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Home is where you feel more at home…

But what if every door slammed shut—

What if home was an echo that faded

Eaten by walls of wire and rust.

They say:

"It's just detention."

But these halls murmur the moans of ghosts,

Spirits muzzled by cold procedure,

Hurt masked as policy.

I was one.

Just one.

Swept from light into the darkness of the system,

Where time recalls none of your names—

And mercy is a rumour too costly to believe.

I came not with threat,

But hope like a candle in a storm.

They did not look upon my face,

But the paper it was written on.

To them, I was a case—

A number.

An echo in a corridor

Where sympathy goes to die.

You speak of law,

Yet law wore shackles on my wrists.

You speak of rights,

Yet mine were ripped like flesh from bone—

Sanitised with smiles,

Their brutality bore no fangs, only forms.

Inside was 130 degrees.

Inside was fear.

Within a prayer was in the middle of a sentence.

Within, I tasted death—

And death turned away with cold heart.

I've seen the vacant faces of men

Who'd lost sight of what their children smell like.

I've slept with shadows

Who cry to the cracks in the wall,

Implored them to open into sky.

And yet,

No camera captured the scream.

No headline written our pain.

We were not news.

We were "overstays."

"Illegal entries., mighty alliens"

Stories buried before they are born.

And know this—

Torture doesn't always scream.

Sometimes, it's clipped to

Sometimes, it's a statement.

But I write.

I write for the silenced whose words are overwhelmed by ink and complacency.

I pen for the mothers imprisoned for having dared to imagine liberty.

I am writing to the man whose dignity is drowned in the flood of castle walls.

I write because silence is surrender — and I will not be still.

I urge you:

Unlearn what they’ve taught you to fear.

Unsee the monster they claim I am.

Undo the borders you’ve built in your heart.

Not all fences are made of metal

Some are woven into your media, your minds,

Your morning coffee conversations.

This is my request

Not for pity,

But for accounting.

For you to look past the suit, the badge, the policy.

And catch

a human being,

a heart,

a tear.

This is not about me.

This is about the cold machinery

That grinds the bones of the displaced into statistics.

That jails hope

And calls it "immigration control."

So here I stand—broken, but alive.

A man who dared to dream beyond boundaries.

A migrant.

A soul.

A survivor.

And this

This is

my plea.