YOU deleted me off Facebook after the vote. We’ve not spoken since. Given the nature of my work and how I spend my free time, I can’t imagine my being anti-Trump could have come as any great surprise. On the morning of November 9th, I wrote of my shock and concern at the result. How could this have happened? You called me a narrow-minded bigot. You removed me from the list. Family drama in the digital age.

So it’s been just over two months. We’re still not talking and I don’t see that changing any time soon. Stubbornness runs through us. I won’t apologise. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready to. I’d like to explain to you why the 4,595 miles between your home and mine are not enough to stop me from having an opinion.

Last night we had to bring someone home. A vet from Glasgow University with an Iranian passport who’d been on holiday with her boyfriend in Costa Rica. Thanks to Trump’s executive order banning those from seven predominantly Muslim countries, she couldn’t even transit through the US. She had to find an alternate route home via Madrid. Flights cost £2,600, more than a month’s wages. We organised online and in 30 minutes collected the money needed. Not the embassies, not the airlines, just ordinary people who could afford to throw a few pounds at injustice. Colleague, friend or perfect stranger, we recognise this woman as a citizen. We recognise her as more than her passport. She is human and deserves to be able to move freely. We’re outside, we have no vote, but we can loudly condemn the actions of your administration, and do what we can to ease the pain of those caught in the crossfire.

This is just one instance of the chaos caused. I invite you to watch the news or search the internet for the scenes at JFK last night. What your president is doing is unconstitutional. It’s illegal. It’s wrong. These are not the actions of a man who wants peace or values your safety. That’s why a federal judge from Brooklyn has halted the xenophobic ban by granting a stay. This is thanks to the tenacity of the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Immigration Law Centre who worked on behalf of two Iraqi men detained yesterday. But this only means visa holders can’t be sent back. This means they could still be held in detention. Land of the free. Home of the brave. What does that mean?

In the summer I took a trip with my two closest friends. Not to America, but to Copenhagen. We rode bikes and roller coasters, danced, climbed old railway carts, ate until our stomachs ached. We made unblemished memories – and now all I can think of is how easily they could have been coated with the patina of xenophobia, because of a reaction to an Iranian dual nationality. One signature on a bit of paper, and everything could have changed without warning. This is not just close to home. It’s affecting home for many. It’s putting the US Government in the middle of the lives of non-citizens. We can’t ignore that.

THIS is why we care. This is why it matters to those far outside of the US. We’re looking at the world unable to comprehend what’s happening. We’re looking at our friends, colleagues, neighbours, peers and classmates, wondering how it must feel to be singled out again and again as an enemy of the free world, by accident of birth or religion. “I’m sorry about the white people” is constantly on our minds, and in our lips when we get over ourselves enough to say it aloud.

By an accident of your birth, you’re the right kind of immigrant. White. Christian. Educated. British. You’ve had your go at the American dream for the last 25 years, you’re now a citizen and can come and go as you please. America is yours and you are American. There’s little chance of that being snatched away from you. You’re a tetris piece who looks like all the other right kind of tetris pieces. You fit the space that’s been created for people like you. I’m happy that it worked out. But I’m worried about the other spaces that are disappearing now. America is building walls and closing its doors. America First affects everyone else, not just those who aren’t the right kind of American – and who knows what that will be tomorrow. A whim. A mood. A signature. It could all change.

Sure, I don’t live there, but like most British kids I substituted my cultural diet with a supersize portion of The American Dream. The stuff we could see. Big houses. Tended lawns. Kids on BMXs. Teens in fancy cars. Kool-Aid and milkshakes and sloppy joes. But we also knew it was more than that. All the stuff we couldn’t describe, but knew was the background to it all. Freedom, justice and a slice of the pie for anyone who wanted to give up their old life and make new one. We dined out on that dream to escape our own lives. We dined out on it and didn’t think for a second what it was built on.

THAT perspective has come with age, history lessons, books and life experience. As we watch the dream crack open, more and more are perceiving the foundations. Colonisation, killing and displacement of Native Americans, disease, forced religious conversions, slavery, civil war and cultural erosion. I know you know this. We all do. But it can’t remain the white elephant of history when the actions of your president echo sentiments from a time so damaging to so many. I hope America can start again and make amends by making the dream a reality, for all. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are empty words if they come with hateful caveats.

When I came to visit Texas I was 12. I was overwhelmed in so many ways. The hair-dryer heat, the grand atemporal neo-eclectic houses. The monster malls and absent sidewalks. The sun-bleached grass where suburbanites insisted it should grow despite the climate. It was a mirror-world. Everyone spoke English, yet everything was different. Instead of a local park with tangled swings and tangled teens, there was a community pool with lifeguards and diving boards. At home, tadpoles were the zenith of backyard zoology, so I shrieked with pure delight the first time I saw a house gecko. And then another. And another. Tiny dinosaurs everywhere. I reached out to touch its gnarled back, sending it scuttling up the stucco. It was rare. It was special. I wanted to keep it.

I remember the neighbourhood kid who split the reverie with a swift and unforgiving stamp. "A pest". I felt the blood slosh around my ears as I tried to keep still, hoping time would stop and the shoe would not lift. I didn’t mention it. This was normal in the mirror-world, and I was a child who rescued spiders from the bath.

Days later another child beckoned me into their garage. They wanted to show me their own tiny dinosaur, bug-eyed and dorsal-shelled, gliding around a small tank. Isn’t she beautiful? She was. But to me, forelimbs and tails were just as beautiful as flippers and shells. On that trip I learned there are right and wrong kinds of things. Some you love and feed – and others you stamp on.