NASHVILLE — My husband had just been wheeled away for a routine hip replacement operation when I found a note under my windshield wiper in the surgery center’s parking lot. “The woman hit your car when trying to park in the space next to you,” it read. “She pulled off and parked on other side.” The note included a description of the other driver’s car — an older vehicle, bright yellow — along with its license plate number and the time of the collision. My car’s fender was smashed, the bumper crumpled, and across it all was a smear of bright yellow paint.

I called my insurance company and went back inside to wait for the police to come and write up the incident. I couldn’t stop thinking about the other driver. What kind of person does that much damage to someone else’s car and then simply moves to the other side of the parking lot? A panicky teenager? An employee late for work? An irresponsible jerk? Then it dawned on me that the driver might be undocumented, someone for whom a simple fender-bender would cost everything. What if giving my insurance company her tag number would make me complicit in a deportation?

My thoughts were racing, jumbled. “Routine” and “surgery” are not words that work together seamlessly in my mind when someone I love is the patient. I was tired, I was hot, I was worried about my husband. There was absolutely nothing in the note that indicated an undocumented driver, but the notepaper was decorated with an image of the Statue of Liberty, and maybe that’s all it took to skitter my mind in a direction that logic would not have taken it.

Or maybe it’s simply the age we live in, when images of hollow-eyed babies in detention centers are all over social media. When hardworking immigrants, here for years, even decades, are surrounded like fugitives and carried away, their hands zip-tied behind their backs, while their children wail. When the rhetoric of the president of the United States is echoed in a mass murderer’s racist screed. Every single day in this country, peaceable people suffer for the crime of not being white, and it’s always the guy with a gun who wants to define what “white” actually means.