Let My People Go
In the face of fear.
History has a simple trick for the powerful. If you want to rule, split a people. Give one group a story about why the other group is dangerous. Stamp them with a label. Turn fear into policy. Pharaohs did it. Rome did it. Colonial governors did it. Jim Crow politicians did it. Union-busters did it with Pinkertons at their side. The playbook does not change, only the costume.
In America the target rotates. Today it is the immigrant. The word illegal does political work. It pretends a person can be a crime. It turns neighbors into suspects. It trains us to confuse hardship with threat. While we argue at the bottom about who deserves bread, the top consolidates power and pockets the bakery.
So let my people go is not only about chains. It is a refusal to keep feeding systems that run on separation. It is the sentence spoken across time to each new pharaoh. Release the grip. Stop the raids. Stop the lie that scarcity is the fault of the hands that harvest our food and clean our hospitals.
The story of Moses reminds us what happens when a ruler mistakes labor for property. Pharaoh believed the Hebrews were his to command, that their work was his to spend, their children his to kill. But Moses stood before him and spoke the line that echoes through every age of oppression: let my people go. It was not only a demand for release, but a challenge to the entire structure of power, a system that depended on division, on fear, on the lie that some lives exist only to serve others.
And here we are again, dressed in modern clothes but living the same script. ICE raids sweep through neighborhoods, workplaces, and courthouses with the same message Pharaoh carried: these people are not yours, they are ours to control. Yet the evidence tells another story. Study after study shows immigrants are not criminals, not threats, but part of the American body. They are our brothers and sisters, the ones beside us on the job site, in the fields, in the bread line, in the pew. They do not stand apart from the American people; they are woven into its fabric.
Not the oligarchs. Not the billionaires who sit at the top of the pyramid, insulated by their fortunes, watching while the rest of us are pitted against one another. The people being raided, detained, and deported are not the ones draining our wages or collapsing our healthcare system. They are not the ones buying elections, writing loopholes into tax codes, or moving factories overseas. The divide is not between citizen and immigrant. It is between those who labor and those who live off that labor. The United States was born in revolt against a king’s tyranny, yet here we are, bowing before a new pharaoh class in corporate towers and marble offices. They’ve studied history well enough to know the trick: keep the poor fighting the poor, and nobody looks up. Keep us blaming the neighbor who speaks with an accent, and we won’t notice the hand in our pocket. Keep us suspicious of the worker in the field, and we won’t question why bread is scarce when the silos are full.
That is why the demand must stretch further than calling off the raids. Let my people go means taking back the means of life itself. Food. Health. Work. Pay. Protection. Freedom. These are not luxuries doled out at the whim of a benevolent ruler. They are the foundation stones of a people’s survival. Food does not belong to agribusiness that exploits labor while families starve. Health does not belong to pharmaceutical companies that ration medicine at the price of rent. Work does not belong to the corporations that offshore factories and crush unions. Pay does not belong to the executives who pocket more in an hour than their employees see in a year. Protection does not belong to militarized police who treat neighborhoods as occupied territory. And freedom does not belong to oligarchs who treat law as a tool for their wealth.
To allow these essentials to be monopolized is to accept the terms of bondage and to remain in Pharaoh’s house, stacking bricks for monuments that are never ours. The truth is simple: these things already come from us. The fields are plowed, the hospitals staffed, the homes built, the roads paved by our collective labor. We do not need permission to live. We need the courage to recognize that the power to live freely has always been in our own hands.
Let my people go is not only a line from scripture. It is a demand that echoes into this moment. It belongs on the lips of every worker pulled from a factory floor, every parent torn from a child, every voice silenced by raids carried out in our name. It is not ancient history. It is the language of resistance in the present tense.
We cannot wait for another Moses. We cannot keep waiting for a single leader to step forward with the staff and the thunder. That myth lets us believe salvation will be handed down. But the truth is harsher, and more powerful: we are the ones who must speak it. We are the ones who must carry it. When ICE comes for our neighbors, when corporations tighten the chains of debt, when politicians tell us scarcity is natural, our answer must be the same: let my people go.
And it cannot stop at words. The exodus will not be given, it must be made. It begins in the choices we make every day to refuse division. It begins when we defend each other’s right to bread, when we open our homes, when we link arms at job sites, when we refuse to look away as raids tear through our communities. It grows in the unions we build, in the sanctuaries we create, in the strikes that say plainly that Pharaoh’s monuments will not rise without us.
This is how a people walk out of Pharaoh’s shadow. Not by waiting for miracles, but by seeing each other as kin. This is how a nation built on rebellion remembers its promise: that the tyranny of a king, by any other name, cannot stand when the people stand together.
📜 Receipts: ICE, Labor, and the Pharaoh’s Lie
ICE Raids & Enforcement
In FY2023, ICE conducted over 142,000 arrests and nearly 117,000 deportations.
Workplace raids have surged, with high-profile crackdowns on poultry plants, farms, and construction sites, industries where immigrant labor is essential.
Most people targeted had no violent criminal record; the majority were picked up for civil immigration violations.
Who Really Feeds America
Roughly 73% of U.S. farmworkers are immigrants; about half are undocumented.
Without immigrant labor, food production, harvesting, and distribution would collapse. The bread on the table is already theirs as much as ours.
Economic Impact
Immigrants (documented and undocumented) contribute billions in federal, state, and local taxes annually.
Studies repeatedly show immigration reduces crime rates, contradicting the “threat” narrative used to justify raids.
The Real Scarcity
1% of Americans now control over 30% of national wealth.
Food insecurity affects over 44 million people in the U.S., not because of immigrants, but because of inequality in distribution and wages.
The receipts don’t lie. The raids aren’t about safety. They’re about keeping a people divided, while the real Pharaohs keep the silos locked.
TOW
ICE raids are Pharaoh’s chains, but this nation was built to break kings.
ETHER
The shadow of Pharaoh lingers, but the frequency says: the people walk free.