The woman handing out candy on Halloween looked me up and down as I stood there with my older brother, who our mom had forced to take me trick-or-treating before he could go hang out with his friends.
“Aww are you a girl version of Superman?” She asked as she put candy in my plastic jack-o-lantern basket.
“I’m Supergirl!” I told her, to which she nodded with no sense of recollection of who on Earth or Krypton Supergirl was.
I dressed as Supergirl for the next three Halloweens, obsessed with Batgirl this, Clark Kent that; they were the only words to come out of my mouth half the time.
My mom, a working single mother, made superhero costumes for my dolls because we couldn’t find any in stores and she supported my interest in heroes who wanted to help everyone, no matter who they were.
Fourteen years after the “girl Superman” incident, I sat in awe as I watched the credits roll for “Superman,” directed by James Gunn and starring David Corenswet as Superman and Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane.
As I walked out of the theater raving to my friends about how perfect I thought the movie was, a group of teenage boys leaving the same movie passed by, sharing a very different opinion.
“That was so f***ing dumb! They made Superman such a snowflake and all that immigration talk. Like Dude, Superman doesn’t need to be political,” one of the teens said, to which the others responded with agreement and laughter.
While theirs was a very different viewing experience, I thought it’s just one teenage boy who had probably fallen down a bad rabbit/Reddit hole opinion.
Then I went online to look at the movie’s reviews, it was like a punch to the guts as I scrolled through the stream of comments.
“You know what it says on his cape? MS-13,” said Fox news host Jesse Watters, comparing Clark Kent to the international gang formed in Los Angeles in the ‘80s to protect Salvadoran immigrants.
Fox News hosts then engaged in an “ethical” debate about whether Superman and Supergirl came to America illegally and if they should be sent back to the fictional exploded planet of Krypton.
“Yes, he’s (Gunn) trying to spin the iconic story of Superman into a woke joke tale of an illegal immigrant.” Said Tomi Lahren, while hosting the Fox News Rundown podcast. “Is nothing sacred? Can entertainment just be..entertainment. Politics does not have to creep into EVERY facet of daily life and it shouldn’t.”
While I don’t take anything Fox News reports as fact, it did surprise me that people knew so little about a character who has been at the center of our cultural zeitgeist for 88 years.
Clark Kent or more commonly known by his superhero alias, Superman, was created by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, both children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.
When Action Comics first introduced Superman in 1938, Siegel and Shuster wanted to create a character who was, in their own words, the “ultimate outsider,” as his parents had sent him to Earth from a doomsday planet Krypton as a baby so that he could live.
Clark Kent experiences the narrative of immigrants, leaving their own land and culture behind for a chance of a safer tomorrow in a foreign land. His name is even anglicized from Kal-El to Clark as many real-life immigrants endured in places like Ellis Island.
Superman, through its many iterations, has carried this key element of the character. Even in Zack Snyder’s 2013 version — which has a lot of other problems — Superman is described as an immigrant who struggles to find his place.
In the long-running (2001-2011) CW show “Smallville” that focuses on a young Clark Kent, one episode addresses the exploitation of immigrant workers, and when Clark is advised to stay out of the problem, he replies, “I’m an illegal immigrant, Mom. You’ve been harboring me for over 17 years.”
While the far right claims that Gunn’s 2025 iteration of Superman goes against the “traditional morals” of the character and is too political, I would argue that the Superman who actually goes against the character is Dean Cain’s.
Cain starred in “Lois & Clark:The New Adventures of Superman,” a show that torpedoed in low during its final season in 1997. Cain signed up to be a U.S. Immigration and Customs agent in August of 2025 after serving as a reserve police officer.
That’s right, an out-of-work actor and adamant MAGA supporter, Cain joined ICE because — in his own words — he felt the agents were facing unjust vilification. The same ICE agents who have detained more than 6,200 children since the 2025 inauguration of Trump, according to The Marshall Project.
Cain’s actions are more un-Superman than anything that occurred in Gunn’s 2025 movie. While I understand Cain is not the character he portrayed, the actor made inhuman choices in real life that show he learned little from Superman’s example.
As someone from an immigrant family who has always felt a little out of place, both Superman and Supergirl gave me and many others positive characters to revere, figures of hope, empathy — and as Shuster and Siegel put it — champions of the oppressed.
With the tyrannical oppression of our current administration that is targeting immigrants, dissidents and rules by fear-based manipulation, champions of the oppressed, like Superman, are what we need in our media to inspire hope in what feels like one of the darkest hours in more recent U.S. history.
Much like Superman, I hope that Gunn and Corenswet will continue to illuminate the character of Superman as the immigrant and hero he was meant to be when his ship landed in 1938.
Despite my Supergirl costume not fitting anymore, I will be sitting in the movie theater this summer, watching as Supergirl graces the screen, in the Craig Gillespie-directed, eponymous film to be released June 26.
And I certainly hope Supergirl, another immigrant from Krypton, will also be a champion of the oppressed.