And freedom means more than a visa. It means showing up even when it doesn’t benefit you. Especially then.
And lastly, here are some tangible ways to act:
Support Sikh asylum seekers through checking out these orgs:
Read more on this history:
“We Too Sing America” by Deepa Iyer
“Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Reports from Detention Watch Network
Talk about it at home:
Translate this essay for your parents
Ask your gurdwara to host a community education session on ICE and immigrant rights
Speak to your elders about what it means to be culturally Punjabi and/or religiously Sikh beyond ritual
We are all we got.
In remembrance,
in resistance,
in radical love,
Damneet
Cover image by Amir Khafagy. Sikh community rallies against Trump in Queens January 8, 2025.