This story is about my debut legal thriller, Extreme Vetting, published in 2023 by Ooligan Press. For context, here’s a short book description: “An immigration lawyer fights to keep her client from being deported to the country where his family was murdered many years ago. Then she finds out the killers are coming here—for both of them.”
How my child’s tears led me to write Extreme Vetting
When I came to the United States from Romania in 2001 with a job in software development, this country welcomed me. Over the years, I built a life here. I was grateful to be in a place where an immigrant like me could start feeling at home.
But something shifted during the 2016 presidential campaign. The word “immigrant” took on a sinister tone in our national conversation. Then came the day in the summer of 2018 when I heard the president of the United States read a poem comparing immigrants like me to venomous snakes. Dangerous creatures that kind-hearted Americans might foolishly take in and warm at their breast, when they should instead cast us aside and crush us underfoot.
The disconnect between his rhetoric and the reality of immigration was staggering. How could anyone look at me and see a menacing beast instead of simply another human being trying to live their life?
After I heard that horrible bit from Trump’s speech, I wandered into the kitchen in a daze, trying to pull together lunch for my five-year-old daughter. She was sitting on the floor with a book, and she asked me a question that barely registered through my shock. Instead of responding with patience, I snapped at her to just leave me alone for a moment. When I turned from staring blankly into the open refrigerator, I saw her still on the floor, but now her big brown eyes were brimming with tears, and her little lip was trembling.
Panic jolted me back to reality. I dropped down beside her and apologized. I explained that I was just upset because Trump had said something hurtful. To this day, she remembers that moment, how Trump’s words upset me enough to snap at her, though she says she understands. That day, I realized this cruelty doesn’t stop at immigrants. It ripples outward, reaching our families, our children, shattering their innocence and leaving scars we can never erase.
Later on, my husband suggested I write a story that could help people understand what it feels like to be an immigrant, to try to capture the displacement, the resilience, the daily work of building a home in a new land.
So I soon started writing Extreme Vetting. It was my response to being dehumanized by the president of my adoptive country. To prove I wasn’t the dangerous beast he’d said I was, I did the most human thing I could think of: I wrote a story. Through storytelling, I tried to assert the humanity of immigrants and maybe, just maybe, encourage a more thoughtful dialogue about who we are and what we bring to this country we now call home.
I named my novel Extreme Vetting after a phrase Trump had coined to sound forceful but also to give a veneer of legality to his xenophobic and racist efforts. Of course, my message got lost in the hurricane of anti-immigrant rhetoric that has only grown since those early days. We had “Mass Deportations Now!” signs at Trump rallies in 2024, and now in 2025, we have mass deportations in the US.
When reality outpaced my thriller
When I finished writing Extreme Vetting in 2019, I worried that I had pushed too far into the realm of implausible fiction. The scenes where my ICE prosecutor antagonist ordered raids at schools and churches felt dramatically necessary for the thriller, but I questioned whether I was unfairly depicting immigration enforcement as too extreme. I remember asking the immigration lawyer I interviewed for my book: “Is this too much? Am I making them seem more ruthless than they actually are?” The measured response I got suggested that I was walking a fine line between plausible fiction and sensationalized drama.
How naive that concern seems now. Today, those very scenarios that I crafted as fictional provocations—a raid at a church after Sunday services, an arrest at a high school while children watched in terror—have become routine events that barely register a news headline. What I portrayed as the shocking overreach of a rogue prosecutor has become standard operating procedure for ICE. The outrageous behavior I attributed to my antagonist now feels almost quaint compared to masked agents kidnapping people in broad daylight, with no regard for due process or basic human dignity.
The corruption subplot in my novel—where this ICE prosecutor sells immigrants’ personal data to a foreign data broker, who then coordinates with criminal networks in home countries—was based on real legal cases prosecuted in Washington State. But even that scheme, which I thought represented the absolute depths of wrongdoing, pales in comparison to today’s reality. We now live in a country where immigrants and citizens alike are being shipped to detention facilities that operate like concentration camps. The systemic cruelty has exceeded what my imagination dared to conjure, even in the service of a thriller that demanded high stakes and moral urgency.
Perhaps most telling is how my research process itself has become hard to replicate. The court documents I studied, with their careful procedural language and appeals to legal precedent, seem like artifacts from a time when legal norms still mattered. Today’s enforcement operates in a realm beyond documentation, beyond oversight, beyond the reach of the very legal system my novel used as its foundation.
In trying to write a cautionary tale about the dehumanization of immigrants, I accidentally wrote a period piece—a snapshot of a time when such dehumanization still required justification, still operated within recognizable legal frameworks, still generated enough public outrage to fuel a thriller plot. Reality has since dispensed with such niceties.
The timeless heart of Extreme Vetting
While the specific political moment that sparked Extreme Vetting may feel like ancient history, the human truths at its center are still relevant. The fundamental question my novel grapples with—what does it mean to belong somewhere?—transcends any single administration or news cycle. It’s a question that has echoed through US history and will continue long after today’s headlines fade.
The characters in Extreme Vetting embody the complex reality of modern immigration that no political slogan can capture. There’s my protagonist, Laura Holban, an immigration lawyer who, like me, came from Romania and became a citizen, yet still navigates the precarious space between belonging and otherness as she fights for her clients in a system designed to exclude them. There’s Emilio Ramirez, who fled Guatemala after his entire family was murdered, worked for over twenty years to build a life in the US with his wife, Blanca, and their two sons, only to be torn from that life when ICE arrests him at his children’s high school. And there’s sixteen-year-old David Ramirez, a US-born citizen who shouldn’t have to fight for his father’s right to exist and his younger brother’s well-being yet finds himself thrust into a legal battle that will determine whether his family survives intact.
And then there’s my antagonist, Mason Waltman, the ICE prosecutor who sells detainee information to the very criminals the immigrants are fleeing from. He resents that his mother was an immigrant, and he’s determined to prove that he belongs here by prosecuting people like his mom. Waltman’s willingness to frame innocent people and threaten Laura’s own citizenship shows how quickly the machinery of exclusion can turn on anyone—even those who think their papers protect them.
These stories matter because they refuse the comfortable simplicity of viewing immigrants as either good or bad people. They’re simply people—flawed, striving, loving, afraid—trying to build something stable in a world that often seems determined to erase them. The five-year-old who saw her immigrant mother break down after hearing that poem about venomous snakes deserved better than to inherit that pain. Every David Ramirez fighting for his family’s survival, every Laura Holban navigating between worlds, every Emilio Ramirez who dies protecting the future he built for his children—they all deserve to be seen as fully human.
Extreme Vetting may have been written as a response to one particular moment of national cruelty, but its goal was to tell timeless stories about resilience, belonging, and the price we all pay when we allow fear to overcome compassion. These themes will remain relevant as long as people cross borders seeking better lives, as long as families are torn apart by policies that treat human beings as numbers in a system rather than neighbors to be welcomed.
If you’re looking for a thriller that will keep you turning pages while also challenging you to see immigration through new eyes, I invite you to discover Extreme Vetting. In a world where fiction keeps being overtaken by an increasingly harsh reality, sometimes the most radical act is simply to remind ourselves—through stories—of our shared humanity.
