The Day Hernández Walked Free and Guinea-Bissau's Ballots Vanished

Dear diary, today I felt pulled in too many directions at once.

This afternoon, in a federal prison in West Virginia, one of my cells opened for Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras. He had been serving a 45-year U.S. federal sentence for cocaine trafficking, but a pardon from President Donald Trump set him free. In Tegucigalpa, his wife Ana García de Hernández stood in front of cameras, thanking Trump while fireworks cracked above neighborhoods still scarred by the drug trade that flourished during his rule.

Out at sea in the Caribbean, I watched myself argue with myself over an old decision. Back on September 2, a U.S. drone and helicopter blasted a small boat that officials said was carrying drug smugglers, killing most of the eleven people aboard. Today I listened as the world argued over the second strike, the double tap that hit after commanders knew there were survivors still clinging to the wreckage. The White House pointed to Admiral Frank Bradley, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke of the fog of war, and lawmakers in both parties asked whether Operation Southern Spear had crossed the line into a war crime.

On land, I tightened my borders. In field offices of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, officers stopped processing stacks of files as word spread that all immigration applications and even citizenship ceremonies were paused for people from 19 mostly non-European countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Cuba and Venezuela. People who had waited years for green cards or oath ceremonies suddenly found their interviews canceled, their futures folded into the same limbo as the paper forms now locked away in cabinets.

Far to the north, winter sank its teeth into me. The first big storm of the 2025–26 season swept across the Ohio Valley into the Northeast, smearing snow, sleet and freezing rain across interstates and small-town main streets. New Jersey's governor signed Executive Order 406, putting Hunterdon, Morris, Passaic, Sussex and Warren counties under a state of emergency starting at 5:00 a.m. Plows scraped along dark highways while salt trucks rattled past shuttered schools. In Down East Maine, some of my children measured nearly a foot of snow in their yards, and in New Hampshire meteorologists tallied town-by-town totals for what they called the first statewide snowfall of the season.

In Middle Tennessee, about 178,000 of my citizens marked little ovals on paper and touchscreens for a special election. By night’s end, Republican Matt Van Epps had defeated Democrat Aftyn Behn for the open 7th Congressional District seat, roughly 97,000 votes to 81,000, 53.9 percent to 45.0 percent. The party balance in Congress did not change, but the margin was narrower than in years past, and party leaders on both sides read the numbers like tea leaves for the battles of 2026.

South of all that snow, I felt a different kind of movement in the air. An Eastern Airlines charter landed near Caracas with 266 Venezuelan deportees returning from the United States. It was only one flight among many; more than 18,000 people have been sent back this year on 95 flights, 76 of them flying directly from U.S. airports, despite threats to declare Venezuelan airspace closed. On the tarmac, some passengers knelt to kiss the ground, while others stared at the terminal, wondering how they would feed their families in an economy they had once risked everything to escape.

In Colombia, I tried to correct a quieter wrong. Migration officers escorted nine adults from the Lev Tahor sect, part of a larger group of 26 members including 17 children, out of a hotel in the town of Yarumal. Investigators said the ultra-Orthodox group’s practices put children at risk. By tonight those 17 minors were in New York state custody, learning new routines far from the black tunics, arranged marriages and rigid rules that had defined their childhood.

In Brussels and Bruges, I watched my institutions question themselves. Belgian police, acting on orders from the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, finished raiding the offices of the EU’s diplomatic service and the College of Europe. Former EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, now rector of the college, was detained and formally accused of procurement fraud, corruption, conflicts of interest and violating professional secrecy in connection with an EU-funded diplomatic training program worth over a million euros. She walked out again under investigation, while staffers in the cafés around the EU quarter whispered about yet another scandal in a union already bruised by earlier influence-buying affairs.

Over South Sudan, one of my smaller aircraft became a test of calm. A Samaritan’s Purse Cessna 208B Grand Caravan lifted off from Juba, loaded with medicine bound for Maiwut. Mid-flight, a passenger pulled a gun and ordered the pilot to fly to Chad. Hours later, after convincing the hijacker they needed fuel, the pilot diverted to Wau Airport. On the dusty runway, security forces swarmed the plane and arrested the man. The three other occupants and the pilot walked away unharmed, shaking, their mission to deliver medicine delayed but not destroyed.

On the Atlantic coast of Guinea-Bissau, my democracy staggered. In a worn office in Bissau, electoral officials faced shelves where ballot papers, tally sheets and computers should have been. Armed men had stormed the building on November 26 in the midst of a coup that had already toppled President Umaro Sissoco Embaló. Today the National Electoral Commission announced it could not complete the November 23 presidential election; the records were gone, the process broken. Power now rested with Major-General Horta Inta-a, sworn in as transitional leader, while rival candidates and regional blocs argued over whether this had been a genuine coup or a staged drama that spun out of control.

In Jakarta and The Hague, two aging men saw a different door open. Indonesia and the Netherlands signed an agreement to repatriate Dutch nationals Siegfried Mets, seventy-four, and Ali Tokman, sixty-five. Mets has been on death row since 2008, convicted of smuggling 600,000 ecstasy pills, while Tokman is serving a life sentence for bringing six kilograms of MDMA into the country after an earlier death sentence was commuted. The new papers mean that on December 8 they are expected to board a flight to Amsterdam, to serve out their sentences back home rather than face execution in Indonesia, the result of appeals from the Dutch king and foreign minister on humanitarian grounds.

In Beirut, I knelt among ruins. Pope Leo XIV spent the last day of his visit to Lebanon at the site of the 2020 port explosion, standing before the shattered grain silos that once towered over the harbor. He prayed in silence with families who lost loved ones in the blast that killed more than 200 people and wounded thousands, then urged the country toward peaceful coexistence and real accountability for the disaster. The concrete is still cracked, the grief still fresh, but for a moment thousands of my voices sang together in the same trembling prayer.

Not everything today was war, scandal or sorrow. In SoHo, New York City, television viewers watched David Muir taste holiday flavors at Van Leeuwen Ice Cream and test an American-made Zeroll ice cream scoop as part of the annual Made in America Christmas segment. A Christmas-tree growing kit in one small town, a candy company in another, and a dozen other tiny businesses scattered across my vast body felt a jolt of hope as their websites strained under the sudden weight of orders.

So that was my day: I freed a convicted trafficker and rescued children from an abusive sect. I froze thousands of immigration cases and filled deportation planes with tired faces. I argued about war crimes on the open sea while a small aid plane landed safely after a gun was drawn in its cabin. I buried an election under the smoke of a coup and knelt beside a shattered port to remember another explosion. I sent an old man home from death row and taught schoolchildren in New England how heavy wet snow feels on their mittens.

On days like today, I do not know whether to be proud of myself or afraid of myself. But I keep waking up, scattering my billions of hearts across prisons and parliaments, kitchens and cockpits, polling places and portside memorials, still trying, clumsily, to learn how to be kinder to me.

Until tomorrow, I remain myself, all of us at once.