I have a Salvadoran godson who has been in the black hole of President Nayib Bukele's jails for more than three years. He has not been allowed to send letters or to receive visits from anybody, including lawyers. My family and I have tried, through multiple channels, to get him out, without success. This grotesque mockery of justice is what President Trump is trying to normalize, and it is hard for me to understand how we as a country have fallen so far so fast. How does emulating a dictatorship, like that in El Salvador, prove that America is "great"?

This would be a rather stunning argument from a Black writer such as myself. I am in fact ecstatic that McDonald is playing the role; my argument was that, given the show's sociohistorical specificity, McDonald should not play the role as a specifically Black character, just as she has not done in the past when portraying (always to perfection) other white characters. I read Stephania Taladrid's account of Tony Ogburn's efforts to treat women in Texas after the passage of S.B. 8 with my heart in my mouth ("The Texas Exodus," December 2nd). I was especially horrified to hear about the difficulty of treating ectopic pregnancies; as Ogburn says, "it's the standard of care everywhere in the world." An ectopic pregnancy is an inherently nonviable one.