By Global News Desk
Published: August 22, 2026
Main Facts
For nearly a year, Venezuelan immigrant and prominent Pagan columnist Alan U. Dalul found himself suspended in the invisible, high-stakes machinery of the United States immigration system. Following the expiration of his employment authorization on November 7, 2025, Dalul entered a prolonged state of legal limbo while awaiting the adjudication of his green card petition.
Married to a U.S.-born citizen, Dalul faced a rigorous evidentiary process wherein any perceived act of generating income—including his regular contributions to The Wild Hunt—carried the severe risk of being flagged by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) as unauthorized work, potentially triggering deportation proceedings.
Rather than succumbing entirely to the profound psychological distress of the period—which included severe insomnia, anxiety, depression, and a late-stage crisis center visit—Dalul processed the ordeal through the lens of his spiritual practice. In his first public column since returning to the publication, Dalul outlines how enforced silence and professional paralysis reshaped his understanding of witchcraft, prayer, somatic health, and mindfulness.
Chronology of an Ordeal
- November 7, 2025: Dalul’s employment authorization officially expires. Operating under intense pressure during the final weeks leading up to the deadline, he hyper-focused on drafting a backlog of articles to ensure a steady stream of content would be published after his voice was legally silenced.
- November 2025 – August 2026: A grueling nine-month period characterized by total professional inactivity, acute financial dependence, and heightened vigilance against any action that USCIS might misinterpret as unauthorized labor. The psychological toll manifested as chronic nightmares, sleep deprivation, and clinical anxiety.
- August 2026 (Pre-Publication): Following a severe mental health crisis that necessitated an intervention at a local crisis center, Dalul reaches a turning point in his processing of the trauma, ultimately finding the resilience to write about his experiences.
- August 22, 2026: Dalul officially returns to The Wild Hunt with the publication of his essay detailing the spiritual and personal lessons learned during his time in bureaucratic limbo.
Supporting Data & Context
The psychological toll described by Dalul is far from isolated. Immigration advocates, legal aid organizations, and human rights watchdogs have long documented the cascading mental health crises generated by backlogs within the U.S. immigration apparatus.
- The Backlog Crisis: Millions of applicants face multi-year delays for adjustment of status, family-based petitions, and employment authorizations. USCIS processing times frequently fluctuate, leaving families vulnerable to sudden policy shifts and administrative bottlenecks.
- The Threat of Unauthorized Work: Under current U.S. federal law, asylum seekers, adjustment-of-status applicants, and individuals awaiting green card renewals cannot legally earn income without explicit, unexpired Employment Authorization Documents (EADs). Even unpaid or freelance contributions that offer tangential exposure can invite aggressive scrutiny from immigration enforcement agencies.
- Psychological Impact: Studies published by public health organizations consistently highlight that the threat of family separation, indefinite detention, and administrative precarity results in high rates of generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) among immigrants and their spouses.
Official Responses and Systemic Realities
While USCIS maintains that it is continuously working to streamline adjudication processes and reduce backlogs through technological upgrades and policy memos, immigrant advocacy groups argue that structural flaws remain deeply entrenched.
Human rights organizations point to recurring institutional barriers—such as restricted access to affordable mental healthcare for undocumented or transitional applicants, opaque communication channels with agency adjudicators, and the catastrophic physical and psychological consequences documented inside immigrant detention facilities—as evidence of a broader humanitarian crisis.
For petitioners like Dalul and his U.S.-citizen spouse, the administrative burden requires amassing exhaustive, intrusive evidentiary documentation to prove the authenticity of their lives and relationships, all while enduring a system that can abruptly strip away a person’s livelihood with a single calendar date.
Implications for the Pagan and Witchcraft Community
Dalul’s return essay transcends personal narrative, offering the broader Pagan, polytheist, and witchcraft communities a profound meditation on how spiritual frameworks can adapt during periods of extreme duress. Rather than viewing his forced hiatus as a total loss of practice, Dalul reframed the constraints through six core spiritual takeaways:
1. Radical Simplification: Less Is More
When chronic anxiety and clinical depression rendered elaborate rituals impossible, Dalul stripped his practice down to its absolute bedrock. For most nights, his practice consisted of lighting just two candles: one dedicated to the Divine/Absolute, and another to his blood ancestors. This minimal threshold provided the emotional anchor necessary to endure the darkest stretches of his isolation.
2. The Limits of Nomenclature
Long identifying as a "theistic agnostic," Dalul found that dropping specific divine names in favor of broader conceptualizations—such as "Divinity," "Great Divine," or "Great Spirit"—altered the energetic resonance of his prayers. During times of profound hopelessness, avoiding rigid names offered a linguistic and psychological liberation.
3. Redefining Prayer
Challenging the transactional nature of petitionary prayer, Dalul’s ordeal transformed his spiritual communication into an exercise of radical gratitude. Rather than solely asking for intervention, surviving each bureaucratic milestone fostered an impulse to express unalloyed appreciation to the spirits and ancestral forces sustaining him.
4. Somatic Vulnerability: When Temples Crumble
Addressing the common esoteric platitude that "the body is a temple," Dalul offers a sobering corrective: real temples crumble. Walls crack, paint peels, and maintenance becomes impossible when resources and mental health fail. Accepting physical changes, weight gain, and depressive episodes without self-blame allowed him to focus on a singular, vital objective: keeping the structure standing today so it could be repaired tomorrow.
5. Mindful Engagement and Wordcraft
Drawing on previous reflections regarding public accountability, social discourse, and the responsibilities of public figures within the community, Dalul emphasized the necessity of intentionality. Becoming a father during a period of intense precarity sharpened his awareness of how finite human energy and time truly are, discouraging reactive engagement in favor of deliberate, measured speech.
6. Sonic Witchcraft and Deep Roots
While conventional understandings of ancestral roots involve returning to traditional folk practices or regional lore, Dalul’s grounding mechanism manifested through "Music Witchcraft." Leaning on sonic explorations ranging from Faun and Lady Gaga to Kerli and Lindsey Stirling, his headphones became his primary ritual tool—a portable sanctuary impervious to external administrative borders.
Conclusion
Alan U. Dalul’s reintegration into the public sphere via The Wild Hunt serves as a testament to human resilience in the face of rigid, often hostile bureaucratic structures. By synthesizing the trauma of legal limbo with the reflective tools of his witchcraft, Dalul demonstrates that transformation often occurs in the darkest, most pressurized conditions. As he steps forward into this next chapter, his journey stands as a powerful reminder of the endurance required to survive systemic limbo—and the profound clarity that can emerge from the ashes of a fractured routine.
