I have known since before the election that Trump is planning to deport all of the immigrants. I’ve been angry about it. I’ve talked to the people about it. I have argued with people about it, but I haven’t truly cognitively processed it.

When I got to the slide about immigrant workers, I broke down, crying, sobbing tears—no no no no that can’t happen here tears. I already knew. It was something I already knew.

The reality of such a thing is so horrible to contemplate that even if you can attach the faces of people you know to the coming horror, you’re more likely to think of it in abstract terms. 20 million people is a number we can’t fathom. But data allows us to process it in an abstract way, and can connect the abstract to something cognitively meaningful.

When I saw the data arranged that way I was forced to confront the abstract representation of this category of people that drove home cognitively what could be coming.