The Inspiration behind Extreme Vetting

The Inspiration behind Extreme Vetting

by Roxana Arama

One afternoon in 2018, I was browsing the news on my phone when I saw a video of the president of the United States at a rally, reading a poem about a venomous snake and a kind-hearted woman. The woman took the snake home to warm and feed, but the snake bit and killed her. The president compared immigrants to snakes that should be crushed underfoot before they bite the generous hand that fed them.

I was horrified. Could someone really look at me and see a dangerous beast deserving to be killed? I later learned that the president had been performing that appalling routine since he was a candidate, but with everything else offensive he always said, the snake poem had never risen to the level of national outrage.

I went to the kitchen to prepare lunch for my kids, and I walked past my five-year old daughter sitting on the floor with a coloring book. As I stared into the fridge still in shock, my daughter asked me something—I don’t remember what—and I snapped at her, “Don’t talk to me right now. Just leave me alone!”

Moments later, I realized what I had done. My daughter was still on the floor, but now she had tears in her big brown eyes, and her lower lip quivered. I sat down with her and apologized. I used simple words to say it wasn’t her fault. I’d raised my voice because I was upset that Trump had compared me to a snake, and I was hurt and angry. She said she understood. Years later she still asks, “Do you remember when Trump made you angry and you yelled at me?”

One evening in October 2018, after we put the kids to sleep, my husband and I were chatting. I mentioned again how frustrated I was with our public discourse on immigration. He thought I should write about it. In an instant, I began envisioning a new book. It would be a thriller, even though the genre I usually wrote in was speculative fiction. I could draw from my almost twenty years of living in my adoptive country among other immigrants. I would take the readers inside our immigration system so they could see for themselves how complex and broken it sometimes is. And I would also assert the humanity of foreign-born people that the snake poem at the Trump rally had questioned.

I started working the next day, writing notes about certain episodes in my life I could use for my protagonist’s backstory. As a naturalized citizen since 2009, staying informed in order to vote in every election had always been a priority. But now I had a specific reason to research the laws and politics of immigration.

Soon, the novel’s plot started to take shape. Seattle, Washington, 2019: An immigration lawyer fights to keep her client from being deported to the country where his family was murdered many years ago. Then she finds out the killers are coming here—for both of them. She’s a single mom and an immigrant herself, and she tries to protect her daughter and her client’s sons as she uncovers a deadly conspiracy involving an ICE prosecutor, stolen data, and human trafficking.

I called a friend who’s an immigration lawyer and asked if my story was plausible, and we discussed a couple of recent criminal sentences against ICE prosecutors in Washington State. I wanted to understand more about the legal framework, so she kindly agreed to a series of interviews and follow-ups as I wrote and edited the novel. Even though I had gone through the immigration process twice—once with a work visa for my software development job, and once through my marriage to an American citizen—I didn’t quite grasp the complex system spanning the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the agencies in between. A system both protecting and harming our country.

Meanwhile I followed the immigration news—and in 2019 there was no shortage of it in the media. Though most articles focused on the separation of families at the border, I looked for stories about long-term immigrants who were parents of American-born children, like me. Under the Trump administration, families that had been safe before were now targeted for arrest and deportation. The plan was that even US citizens should have their background reexamined and, if possible, their naturalization revoked. This program was called “extreme vetting,” a term our entertainment-minded president had coined for “enhanced scrutiny of immigrants.” 

Friends and family suggested books and articles for me to read. My local bookstore provided me with titles that informed my writing, either thrillers or novels written by immigrants. I worked hard and completed the manuscript in fourteen months, hoping to publish it before the November 2020 elections as my tiny contribution to our public discourse on immigration. Of course, publishing being slow by nature, Extreme Vetting will finally be out at the beginning of 2023. But I believe it’s still a timely story. And its publication date happens to be twenty-two years to the day since my arrival in the United States as an immigrant, on February 7, 2001.

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Roxana Arama is a Romanian American author with a master of fine arts in creative writing from Goddard College. She studied computer science in Bucharest, Romania and moved to the United States to work in software development. Her short stories and essays have been published in several literary magazines. Extreme Vetting is her first novel. She lives in Seattle, Washington with her family. More at https://roxanaarama.com/.

EXTREME VETTING

An immigration lawyer fights to keep her client from being deported and losing his family. But those who want him gone will stop at nothing—including murder.

Seattle, Washington, 2019. Attorney and single mom Laura Holban is an immigrant herself, guiding clients through a Kafkaesque system of ever-changing rules, where overworked judges make life-shattering decisions in minutes. Laura’s newest client is Emilio Ramirez, who was arrested in front of his sons at their high school and thrown in detention.

When Laura files for Emilio’s asylum, the world turns upside down. False criminal charges prevent his release, someone is following his family, and an ICE prosecutor threatens to revoke Laura’s US citizenship. None of it makes sense—until she uncovers a deadly conspiracy involving ICE, stolen data, and human trafficking.

Now the man at the center of it all is coming after Laura and Emilio, who must find a way to survive—and keep their families safe.

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Category: On Writing