In the spring of 2009, a boy in a refugee camp in Nepal watched a United Nations official pin case numbers to a bamboo wall. His heart raced as he searched the papers for his family's nine-digit code that would determine their next chapter. He found it. Destination: Cleveland, Ohio, USA.
He ran through the camp's dusty paths to tell his mother the news, mispronouncing the country's name as "Umerica." To him, it meant escape. To his mother, who had already buried four children and lost everything to ethnic cleansing in Bhutan, it meant goodbye to the last threads of a life she once knew.
That boy grew up. He became a naturalized American citizen and a journalist. But when he began reporting on the U.S. immigration system, the questions became harder.
Over the past two years, this journalist has covered a Rohingya refugee who died after being abandoned by U.S. border patrol, mothers separated from their children, and refugees returned to countries they once fled in fear. He watched the refugee program that saved his own family grind nearly to a halt. In the meantime, it made exceptions for a small group of white South Africans.
"How do you love a country whose government sometimes fails to live up to the ideals that first drew your family here?" he found himself asking. The harder question came next: how do you continue loving neighbors and friends who welcomed your refugee family with extraordinary kindness, then later voted for leaders whose policies might have kept that same family from ever entering the country?
Born in a camp in Nepal after his family was driven from Bhutan during a campaign of ethnic cleansing that displaced more than 100,000 ethnic Nepalis, this journalist grew up belonging nowhere. To Bhutanese officials, he was a child born in exile. To Nepal, he was a refugee confined behind barbed wire. Every document identified him only as a refugee, not as a citizen of any nation.
Two years after his case number was posted, his family's paperwork changed. Instead of Cleveland, they were headed to Twin Falls, Idaho, a small rural town he had never heard of. What followed was a life that transformed him from a boy in a camp into an American.
His Idaho neighbors taught him how to drive, how to change a tire, how to fill out college applications. They invited him into their homes before he had much to offer in return. They became family. Many of those same people later voted for Donald Trump, whose immigration policies this journalist now investigates and often criticizes.
Holding those two truths together, loving the people who helped raise him while opposing some of their political choices, has never been easy. But it has become central to how he understands patriotism.
Through his reporting, he has seen two Americas at once. One is the small-town generosity that welcomed his family, reflected in volunteers, teachers, lawyers, and neighbors who continue opening doors to strangers. The other is a government that separates families, turns refugees away, and closes doors that were once opened to his own family. America has always contained both extraordinary compassion and profound contradiction.
"Loving this country has never required me to ignore either one," he says. "It has required me to hold them together."
That, to him, is the deepest form of patriotism. America's greatness has never come from being perfect. It has come from its capacity to welcome the stranger, expand the circle of belonging, and keep reaching toward ideals that remain just beyond its grasp. Some people have told him to "go home" because of his accent, the color of his skin, or where he was born. He knows they were wrong. This is his country, too.
Democracy depends on the willingness to see one another as more than political opponents, he believes. This republic is preserved not by agreeing on everything, but by refusing to give up on one another, by believing that fellow citizens are always capable of growth, and by continuing to work toward a country that is better for all.
Somewhere right now, another child is standing outside a refugee camp office, waiting for a list to be posted. When that child whispers the word "America," even if they cannot yet pronounce it, they are whispering the name of a country that believes impossible beginnings can become ordinary lives. That is the America the boy who shouted "Umerica" was waiting for. It is still the America he believes in.
Author James Rodriguez: "This is the rare story that refuses easy answers, and it's a reminder that love for country and criticism of government are not opposites but partners in democracy."
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