I have mentioned in previous columns that most Americans are the products of immigration. Unless you are a Native American, you have an immigration story. It is preposterous for Americans to complain about immigrants when they wouldn’t be here in the first place if not for the immigrants in their own family tree.

Let me tell you about Hansine Christine Nielsen Hansen, my great-great grandmother. She was born in 1843 in Bornholm, Denmark. When she was 2, her father died, leaving her mother and three sisters. Her mother remarried and in 1854 the family prepared to immigrate to America when she was just eleven years old, along with three of her new half-siblings. They sailed from Denmark to Louisiana.

Once they arrived in New Orleans they planned to take a steamer ship up the Mississippi River to St. Louis. Along the way cholera broke out on the ship and her mother, sister, brother, and one half-sister all died of the disease. Hansine was now an orphan, except for this step-father, in this new country where she didn’t speak the language.

Imagine how frightened she must have been. Everything was foreign to her. Her mother and siblings were hastily buried and they moved on. She must have been in absolute shock as she made the rest of the journey up the river and then began the route west to cross the prairie and mountains.

However, she didn’t have anyone chasing her down asking her immigration status or checking for her immigration papers. There were none. She, like millions of other newly arrived Danes and Swedes and Norwegians and Brits and Scots and Irish and Germans and French and people from so many other countries, simply walked off their ships and into this new land that they had claimed as their new home.

And so, when I hear of mass deportations of immigrants in recent months, I get angry. When I hear of Homeland Security Agents going into schools in Los Angeles attempting to “check on” children in the schools, I get angry. When I hear about emails being sent to immigrants with temporary status telling them that it is time for them to leave the United States, I get angry.

I think of Hansine and all that she went through to get to the United States, of all that she lost along the way, of all that she sacrificed for her posterity (now numbering over 1,000 people) to live here and have the rights and freedoms of this country and I can’t believe that we have come to this moment where we are rounding up people and driving them out because we don’t think that they belong here.

Search your family tree. Learn the stories of your ancestors. Find out what they sacrificed so that you could live in the home of the free, the land of the brave. Get to know our newly-arrived Americans and hear what they have gone through to get here and why they want to be here. Surely it is similar to what happened not so long ago in our own families. Let us not close our eyes, ears, and hearts to what is happening; before we know it, it could happen to us.