Jordon Drydahl-Roberts, the Montana man who quit his job in the state’s Labor Department rather than be complicit in the separation of immigrant families, warns in a new op-ed that while he has been overwhelmed by the positive public reaction to his story, he’s afraid the federal government’s mass deportation agenda is set to have “a chilling effect on the good work public servants are trying to do”:
Even as I’m surrounded by the warm glow of love and support from strangers, I still have a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. I wonder how many other people, working in other government offices, have unwittingly or unwillingly been drafted into ICE’s service. How many felt trapped by circumstance, or found a way to justify it to themselves. I stumbled into public service, but I stayed because I felt like I was doing something good. With the specter of ICE looming over all of that now, it has a chilling effect on the good work public servants are trying to do. But they don’t have to comply. They can say no. They can refuse to work with an agency that taints everything it touches.
Like so many other Americans, Drydahl-Roberts wrote that he was horrified by the stories of ordinary moms and dads who “were supposedly ‘low priority’ for deportation” getting targeted for deportation.” So when he was told at work that data that “was part of keeping the department running was going to be turned from a tool used to protect workers into a weapon used to hunt down some of the most vulnerable among us,” he made a choice to not be any part of it:
I had recently seen the video of Border Patrol officers dumping bottles of water that had been left by humanitarians in the desert to stop people from dying of thirst. The apparent glee with which some of them were condemning people to die sickened me. It didn’t seem like an agency of people reluctantly doing a job or making a tough choice because they had to feed their family. They were enjoying it.
He still credits his office with trying to find a way to work with him: “They gave me time to think about it” and discussed perhaps moving him, but he knew “anything I did in the department would forever make me a part of a machine that was going to be used to break up families.” Drydahl-Roberts writes that some of his motivation stemmed from basic humanity: putting himself in others’ shoes. “I thought about my own child and how I couldn’t comprehend us being separated. There was no way I could have a part in this and live with myself.” Thank you to this good man.