'I'll go to jail if I have to'
Posted with permission from Beth Macy from her April 18, 2025 post. Subscribe to her Substack here.
The gentleman, a retired social worker, is in his 80s. He cares for his wife who is recovering from a stroke. In between, he collects cash from his church and other friends in Roanoke to help pay for rent and food for twenty-one immigrant asylum-seeking families in the region.
The list of immigrant needs in our community has skyrocketed in the past month, and the tentacles of fear stretch ever wider as news breaks of Salvadoran prisons and legal immigrants being grabbed off American streets. “People are afraid to come out of their houses,” he tells me.
In the past two months alone, breadwinners from three of his local families have been deported. All were working. “All three left behind preschool children,” the man told me. “They didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to their families.”
The roundups are going to get worse. Working immigrants have long paid taxes into a Social Security system they’ll never be able to draw from, only to learn last week that the IRS was ordered to share their identities and information with ICE, making them even more prone to being rounded up and sent to their gang-riddled home countries or Trump’s Salvadoran prison, with its echoes of transatlantic slave ships and concentration camps.
I’m not using the man’s name or the name of his nonprofit because the group worries that ICE officers might raid his home to steal the names and addresses of the people they’re helping. This is just a sliver of the dangers that immigrants—and the valiant volunteers who help them—are facing. With Trump defying the Supreme Court and promising to send even American citizens to his Salvadoran hell-hole, we are all living in an authoritarian state.
The emergency is now. It’s real. And if you don’t think we’re in one, you’re not paying attention. “I have images of hiding Anne Frank in my attic,” another volunteer who mentors Afghan families told me. “I would protect these people with my life.”
To speak publicly for the octogenarian rent-payer, I turned to his No. 1 right hand, the Rev. Joy Sylvester-Johnson, who for decades ran the Roanoke Rescue Mission, started by her missionary parents in 1948. When the octogenarian could no longer make the drive to take asylum seekers to northern Virginia for their required check-ins and visa renewals, Sylvester-Johnson eagerly took his place.
A widowed retiree in her mid-seventies, Sylvester-Johnson told me she’s willing to be the face of the organization because she doesn’t have anyone to take care of—no spouse relying on her; her children are grown. “I can go to jail if I have to,” she said.
When Vietnamese refugees began settling in Roanoke four decades ago, the community used to rely on local churches to adopt families. “But the country is so divided right now about those things, it’s hard to find churches to do this because the church itself is so divided,” she said.
So it falls to people like Sylvester-Johnson and a handful of other small nonprofits in our region, all of which are dependent on donations and volunteers. Their work became even more urgent when Trump suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions program during his first week in office, which gutted our region’s resettlement program, Catholic Commonwealth Charities, causing it to lay off eight people last month.
The ripple effects of those layoffs are being deeply felt among organizations that help immigrants, from the 40-year-old Blue Ridge Literacy, which provides English and citizenship classes, to the Roanoke Refugee Partnership, a volunteer-run nonprofit that also provides mentorship and help for immigrant families, as well as to Joy’s group that I’m not naming.
On Monday, in the auditorium of our downtown library, a group of concerned local helpers called DoGood Virginia met with them. The idea was to connect the helpers to the potential helpees.
At the request of Sylvester-Johnson’s group, three hefty men stood guard by the door in case ICE tried to infiltrate, though to my knowledge none did.
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The meeting felt overwhelming. Friends said later they weren’t sure which groups to send checks to or which ones to help—because they’re all worthy and all operating at the ragged edge of capacity. I’ll include a specific list of how to contribute below. These efforts are localized to my city, of course, but you can contact your own immigrant organizations or resettlement agencies—hopefully there’s still someone left to pick up the phone.
“One thing that struck me was the regular references to helping immigrants pursue and fulfill their American dream,” a friend said later. “But the American dream feels hollow now. Like, it’s over for all of us in that room.”
Edging toward retirement myself, I worry about my husband’s job, which is dependent on government funding, and about our ability to maintain health insurance, which is dependent on his job. I open our Sunday investment fund email updates with dread because that’s where we see Trump’s tariffying chaos at work.
The week he tariffed the island with the penguins, we lost almost the entirety of my former annual newspaper salary—that’s a year’s worth of work, evaporated in a single week. But our house is paid off, we’re luckier than many, and as the great AIDS/HIV activist Sarah Schulman put it in a recent interview with The New York Times columnist Lydia Pogreen, it’s imperative that people with privilege “think about what you can do, not what you can lose.”
At our DoGood meetings, state delegate Sam Rasoul (D-Roanoke) has urged people in our group to contribute time and money to one or two organizations they care deeply about and to infuse that work into their weekly routines.
Virginia Dems should be laser-focused on our upcoming bellwether elections—including the attorney general’s race. Now more than ever, we need an attorney general who’s willing to punch back against Trump’s executive actions. Instead, our current milquetoast, Jason Miyares, has done nothing to stand up for federal workers in Virginia, which has among the highest ratio of veteran and federal government employees. “Protesting is good, but you need to protest with purpose,” Rasoul advised.
At last week’s rally outside No Show Congressman Ben Cline’s office, our ninth in as many weeks, Do Good started collecting nonperishable items to deliver to food pantries while underscoring how federal cuts under Trump and sycophants like Cline have created spikes in food insecurity. Across the country, hunger has broached 2008 recession-level rates, and in my city alone roughly one in four children is food insecure, according to Pamela Irvine of Feeding Southwest Virginia.
The idea of collecting food at the rallies was the brainchild of my former colleague Libba Wolfe, who told our local TV station:“Everybody’s just so anxious to do something… it’s easy to bring food.” (Libba was The Roanoke Times’ circulation director and knows logistics.)
When we announced the food drive on social media, we had no idea which pantry would receive the goods or who would deliver them, but we knew we would figure it out and we did. If it feels like this moment calls for not just building a plane while flying it but also jumping out of the actual plane—amen, and I hear you.
When leaders refuse to meet with their constituents, Schulman advises: “[Y]ou use nonviolent, theatrical civil disobedience to communicate through the media to the public what your solution is. … There is no quick fix for this moment. This moment is a cataclysm. But speaking out, being informed, working with others, allowing for multiple approaches, that’s what we can do.”
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In a place that became Virginia’s first “Welcoming City,” Roanoke immigrants who qualify are still receiving SNAP benefits and Medicaid, but many are in danger of losing their means of paying rent. Some employers misinterpreting the Trump Administration’s rulings are wrongly telling them they need a green card instead of the employment authorization card many already have.
Of the 300 to 400 Afghans living in Roanoke, most have at least one member who is still employed. But in an environment of widespread fear and retribution, that work is tenuous. Samim Noorzad, an American citizen from Afghanistan who was recently laid off from the Roanoke refugee office, tells family members and friends not to leave their homes without their green cards on them.
“I’m worried about them being stopped and not being able to communicate” with ICE officers. Noorzad worries about his own parents as well, now in limbo in Afghanistan. They were initially approved to migrate to Roanoke, after an expedited interview with the U.S. embassy in Qatar—but the whole thing was paused with Trump’s cancellation of the program.
“I’m appalled, to be honest,” said Noorzad, who translated for American troops in Afghanistan before moving to Roanoke in 2016.
AS FOR LOCAL IMMEDIATE NEEDS: While my husband delivered a pickup truck’s worth of food to the Presbyterian Community Center, local immigrant advocates filled us in on their biggest needs. The asylee group run by Sylvester-Johnson identified rent and food as her group’s biggest challenge. (Contact her at joysylvesterjohnson@gmail.com to make a donation, or to help with transportation.)
Ahoo Salem, whose Blue Ridge Literacy currently serves 250 immigrants with English and citizenship classes, needs volunteer teachers and tutors to help her staff. Afghan women, who were systemically excluded from education, make up the majority of her learners, though the nonprofit teaches English to all levels, from students who were never literate in their native tongue to those who hold Ph.D.s in their home countries. Touring her facilities earlier this month, I met not only beginning English learners from Afghanistan but also a former banker from Haiti, a massage therapist from Columbia, and an IT engineer from Guatemala. (Contact Ahoo at asalem@brlit.org to help this extraordinary organization, which is housed in our downtown library.)
Speaking for the all-volunteer Roanoke Refugee Partnership, retired teacher Stefanie Fowler described a rising need for volunteers to take people to medical appointments during the day. (Most of RRP’s current members work during the day.) The organization desperately needs a volunteer coordinator (four to six hours a week) to expand its capacity to take on more mentors and volunteers, according to director Bethany Lackey. Applicants must go through a background check and join an app called BAND, which then connects them to specific needs of the day. (E-mail Lackey at Bethany@atreeplanted.org or Fowler at omasteffi@yahoo.com.)
“If you get involved in this work, you’re going to laugh and you’re going to cry,” Sylvester-Johnson said. “Every day.”
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The rounding up of human beings is not just a full-on crisis for our immigrant neighbors; it’s going to affect every one of us, and not just in our 401K balances. When Trump talks about re-shoring American manufacturing—the subject of my first book in 2014, “Factory Man,” was this very topic—I have a hard time envisioning who’s actually going to do that labor.
Having spent the better part of the last two years in my Ohio hometown reporting for my forthcoming book, “Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America,” every factory manager I interviewed struggled to find American-born employees willing and able to work. Absenteeism was rampant in every workplace I visited. “We have to teach them basic things, like how to human,” a high-school workforce counselor told me.
At a local job fair in Urbana, one manager said he’d be lucky to retain one employee out of ten new hires after six months —“and we’d probably have an attendance issue with him!” Another employer said his factory resorted to busing in dozens of Haitian immigrants from nearby Springfield—the very same people J.D. Vance and Trump falsely accused of eating people’s pets. (Here’s more on the book, which is now available for pre-order.)
But those Haitians, most of whom migrated legally under Temporary Protected Status, will soon find themselves vulnerable to deportation. And they’re just a sliver of our immigrant workforce. One in five of America’s workforce is foreign-born, almost half our farm laborers are undocumented immigrants, and roughly one-third of our nation’s construction workers are immigrants.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—she of the tight-white shirt and camera-ready blowout—has called TPS a magnet for illegal immigration. But talk to employers struggling to find people to show up to work, and you’ll understand immediately that improving immigration channels is critical if we’re ever going to make things in America again.
If Trump really wanted to Make America Great Again, he would focus not on yo-yo-ing tariffs and cruel deportations of innocent people like Kilmar Obrega Garcia but on real immigration reform—our immigration laws haven’t overhauled since 1986, back when far more Americans really were still making things—and on making more American-born workers mentally and physically well. Well, as in working to prevent the return of measles. Well, as in closing the treatment gap so that more than 13 percent of Americans with Opioid Use Order receive evidence-based care.
Instead, he’s cutting Medicaid and SAMSHA programs that remain the best avenues for addressing addiction, mental illness and declining life expectancies. He’s relying on centuries-old patterns of racism and a toxic misinformation environment that allows him to flat-out lie about the Supreme Court order to send Garcia back to his Maryland family—and yet half the country believes his every word.
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A CALL FOR IDEAS: Please tell me how your community is responding to the grim news, the confusion and cuts. Are you managing to protest with purpose, and if so, what’s that look like in your hometowns and cities? How are you sorting out where to spend your dollars and your time?
Throw a note on my Facebook Author page, or email me at papergirlmacy@gmail.com, and I’ll collate the ideas in a future newsletter.
Thanks for reading, for helping, and for building those planes mid-air. And don’t forget to pack a parachute!