on citizenship.

I still remember the edges of my childhood green card, worn smooth from all the times I'd ask to hold it. Whenever we were packing for another trip back to Venezuela, I'd beg my mom to let me see that laminated piece of paper with "RESIDENT ALIEN" printed across the top.

That small piece of plastic, along with my Venezuelan passport, was my ticket between two worlds after my dad's job brought us here when I was four. I had no idea then how different my path would be from what so many families face today.

Looking back, my story to citizenship was remarkably straightforward. A few years after we moved, my father studied for and passed his naturalization test. My mother? She was already an American citizen, born near D.C. while my grandfather was stationed there as part of a Venezuelan naval exchange program.

Because of their status, citizenship was basically handed to my sister and me. We got our American passports when I was in high school. I know now how incredibly privileged that was, especially as I've watched others fight through immigration systems that seem designed to break people.

The truth is, most immigration stories aren't as clean as mine. There are about 4.7 million American households where family members have different immigration statuses – some documented, some not. Compare that to just 1.1 million households where everyone lacks status, and you start to see how immigration touches almost everyone in some way.

And then there are the Dreamers – around 538,000 people still caught in DACA limbo. Many of them started advocating for themselves as teenagers and now have teenagers of their own. They're Americans in every way that matters, yet they're still stuck in this awful political holding pattern, their futures hanging on whatever mood Congress happens to be in.

The stakes keep getting higher. The Trump administration is trying to reinterpret the Constitution to strip citizenship not just from children of undocumented immigrants, but even from kids born to legal residents. The Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on Trump's executive order limiting birthright citizenship in the coming days – a decision that could upend more than a century of legal understanding.

After the Civil War, we added the 14th Amendment specifically to guarantee that anyone born here is American. The Supreme Court backed this up in 1898 when it ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that a child born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants was definitely a U.S. citizen, no matter what anyone thought about his parents.

If the Court overturns birthright citizenship, with a ruling potentially coming any day, it would unravel everything. The constitutional right that made my mother American at birth created this whole chain of belonging – to me, my sister, and now her kids.

I remember having to replace my Social Security card a few years ago. I ended up chatting in Spanish with the woman helping me, and she gently warned me that my application might take longer because my passport was my only proof of citizenship. It was unsettling – after more than 30 years here, after being American in every way I know how to be, suddenly my place felt uncertain.

If I felt uncertain about my citizenship, I can only imagine what it's like for people with more complicated stories.

This policy shapes generations, not just individual lives or whoever's in office. My pretty privileged path shows how random these distinctions really are – how an accident of birth or timing decides whether someone's American dream comes with the right paperwork or stays frustratingly out of reach.

As we face people who want to redefine what counts as American and punish those who don't fit their narrow view, I keep thinking about how immigration isn't really about borders. It's about families, communities, and the story we're all writing together.

Behind every form, every statistic, every angry policy debate, there are journeys way more complicated than mine – families building lives across borders and generations, contributing to their communities, becoming part of what makes America work. The question isn't whether these stories belong in our future. It's whether we'll finally admit they've always been essential to who we are.