As I stood in the rain Monday outside Congressman Ben Cline’s office to announce that I was not backing down from running against him; as I worried about friends and relatives who will soon lose their Medicaid, some of whom have already lost their jobs to AI and offshoring; as I fretted over farmers struggling with sky-high fertilizer and fuel prices because of a war in Iran that our president can’t even explain, Donald Trump had these words to say:
“I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. … Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I’m talking about Iran, they can’t have a nuclear weapon.”
You know, the way they actually couldn’t make one under President Barack Obama’s 2015 deal with Iran—that is, until Trump tore it up three years later.
Americans are thirsty for electoral fairness, for relief from skyrocketing costs, for basic human decency, for ICE not to deport our immigrant neighbors to dangerous third-country locations. But instead of quenching our thirst, Trump has unleashed constant chaos, a firehose of self-dealing, and a war that’s costing taxpayers $11,500 a second—all of it enabled by rubber-stamp sycophants like Cline. In just this past week alone, I’ve encountered record levels of exhaustion, worry, and fear.
Last night, I met an abortion-clinic nurse who described women from Southern states driving all night long to obtain abortions here because the procedure is outlawed where they live: Women in their second trimester whose lives are in danger. A 17-year-old who’d been given Visa cards for gas to get from her home in Florida to the Roanoke-area clinic but now wanted to know if she could have one more card “because I haven’t eaten all day.” A middle-aged South Carolina woman with five kids and a sister waiting in the car while she underwent the procedure.
Many women are having later-term abortions because it takes time to find a provider and to figure out the logistics of getting to Virginia.
At New Horizons Health Center, the federally funded sliding-scale clinic that cares for 10,000 patients in the Roanoke Valley, immigrants are skipping their medical and mental-health appointments because they’re afraid of being picked up by ICE. Others are routinely being kicked off Medicaid because of new bureaucratic hurdles.
When high profile people like RFK Jr. make uninformed statements about antidepressants being dangerous, that chaos lands directly on New Horizon’s patients, behavior health leader Patricia Spanger told me, many of whom endanger themselves by abruptly stopping their medication, which is dangerous.
At the Bradley Free Clinic, psychiatric nurse practitioner Johna Jenkins has noticed patients rationing their psychiatric meds because of RFK’s crazy notions, too. (Also: Measles are back.) The One Ugly Bill’s added work requirements for Medicaid recipients are cruel, she said, “when most people on Medicaid already work. Many are already working two jobs, some of them three!
“This is the highest level of trauma and mental illness we’ve ever seen.”
And we haven’t yet glimpsed the brunt of the One Ugly Bill, which enacted key Project 2025 proposals to gut healthcare, food assistance, and education. When 350,000 Virginians are dropped from Medicaid later this year—diabolically timed to take place after the mid-term elections—Bradley Free Clinic director Janine Underwood predicts her waiting list will quadruple from its current list of 100. “Most patients will become uninsured, and we’ll be swamped,” she said.
In 2016—not long after Underwood lost her 28-year-old son, Bobby, to overdose—the free clinic’s Hope Initiative began connecting forty people with substance-use disorders, a grassroots effort I chronicled in my book “Dopesick.” Last year, it connected more than 1,000 people for treatment, thanks to four peer recovery specialists on staff who also work with jail re-entry support and fire and EMS, and added psychiatric care and counseling. Forty-three percent of participants have achieved an above-average one year of sustained recovery.
This week alone, Hope helped an addicted woman who’d been sex-trafficked by connecting her to long-term treatment, celebrated a former meth user whose teeth they helped fix who’s now two years into sobriety and working full-time, and connected an uninsured woman to detox for her alcoholism and mental illness, even though she was reluctant to go because she’d have to miss work. “She was at her wit’s end and saying, ‘I just can’t do this anymore,’” Jenkins added. But a Hope peer connected her to care.
“These are my Bobbys,” Underwood said, her eyes welling. “People think overdoses are going down but they’re actually higher than they were when we started the program.”
The clinic was forced, per the Trump administration, to remove the word “diversity” from its website. But that hasn’t stopped it from seeing a record number of Hispanic patients in its mission to treat Medicaid patients and the uninsured.
As I travel the 6th Congressional District listening to potential constituents, I’m appalled at the shape of not just our tattered safety net but the sheer cruelty happening right under our noses (but largely off-camera, thanks partly to our diminished local media landscape).
Last week, members of the local community protested outside the ICE facility in Salem to protest its presence and to put the community on alert to the fact that local officers have a quota of detaining 100 area immigrants this month .
At a meeting Wednesday of concerned immigration activists, an attorney warned that local ICE agents are detaining local immigrants, even those with pending permanent residency, with the goal of transferring them to facilities in Louisiana and Texas, from which they’ll then be sent to third countries such as Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sierra Leone.
She urged immigration leaders to alert families that habeas corpus filings need to happen quickly, within a week, before their detained loved ones are moved to out of state detention centers. State Del. Sam Rasoul described a new law he co-sponsored at the General Assembly, effective July 1, that guarantees public education for undocumented students and prohibits school administrators from sharing personal data with ICE without proper warrants.
A school liaison described a boy sobbing at his Roanoke school and begging his mom to pick him up early because he was so afraid of ICE showing up. “His mom wouldn’t let him get on the bus,” she said.
“The community is largely unaware there is even an ICE presence here, and they are actively disappearing people,” said a Roanoke Indivisible volunteer. “We need to up the ante.”
To assist the group’s efforts, Roanoke Indivisible meets every third Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. to strategize about ICE and other issues. This month’s meeting on May 20 will be a social gathering at Blindhouse Brewery. And as I’ve reported before, the Roanoke Asylum-Seekers Network can offer some assistance to affected immigrant families with legal fees, appointments, and rents; contact Joy Sylvester-Johnson at joysylvesterjohnson@gmail.com for questions; mutual-aid checks can be written to the group and mailed to RASN, P.O. Box 3071, Roanoke, VA 24015.
The clouds may have cleared for now, but the storm of this past week (and year) hasn’t let up. From the clinic nurses holding the hands of desperate travelers to the free clinic peers fighting to save the next Bobby, we are living through a week that has laid bare the stakes of this race. I met a veteran last night who said his wait to get new eyeglasses at the Salem VA was eight months, so he had to shell out $500 of his own money, and yet Trump and Cline are hell-bent on privatizing the VA while sending more young men and women off to die.
While some claim not to think about your financial situation “even a little bit,” I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I stood outside Ben Cline’s office on Monday. We are seeing record levels of exhaustion and fear, but we are also seeing a community that refuses to be disappeared. We are tired, and we are being tested like never before. But we are not backing down
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