Jordon Drydahl-Roberts worked as a legal secretary for Montana’s labor department. A short while ago he found himself in charge of processing labor data subpoenaed by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. According to the Washington Post, Drydahl-Roberts decided to talk with his wife and then they made the very difficult decision that he would quit his job. Being complicit in the breaking up of families and the witch-hunting of undocumented immigrants isn’t what Drydahl-Roberts signed up for.
He has a 4-year-old child, a wife who is working as a substitute librarian while attending graduate school, two cats and about $900 left in his checking account. Quitting would also make him ineligible for unemployment insurance.
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“People have asked why am I doing this if I have a child. I’m doing this because I have a child,” Dyrdahl-Roberts wrote on Twitter. “I want to be able to look my child in the eye.”
The law is the law explains Montana’s labor department.
Montana’s labor department has received 14 subpoenas from the federal Department of Homeland Security since 2014, and the state agency is legally bound to respond to them, said its spokesman, Jake Troyer.
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“The Department is in communication with Jordon, and it’s our understanding his decision to resign is purely based on his personal opposition to the federal administration’s rhetoric on immigration,” Troyer said in an email to The Post. “Jordon’s involvement in the process of responding to subpoenas was limited to assisting attorneys with processing requests.”
Here’s a law that some people broke to shelter Jews and other “undesirables” back in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Law on the Revocation of Naturalization and the Deprivation of German Citizenship(“Denaturalization Law”) – July 14, 1933:
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Naturalizations completed between November 9, 1918 and January 30, 1933 were revocable if thenaturalization was considered undesirable. In addition, German citizens residing abroad weredeprived of their citizenship if their conduct threw doubt on their loyalty to the Reich or harmedGerman interests. Moreover, if a German national did not comply with an order to return to the Reich, their citizenship could be forfeited and their property confiscated by the government. Amongthose immediately affected by this law were the German Jews of Romanian, Polish or Russian originnaturalized during this time. Once stripped of their citizenship, they became stateless.
It’s the law. Detaining and deporting fathers of children fighting cancer. That’s the law. The fact of the matter is that the individual DREAMers stories and circumstances and how they are affected by Trump’s racist policies cuts Mr. Dyrdahl-Roberts the closest. According to the Post, Dyrdahl-Roberts had a tough family upbringing and empathizes with the fact that children don’t get to choose where they are born or where they live, or much of anything. To punish them for things they had no say in or control over is not only cruel, it’s intolerable. People are lauding him as a hero but Jordon Dyrdahl-Roberts wants everyone to know that he is no more a hero than any one of us can be, as he told the Daily Dot.
While Twitter has helped champion Dyrdahl-Roberts’ story across the social media platform and into major media outlets including HLN, Univision, and the Washington Post, he wants other self-described “nobodies” such as himself to know that, no, he isn’t an example of the resistance hero that progressives are hoping will save minority communities from Trump’s oppressive siege: They are. He said that, though people are looking for “heroes” to save the less powerful, they too have the capability of “saving” others.
“You can do things, you, random person who thinks they have no power over anything. It won’t always work out in some magical way, but if we can reach a critical mass, some sort of self-stating middle finger to the administration—they require compliance to get things done that are getting done, so, hey, let’s try not complying,” Dyrdahl-Roberts said. “I understand the impulse to just survive [and not create a disturbance], but really, maybe it’s time we try a new strategy.”
You can probably drop him a note at Twitter or on his Facebook page. A GoFundMe page was set up by Juli Briskman for the humble Jordon. You may remember Juli Briskman as the cyclist who lost her job after flipping the bird to our white supremacist in chief’s motorcade. Good work Jordan Drydahl-Roberts.