‘They’re persecuting people of color’

HARRISONBURG, Va., — The daily assaults on democracy, decency, and dignity are coming so furiously these days they are hard to track. Between the four-dollar-a-gallon gas prices caused by a war that’s also costing us a billion dollars a day, between the shooting of American citizens in the back and the maniac-in-chief’s threat to commit genocide, the quieter indignities taking place in our communities become muted.

And that’s exactly Trump’s and our unelected president Stephen Miller’s plan.

In the past year, the number of immigrants detained by ICE has increased by over 75%, with a record 73,000 people being held in detention as of mid-January. To speed up deportations and slow down due process, the Trump administration is purging immigration judges. Not long ago, national GOP leaders called for a ban on school attendance for the children of undocumented immigrants after taking away their right to access SNAP and Medicaid programs in many states.

Earlier this week, Harrisonburg Mayor Deanna Reed organized a roundtable on immigration at my request, and the stories from that city’s immigrant leaders were hair-raising. To foster district-wide collaboration and share information, I drove down the valley with some immigration leaders from Roanoke, including Ahoo Salem of Blue Ridge Literacy, Joy Sylvester-Johnson of Roanoke Asylum-Seekers Support Network, and Dina Imbriani of DoGood Virginia.

“They’re persecuting people of color, right?” said Sal Romero, speaking of ICE agents who’ve detained 350 immigrants in Rockingham County and Harrisonburg in the past year. Romero came to Harrisonburg as an undocumented immigrant in 1991 and rose, through education and hard work, to become the city schools’ chief of staff.

People are being taken to Texas, without any due process, then randomly released without a way to return home. A Honduran man named Luis told me his heart started racing when he walked into Tuesday’s event and saw a Harrisonburg police lieutenant seated at the table. (For the record, Lt. Jason Kidd reported: “We have policies at HPD that require us not to ask those types of questions about immigration and really just focus on law enforcement.”)

Children are watching their parents get pulled over by ICE and ripped from their cars, as was the case of a viral video taken by a 16-year-old right before police took the mom and abandoned the teenager on the side of the road.

“If I had come here [in recent years], I probably wouldn’t still be here,” Romero said.

Nor would, perhaps, the Harrisonburg city councilman Nasser Alsaadrun, who emigrated from Iraq as a refugee in 2008 after his father was assassinated during that war, as retribution for his family’s work interpreting for U.S. Army soldiers.

Highly vetted refugees are also suffering from ICE harassment and bureaucratic delays. A 75-year-old woman lost her housing when her green card expired, Alsaadrun explained. Another immigrant family lost access to Medicaid at the same time their child was diagnosed with cancer.

Chris Hoover of NewBridges Immigrant Resource Center spoke of immigrants being detained with no criminal history who are now being forced upon release to wear ankle or wrist monitoring devices. Of SNAP and Medicaid for children being eliminated as part of Trump’s One Ugly Bill, which targeted refugees, asylum seekers, and human trafficking survivors. Of her caseworkers suffering vicarious trauma due to all the stress.

“Imagine being a poultry worker trying to put an ankle monitor into their boot or a server at a restaurant having a wrist device,” Hoover said.

“It’s fear… and so much confusion,” said Rodrigue Makelele, a Church World Service senior organizer who noted that immigrants are reluctant to go outside, call police to report a crime, or send their children to school. “It’s just so much confusion because you don’t know what is wrong and what is right. At this point everything seems wrong.”

Makelele, a Congolese former refugee, leveled me with a stare and said: “We need someone in Congress who doesn’t just have good words. … We need someone who will want to protect the dignity of every single person despite their legal status, their situation, or how they find themselves here.” To make sure no one gets thrown under the bus, no exceptions.

Last week, in response to Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s order that local police don’t have to comply with ICE, Congressman Ben Cline had the gall to introduce a federal bill imposing exactly the opposite rule—not long after ICE shot and killed two citizen protesters, and more than six detainees have died in ICE custody this year.

As I’ve said repeatedly during my campaign to become the CD-6’s first congresswoman, there are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, the large majority of whom are law-abiding and doing jobs that would otherwise go unfilled. I know this because I spent ten of my 25 years as a Roanoke Times reporter tracking that story. Because of our impotent politics—because of ginned-up fears and centuries of racism—significant immigration reform hasn’t occurred since 1986, creating workforce shortages and humanitarian woes alike.

As I reported in my latest book, Paper Girl, factory managers in my Ohio hometown had to bus in Haitian immigrants from nearby Springfield just to fulfill their orders. One employer, asked if he hired ten American-born employees how many would still be working for him after six months, told me: “One. And we’d probably have attendance issues with him.”

This is the same Springfield where Trump and JD Vance falsely and notoriously claimed of the Haitians: “They’re eating the pets; they’re eating the cats.” Now, some of those Haitians, with the threatened removal of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), are proactively fleeing for Canada and other places outside the U.S., leaving some employers high and dry. One auto-part maker told me his factory only has 30 Haitians employed, down from 100 two years ago, but that’s partly because orders are down due to Trump’s trade wars and tariffs.

As Skyline Literacy Volunteers director Nelly Moreno Shenk explained it, it was unconscionable to eliminate TPS for “lawful permanent residents who have done everything right, obeyed all laws, have applied for citizenship, passed their interviews and yet remain in limbo” simply because they ended up on Trump’s list of retroactively banned countries, including those from Haiti, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. Challenges to TPS appeals are being appealed in court; the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to weigh in this summer.

Pathways for citizenship are desperately needed not just to just take people out of the shadows but also to get them on the books, paying taxes (though many already pay into Social Security, despite not being able to draw from it), and letting them live a life of dignity, free of fear.

With her staff budget cut in half by Trump’s One Ugly Bill, Susannah Lepley of Church World Service called on the people gathered at the forum to donate money and, more importantly, their time to assist her remaining staffers who are struggling to serve 1,500 refugees in the region. “Everyone needs to stand up,” Lepley said. To donate to her organization and to receive the Church World Service’s weekly State of Play newsletter, please subscribe here.

To close the roundtable, I told the story of my own family’s entrée into immigration services, via a Liberian family we began mentoring in 2004. They’d arrived in Roanoke with just the clothes on their backs—a family of eight, including a grandma in her 90s and five kids. We were supposed to help them learn English, but they needed so much more. So we focused on finding jobs for the parents and teaching them to drive, a harrowing experience I couldn’t stomach and delegated to my husband. When the kids’ needs began to overwhelm us, we asked our friends to help us, connecting each couple with a child to mentor.

Some 20 years later, one of the five kids is a married accountant with a master’s degree, and another is a nurse. All are employed, and the couple now owns a house they purchased with the help of Habitat for Humanity. When the accountant’s wife had a baby last year, the couple named her for his family mentors, our friends Lee and Frances.

It may sound cliché, but my friends and I agree that we received far more than we have given to this family—including the sound of the telephone hitting the floor that first winter. The kids had called me to squeal and to marvel that they’d never before seen snow.

If you’d like to donate or volunteer with Roanoke Asylum-Seekers Support Network, a group I’ve writtten about before, e-mail me at papergirlmacy@gmail.com, and I’ll pass on your information to leaders. Volunteers drive immigrants to legal appointments and collect money for legal fees and rents. The need is dire, as the RASN leader explained:

“One of our folk was taken by ICE this past weekend in Salem,” he e-mailed recently, echoing a story I’d also heard from a Haitian friend in Pittsburgh. “A Haitian family has their last court hearing this Friday, but I’ll be surprised if they get asylum. Being deported to Haiti these days is almost like a death sentence. The gangs know when deportees come back into the country, knowing that they have connections in the States, and thus are at risk of kidnapping for ransom.”

• • •

Last week in New York, I was honored for Paper Girl to be a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. I didn’t win my category, but I was blown away by those who did. In her acceptance speech, the journalist Karen Hao spoke powerfully about resistance.

In her winning 2025 book, “The Empire of AI,” Hao unpacked how America’s leading artificial intelligence giants are growing into modern-day empires, aided and abetted by the federal government, which is showing no signs of regulating the billionaire-led companies—even as AI threatens to replace half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years and driving unemployment to 10-20 percent.

Without government guardrails, AI is going to make what NAFTA and other trade deals did to the 5 million factory workers it displaced look like child’s play.

Hao, who won in the nonfiction category, beseeched her audience not to despair.

She quoted Rebecca Solnit: “Hope is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and destruction… Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty there is room to act.”

She concluded her remarks by celebrating the written word as “one radical act of resistance against the imperial project that seeks to strip us of those words and of our humanity.”

She added: “When people rise, empires always fall.”

• • •

There are just 12 days until April 21, the day of Virginia’s redistricting referendum. It’s a chance, in my view, to combat Trump’s power grab, his demand that Texas legislators add Republican seats to the House without a vote. Virginia—the mother of presidents—can correct this naked act of electoral manipulation by voting YES on the referendum.

In the meantime, I hope to see you on the road at these events in the coming couple of weeks:

• Campaign stop: Nelson County Dems are hosting a meet and greet Friday night at 8445 Thompson Nelson Highway, Lovingston.

• Book talk, in conversation with novelist Silas House, Saturday, 4:30 p.m. at Greensboro Bound Book Festival.

• Campaign stop, James Madison University Young Dems, meet and greet, 7 p.m. Monday, Taylor Hall, room 400, with special musical guests. (Go Dukes!)

• Campaign stop, Roanoke College Young Dems, meet and greet, Olde Salem Brewing, 21 E. Main St., Salem, 7 p.m. Tuesday. (Go Maroons!)

• Book talk, Rocktown Author Festival, 1:30 p.m., April 25, Massanutten Regional Library, 174 S. Main St., Harrisonburg.

• Book talk, Columbus Metropolitan Library, in conversation with my dear friend and fellow-Buckeye author Brian Alexander, 2 p.m. May 3.

• Roanoke branch NAACP keynote address, Citizen of the Year Awards Program & 74^th Life Membership Freedom Fund Dinner, 6 p.m. May 8, Holiday Inn, 3315 Ordway Dr., Roanoke.

More events are listed on my website.