From Beth Macy 'Helping Our Terrified Immigrant Neighbors'
Trump’s Fascism Threatens ‘to make liars and criminals out of all of us’. Posted with permission from Beth Macy from her September 9, 2025 post.
The coordinator of Roanoke Asylum-Seekers Support Network is 84 and a longtime Quaker, as are many of the group’s supporters and volunteers. I’ve interviewed him several times since Trump signed the act that turned ICE into the largest police force in the history of our nation, and every time I do I’m reminded of a prominent Ohio abolitionist featured in my forthcoming book, Paper Girl.
Udney Hyde was also a Quaker, an Ohio farmer who hid runaway slaves in cellars, attics, and stables in clear violation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. For more than a decade Hyde coordinated the secret passage of 517 enslaved people to Canada with other like-minded Ohioans, building a trapdoor to the cellar of his log cabin and a platform inside his well where they could hide from the henchmen their enslavers hired to return them to slaveholding states. Hyde told people he was “breaking the laws of man but keeping the laws of God.”
There are strong parallels between Hyde and my unnamed octogenarian. Not long ago, the leader of RASN went through the handwritten notes he keeps on the couple-dozen immigrant families he helps in the Roanoke region and blacked out all their identifying information—so that if ICE raids his home, they might know where he is but not the families. Joy Sylvester-Johnson, one of his most active volunteers, told me in an earlier essay that she was willing to go to jail if it came to that.
The nonprofit collects donations from 100 supporters—which the coordinator then uses to help roughly families pay rent, utilities, and legal fees. He finds volunteer mentors to help transport them to doctors’ appointments, clothing closets, food pantries, and immigration court hearings. Last year RASN disbursed nearly $90,000 in direct services.
Along the way, he listens to the immigrants, offering encouragement and advice. For a 31-year-old single mother of two from Honduras—I’ll call her by her initial, F—who walks to work at her housekeeping job, the uptick in ICE removals across the country has been terrifying.
“I don’t feel safe at work, on the street, even in the house,” she told me recently, through a RASN volunteer interpreter, a former high school Spanish teacher. Her friend in Maryland was deported recently from his roofing job site.
F began to cry as she recounted the man’s story. In her family’s case application for asylum, she recounts her family fleeing an addicted, violent relative in Honduras and settling in a Roanoke County housing complex where other relatives were already living. For the first few months, seven people were crammed into a two-bedroom trailer, where she and her young son slept on a mattress on the floor.
All were working housekeeping jobs, sending their children to county schools, and living in relative peace until Trump decided to make their very existence in America the flashpoint for making sure we stay so angry and suspicious of one another that we don’t crane our necks upward to see that $50 trillion dollars has been siphoned from the bottom 90 percent of Americans and given to the richest 1 percent.
In seeking legal asylum under Temporary Protected Status, F has told her story to an immigration judge in Sterling, Va., three times, but the judge said her approval chances were slim. “Domestic violence doesn’t count” as an acceptable reason, the RASN coordinator said. “Best case: They may give her another year.”
A few blocks away from F’s tidy trailer, a cousin I’ll call D was also turned down recently by that same court, a decision RASN is helping her appeal. The legal fees cost around $8,000 a year.
D came to Roanoke in 2018 after her husband was murdered by Honduran gangs when he refused to pay their extortion fees. She was hit by a bus and lost a leg in Honduras at the age of thirteen, but nonetheless she walked with her young son for three months of their journey to Roanoke, where she has relatives, on a wooden leg. Eventually relying on a prosthetic foot provided by Carilion Clinic’s charity care program, she set about creating a job she could do from her home: She buys home goods and clothing in bulk on the internet she sells to friends in her neighborhood while taking English classes at night.
Her friends have been racially profiled, pulled over at ICE check points on Williamson Road, and sent who-knows-where. During the first quarter of the year, three of RASN’s single-mom clients and one family of five were deported. All the deportees had preschool-age children who were left behind under the care of extended family. A single mother helped by the group was fired from her job a few months back in a small nursing home along with all the facility’s undocumented workers.
A recent ICE raid at a local roofing site resulted in the removal of eight Cuban men from their families. A RASN family of five disappeared on a trip to Houston to visit a family member having a medical emergency.
One of the deportees had to have emergency surgery while in a remote detention facility in Louisiana—her family had no idea where she was—after which she was placed in a crowded cell without any meds or post-op care. Another deportee was flown back to Honduras, leaving his two children and a pregnant wife, who’d already been granted asylum, a work permit and had started her application for a green card. “Separating families is a policy to encourage self-deportation,” RASN’s leader told me.
Many parents are too afraid to work, worry constantly about driving too fast (or too slow) and even fear going to church, and RASN can’t meet all their needs.
These are the stories you’re not reading in local news outlets, partially because local news has been so flattened as to become impotent and partly because those featured are fearful of being named lest they be stomped by Trump’s retribution campaign.
You can help by supporting these families with donations for rents or legal fees, or by offering day jobs to help fill the gap; reach out to me here if you have local work for the group’s clients or are able to drive folks to immigration hearings and check-in appointments. Checks can be mailed directly to RASN at P.O. Box 3071, Roanoke, VA 24015.
For other ways to help immigrants wherever you live, I highly recommend this piece by my journalist friend Andrea Pitzer about how to lobby local police and sheriff’s departments and other tips for de-ICE-ing your community.
When I asked D what her plans were for her children should she be deported, she shook her head and said, “I really want to stay in this country where I’ve received so many blessings.”
As we drove away from her home, the volunteer explained, “D is very intelligent, but she has no plan. There is so much denial because if they think about it, they’ll go crazy. They know that ICE could clear out this [housing development] or their [workplace] in a day.”
“The unnecessary suffering is the hardest thing to watch,” Joy Sylvester-Johnson said. Aiding the undocumented threatens to “make liars and criminals out of all of us.”
Perhaps.
But as Udney Hyde would say, it also makes us keepers of the faith.
Even Citizens Are Terrified and Too Scared To Be Named
After leaving D and F’s homes, I thought about a family I’d met at the June 14th No Kings rally. The wife, A, is a civilian epidemiologist who works for the military, and her physician husband, R, is a veteran presently working as a radiologist in Rocky Mount. Both were born in the United States, the children of immigrant parents; both came from military families whose members proudly served their countries.
The No Kings rally was the first protest of their lives. They attended because they were scared, especially when R found himself driving to work through Boones Mill—aka “Trump Town.” (On the store’s Facebook page, one female shopper exclaimed: “I’d rather be grabbed by the pu**y than have a pu**y for a president.”)
Last weekend, I called the couple to see how they—upper-middle class Roanoke County residents who sent their child to the tony North Cross private school—were faring after Trump’s elevation of ICE to the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the country, its powers now predicted to outpace that of the FBI or the DEA.
“The [anti-immigrant] rhetoric just puts you on guard even though I served in the military and did everything that was expected of me as a U.S. citizen,” R told me. After Trump’s re-election, R tucked his lifetime membership cards to the American Legion and the D.A.V. into his wallet, and he’s plastered a U.S. Navy veteran sticker on the side of his truck.
The couple feels safe traveling in cities, but when they’re in rural areas, they find themselves constantly checking their surroundings: Who else is here? What are their demographics? On Sunday, after attending a sunflower festival in the rural hamlet of Buchanan, Va., they considered stopping at a dinner in Buchanan or Fincastle, another small town. Then they thought again and drove straight home to Roanoke.
Ten years ago, they wouldn’t have given their dining options a second thought. They’re stunned by the number of people they know who have mentally checked out on what’s happening to their immigrant neighbors or the fact that they have to think about their trans son’s safety constantly, creating contingency plans and recreating them with every new cruelty. Texas wants to make it a felony to be trans, and one of our Felon-in-Chief’s latest proposals is for HHS to bar federal funding for gender-affirming care nationwide.
One of their Navy buddies, a thrice-time Trump voter, was stunned when his British-born wife was detained recently by ICE at O’Hare International Airport recently while coming home from a vacation to Ireland—for a bad check written eleven years ago, a misdemeanor. “He didn’t understand what truly was happening until it was happening to him,” R said.
As the saying goes: It shouldn’t have to happen to you for it to matter to you.
Donna Hughes-Brown, 59 and a permanent legal resident of the United States after emigrating with her parents at the age of 11, is now in a Kentucky holding facility while the removal proceedings related to her long-ago $25 bad check play out. Her husband has beseeched his Missouri reps and his governor to intervene but so far gotten zero response from the Trump-cowed politicians.
As James Brown told Newsweek: “You look at the news, and they’re not telling the truth about what’s actually happening to a lot of legal immigrants,” said Brown, adding that he “100 percent regrets” voting for Trump. “What’s bad is that Trump is so demeaning to people, and he’s so condescending and so retaliatory that people are afraid to say anything.”
But we have to speak up, I’m reminded on a daily, almost hourly basis. We have to call out the cruelties and the lies. While Udney Hyde was hiding runaways in hay-covered wagons, the great orator Frederick Douglass warned in 1857: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.”
Why Immigrant Workers Are Desperately Needed
Among other themes, Paper Girl explores what happens to small communities who have found themselves relying on immigrant workers when locals aren’t up to the task. I feature my hometown of Urbana, Ohio, as well as nearby Springfield, as it became a national flashpoint in the lead-up to the 2024 election. My ex-boyfriend, who is profiled in the book, emerged as a leader of the Stop the Influx to Springfield group.
During my two years of reporting for the book, I couldn’t find a factory manager who wasn’t hard up for employees—one said if he hired ten people today, only one would still be working for the company in six months. One of the biggest factories in my hometown had to start busing Haitians in from nearby Springfield.
“We never once talked about not having enough employees,” said a former classmate of mine whose family had operated an automotive-parts welding factory for 53 years. At the time of our interview, the family employed 375 workers over two shifts, including 27 Haitian refugees who commuted daily from Springfield. Soon after, the company resorted to offering flex-time to its American-born employees; workers could forgo benefits in exchange for the option of showing up part-time whenever they please. “You come in every day, and you don’t even know who’s going to be here,” another manager said.
But many of the Springfield Haitians are now leaving, after Trump almost immediately removed Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. On Friday, a federal judge blocked the order, but some Springfield Haitians have already fled to countries like Canada, fearing deportations to countries like Uganda and South Sudan. Meanwhile, to extend tax breaks for billionaires, $1 trillion will be cut from Medicaid over the next ten years—the single-most effective federal tool that helps make low-wage Americans workforce-ready by helping them heal from addiction and other diseases of despair.
Willy-nilly tariffs will not be enough to bring manufacturing to America again—a topic I’ve covered since my first book, Factory Man, came out in 2014—and Trump and his Republican enablers know it like the back of their pu**y-grabbing hands. But it’s so much easier to demonize immigrants and trans people and [insert minority group here] than to tell the truth about what ails America and then actually fix it.
My Local Book Launches
Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America will publish on Oct. 7, and I couldn’t be more excited. Last week People magazine listed it as No. 6 on its “Must-Read Books of Fall 2025” list, and early endorsements include this blurb from one of my favorite writers of all time, Susan Orlean, whose forthcoming memoir, Joyride, I am dying to read.
I’ll be posting an updated tour list on social media soon. In the meantime, you can still pre-order signed (and discounted!) copies of the book through Porchlight Books. I’m especially stoked about the October 5 book launch in my hometown of Urbana, where I spent the first third of my life, and the later event in my present home city of Roanoke, where I’ve lived and reported from for 36 years.
The Roanoke launch will take place on Oct. 16 at Charter Hall in the downtown City Market building. It’s a fundraiser for first-generation students (like I was) who go to Virginia Western Community College and are raising their younger siblings, as the young man and welding student I profiled in the book is now doing. The $40 ticket includes a book, food and beverages, and the opportunity to help some promising young people who are trying their damnedest to be happy, productive Americans and to better their lot.
I hope to see y’all somewhere on the tour. In the meantime, here’s another Josh Meltzer photo from the book, this one of Silas James (the modern-day me), helping train his drum-major successor for the UHS Homecoming game in 2023 while working full time and going to college full time. (Silas on far left, me with trumpet on far right.) With hard work and the right kind of help, we can all strive for a life better than the one we were born into.