Stepping into St. Adalbert’s, you are immediately struck by its magnificent proportions for a church in the middle of a neighborhood. It was built in 1926 with the original intent of becoming a cathedral, only for the diocese to decide to seat the bishop elsewhere in what many considered to be a snub of the Polish immigrant community. On one interior wall, a mural depicts Christ with a background of immigrants beating swords into plowshares; an inscription above his figure reads, in Polish, “By the sweat of your brow you have earned the bread of life.”
Nearly a century later, it’s still the spiritual home to large, Catholic, immigrant working families—only now they mostly speak Spanish, not Polish. Father Ybarra has succeeded predecessors with names like Gapczynski and Kazmierczak. And in this first scare of the Trump era, it now became a haven for families unsure if they were safe in their own workplaces or homes. Parents had grabbed their kids from Harrison Primary Center and small shops closed for the day. After that day working the phones to verify this was all a false alarm, my staff and I added to our mayor’s office to-do list the creation of a phone tree in the event of immigration raids.
One evening soon after, I walked through the doors of the Harrison school, a place I sometimes visited in order to read to second-graders. This time I wasn’t there to introduce them to “Pete the Cat,” but to address a “Know Your Rights” event for neighborhood residents. Hushed voices of hundreds of parents echoed off the lacquered basketball floor of the gym where they gathered. A legal nonprofit had set up a projector with a slide show. I rose to reassure the parents, in my rusty high school Spanish, that we were a welcoming community. “Our police are here to keep you safe, not to practice federal immigration enforcement,” I insisted. And not to tear your family apart, I thought. The last thing our law enforcement needed was for Latino families to be afraid even to speak to our officers, especially if they had information needed to solve or prevent crime in their neighborhoods, all because they conflate local police with federal immigration authorities.
As I got ready to leave, a volunteer came up to me in the hall of the school and said there were some high school kids who wanted to meet me. I wasn’t sure why high school kids would be around, since Harrison is an elementary school, but I said I’d be happy to and followed her into the glass-walled school library. There, I saw a group of mostly white students from Adams High School, which is over on the East Side. One was helping a group of small kids figure out a puzzle; another was distributing pepperoni pizza from boxes lined up on the side. A student explained that they were volunteering as part of their National Honor Society commitment, entertaining children while their parents were in the gym.
I choked up with a mix of emotions: appreciation on one hand for the work of these civically spirited students, and on the other hand, alarm at the world we were living in. When I was in high school NHS, our volunteer projects had to do with things like litter cleanup. Now, in post-2016 America, there were whole new categories of things you can volunteer to do—such as consoling and entertaining six-year-olds while their terrified immigrant parents gather in a school gym to get legal advice on how to keep their families from being torn apart by federal agents. It was another reminder that the reality of politics is personal, not theoretical. Tip O’Neill’s dictum was right: all politics is local. Especially national politics.
For me, the politics of immigration came even more up-close and personal when I visited Eddie’s Steak Shed to meet the family and friends of its owner, Roberto Beristain. Roberto had been a fixture in nearby Granger, and so was Eddie’s, employing about twenty people. He had come to the U.S. twenty years earlier, without a visa, and fallen in love with an American citizen named Helen, whom he would marry. He got a job as a cook at Helen’s family’s restaurant, and eventually saved up enough to buy out his retiring brother-in-law. He and Helen were raising three kids, all citizens. He had been trying himself to become a citizen for years, but his path was complicated by a years-old paperwork problem from being detained at the Canadian border during a vacation to Niagara Falls. Still, he had a work permit and a driver’s license, he paid taxes, and for years had been visiting an ICE office annually to check in. Other than immigrating without permission, he was more law-abiding than most of us, with not so much as a traffic ticket against his name.
Every year, Roberto would go check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But when he went to an ICE office to renew his work permit in February 2017, things did not go as usual. At this gathering of alarmed friends and family members who had asked me to come meet them at the restaurant a couple hours before it opened, Helen teared up as she described waiting for him in the car outside, grow ing more and more concerned until someone came out to tell her that Roberto was being detained.
By the time I came to meet Helen and their friends, Roberto was being held for deportation in Racine, Wisconsin. Procedurally, things were not looking good for him. His lawyers had few options; still, the friends and family at the restaurant took turns making his case and sharing stories about him. A server spoke of how hard he worked alongside his staff, in the kitchen when necessary. His stepson explained how Roberto held up his family. One by one, they described what he meant to them and asked me what could be done.
Demographically, the crowd was typical of Granger: overwhelmingly white and Republican. Yet they were all outraged that their hardworking and honest friend was being taken away. I recognized one man, with a small white mustache and a light-colored blazer, from a Kiwanis Club appearance I had made nearby. He was a certain kind of old-school, dignified small-town gentleman for whom being Republican was synonymous with being respectable, someone who likely voted for Trump without enthusiasm but out of reflex, reinforced by a decades-long antipathy to all things Clinton. He grew indignant as he described how he and his conservative friends expected the new president to go after criminals, not members of the community in good standing. It emerged that even Helen had voted for Trump, never expecting this.
I had little role other than to listen; a mayor can’t do much when it comes to immigration policy. I ached for some way to reassure the family, especially the two bright teenage daughters who were now dealing with a new dimension of bullying in middle school (“Your father is illegal!”), and their eight-year-old brother, Dimitri, who simply didn’t understand why his dad wasn’t there to put him to bed anymore.