Since taking office, the Trump Administration has effected change at a dizzying pace–cutting the funding of many government agencies and programs; pursuing undocumented people; declaring trans and nonbinary people nonexistent; making diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts against the law; upending the U.S.’s relationships with other countries; and more.
For this spring’s contest, we asked writers to reflect on how their life has changed since Trump took office, if it has.
Here’s what they had to say:
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1st Place
Judy Kim
11th grade, Chadwick International School
South Korea
Five years after I had last seen my dad, he returned, teared up, sitting on the edge of an airport bench like he didn’t know who he was anymore. “Welcome to Korea” wasn’t the phrase he expected to hear. It sounded more like an eviction notice. My father had worked nearly five years in the U.S.—just three months short of qualifying for a green card—when it all collapsed. He was cut from his job just before the finish line, forced to leave everything behind: his career, his home, his dream. He came back with nothing but a suitcase and a silence that filled the house.
Trump’s presidency made visas harder to get, even for those who had already put in the time. My mom, who had a job offer from a hospital in the U.S., was still denied a working visa. Years of studying, training, and quiet perseverance were erased with the cold indifference of a single mailed rejection. She was forced to abandon the “American dream” we had built piece by piece, only to watch it collapse under a system that never intended to let us in.
As a Korean student preparing to study in the U.S., I now move through a nation tightened by suspicion and shrinking opportunity. Immigration laws have cinched into a kind of bureaucratic chokehold. My family exists in a permanent state of transit—always departing, always returning, never arriving. We live in the spaces between: between nations, between identities, between the promise of a future and the punishment of wanting one. The dream remains, but it no longer glows; it flickers behind layers of red tape, dimmed by a system that makes belonging feel like trespassing.
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2nd Place
Suri-Janaan Shaw
11th grade, Bard Early College High School
New York
Since Donald Trump took office in January, 2025, my life, and the lives of the people I love, have been nothing short of havoc-ridden. As a Black female student from a Caribbean immigrant family with established roots in the U.S., I’ve watched as fear and uncertainty grow within my family. Watching people I love who have worked so hard for over 20 years, building lives here, now live in constant fear of being deported. Their sense of security has been shaken in a nation that was once their safe haven. For some of my relatives who had dreams of gaining citizenship, their dreams have been shattered. I’ve seen them cry as they realize the harsh reality that their American dream will never come true. In these moments, I feel powerless, knowing I am unable to protect them from a future that feels so uncertain.
As a young Black woman, I too feel the weight of Trump’s policies, which seem to disregard my own womanhood and the worth of people who look just like me. It’s hard to escape the fear forced on me living in a world ruled by a man who does not value me or my community. Under his command, I feel as though I’ve been stripped of my rights and my dreams. One of those dreams being attending an HBCU, but under Trump’s administration they are cutting funding to these institutions and this vision just feels so far beyond my grasp. I’m left to question how much longer we, as a society, will have to endure under this hateful treatment. Trump’s presidency has left me feeling lost, undervalued, and terrified for my future as well as my family’s future.
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3rd Place
Ashani Ahuja
10th grade, The Nightingale-Bamford School
New York
Since January 21, 2025, I have learned that the city I call home is not just a place of resistance, but also of remembering.
The subways still hum their electric hymns, and steam still curls from the grates like ghosts unwilling to leave. But now, conversations cut quicker. Eyes linger longer, searching for something— recognition, reassurance, proof that this city makes room for us all.
I have felt the weight of vanished things. A legal aid office that fought for the undocumented, shuttered overnight. A teacher who no longer calls students by the names they choose. Some losses are loud– protests spilling into avenues, voices raw against cold air. Others slip quietly through the cracks, like whispers swallowed by the wind.
But the city does not forget. It speaks in quiet acts of defiance: murals repainted even when they’re scrubbed away, flyers taped back up after being torn down, the glow of candlelight in windows that refuse to surrender to the night. It lingers in the quiet thanks exchanged between strangers, in doors held open, in small kindnesses that say I see you; gestures once routine, now carrying more weight than ever before.
I have learned that the pulse of New York is not set by laws, but by the people who refuse to stop moving. The runners on the bridge at dawn; artists who leave messages in chalk. The voices in Union Square, chanting in unison, refusing to be drowned out.
This city does not bow. It does not yield. It grows new roots in the cracks, new voices in the quiet, new hands reaching out when the ground shifts beneath us.
Since January 21, 2025, I have learned that policy may shift the course of a nation, but the people determine its direction.
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Honorable Mentions
Mira Fox
10th grade, Flower Mound HS
Texas
The key card printed with my mother’s uplifted face that used to welcome her to her office now seemed to mock her previous state of happiness, and status of employment. She was barred from her office, which was ironic considering she completed her bar exam with her head held high. Her head was still high, chin unwavering, eyes unleaking, as she read the final words of her official firing from an evil email. Deflated, but not burst, she clutched her phone like a child with a balloon, careful not to let it escape into the sky. My mother, a lawyer who poured countless ounces of labor into her computer, solving cases and absolving people from problems, was now jobless. She was used to treating the sky as the limit, but suddenly the clouds enclosed.
My mother is always acute, esteemed in all endeavors, and was certainly educated enough to work at the Department of Education as a lawyer who handled allegations of discrimination in schools. She was passionate about her job and proud of herself when she finished her workload. She was annoyed when her remote job suddenly became in-person with the bang of Trump’s orange fist, but she still strode in the doors with the glint of pearl earrings and the swish of a flowy blouse, setting up her desk in a cramped cubicle, which she quickly repacked. The antithetical of an anarchist, the polar opposite of a punk, my mother valued laws and the social contract, and she served as an embodiment of the equal scale of justice. That scale was unbalanced as Trump’s regime retracted her employment, swerving a monster truck into the lane my mother drove steadily on, two kids in the backseat.
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Nahid Karimi
10th grade, Solebury School
Pennsylvania
“Human beings are members of a whole
in creation of one essence and soul
If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain,
If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you can not retain.”
—Saadi
As I read this poem in Farsi in January, I wrote in my notebook: I am scared of what is going to happen in the coming four years but I will continue to study, that is why I am here! Last time Donald Trump was the president of the United States, an agreement was signed between the U.S. and Taliban in Doha, and later that year, we, Afghans, lost our country.
I watched my country die and my hopes shattered in the hands of the Taliban. They prohibit me from living with hope, education, and human rights as an Afghan girl. We became refugees from one sorrow to another at the same time traveling to one country and another that didn’t want us.
As I lived through one year of the Taliban regime, I was just 14 and started to understand that, as a citizen of a third-world country, politics can change my life at any minute. The politics of the United States change thousands of lives like my family’s and mine. After 2021, I lost everything as a girl, became a refugee, and lived through conditions that I would have never imagined.
It has been a year now since I began studying on an F-1 visa. Unable to return to Afghanistan, I had to apply for asylum. I am afraid of being myself, an Afghan, a student on an F-1 visa. I am afraid of being called an unwanted refugee and being arrested by ICE.
Police have become a sign of danger rather than safety, and the politics are changing every day. It is rather painful to watch how humans can kick another human out of the country.