Harrisonburg, in the Shenandoah Valley in western Virginia, used to be a sleepy town in the middle of farm country. It is that no longer. With a base population of around 50,000 (more when school is in session), boasting two universities and two colleges in the immediate area — James Madison University, Eastern Mennonite University, Bridgewater College, and Blue Ridge Community College — as well as a regional hospital and a fair amount of industry, Harrisonburg is not a bad place to live, not by a long shot.
The town has a long history, some of it salutary and some of it not so much, and most of that depending on your race. From its first days, it was a commercial town, drawing customers from the area and as far as West Virginia to sell their goods and buy necessities. For white citizens, Court Square in the center of town was the primary gathering place for almost 200 years. Court Days (days that court was in session) were crowded; it was a place where, before 1860, locals could both do business and take in the sights, hangings and slave auctions, and after 1865 at least one lynching.
In more recent years, Court Square was the town’s business center — shopping, restaurants, movies were all located downtown. The basement of the Court House boasted a “Ladies Lounge,” a combination sitting area and restroom relic of the pre-ac era, where white women could retreat when the day’s heat got to be too much. It was closed in the late 1980’s. Under that veneer of Southern hospitality there’s an underbelly of slavery, segregation, and hostility to anyone “not from here,” although old families today do much to pretend that all the unpleasantness in history happened elsewhere. Their ancestors were simple farmers, not rich planters — they had nothing to do with that. It’s not true, but they stick with it.
Despite modernization, despite a lot of strip malls and infill development, much has not changed. Harrisonburg is still the seat of Rockingham County, and Rockingham County is still pretty much agricultural. Harrisonburg is a little light blue island (57% for Clinton in 2016) in the red sea that is Rockingham County (69% for Trump). Memorably, when Oliver North ran for Senate in Virginia, Rockingham County supported him by 60 points.
The poultry industry was born here; the raising and processing of chickens and turkeys have been a mainstay of the local economy. Together with light industry in which English need not be spoken as a condition of employment, the County has operated on low-skilled, low-wage work for a very long time. For the last 30 years or so, a lot of retirees have moved in from New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Northern Virginia. The white population is skewing older; the younger population ever more diverse.
Add to this mix the influence of a large Brethren and Mennonite community. Eastern Mennonite University developed programs for Peace and Social Justice, with a focus on immigration and refugee resettlement. Christian World Service also works to resettle refugees in the area. Harrisonburg is a designated refugee resettlement area, a fact not known to many of the city’s residents. Because of the outreach to immigrant communities, comprehensive services to help people get acclimated, and the availability of jobs, Harrisonburg has a large immigrant population. In fact, the city’s population is about 20% Latino and the students in Harrisonburg’s public schools speak around 55 different languages, Spanish, Arabic and Kurdish having replaced Vietnamese and Laotian as the most prominent in recent years. Shop in the local stores and you’ll hear Chinese, Russian, and Creole, as well as Indian languages, Farsi and many others. It’s a true melting pot.
Which makes for complex dynamics. Despite that the old white southern community culture abides, the students from the colleges bring youth, enthusiasm, and a lot of disposable income to the economy. Massanutten Resort is east of Harrisonburg in Rockingham County and bills itself as a four-season vacation destination, and anchors a huge tourist industry. The local immigrant population has brought a influx of cuisine, making Harrisonburg a culinary destination. Where else in the Shenandoah Valley could you get food truck tacos, authentic pad thai, Cuban pollo a la plancha, sushi, schnitzel, and pho alongside Jesse’s hot dogs and pork barbecue from the BBQ Ranch?
Yet, the influx of new cultures is something that Harrisonburg struggles with. The town loves the commercial advantages and depends on the immigrant population, even more than it acknowledges. According to recent demographic information, the city population would have declined substantially had it not been for immigration:
During the 2000s, about one-third of population growth was caused by international immigration. In the 2010s, two-thirds of Harrisonburg’s population growth is attributable to international migration.
It just doesn’t always treat the immigrant population especially well. The first Latinos in the area were Puerto Rican workers brought in to break a strike in the local poultry plant in the 1960’s. Marval Poultry went to Puerto Rico to recruit because Puerto Ricans were citizens. Then they started to recruit Mexican and Central American undocumented workers who were paid badly and treated worse. Although somewhat dated, Laura Zurraugh presents a generally accurate picture of “The Latinization” of the area around Harrisonburg (link is a .pdf).
Today some immigrants own businesses, but most visibly immigrants work in the kitchens and restaurants, the landscaping businesses, the poultry processing plants and in manufacturing—mostly doing high-labor, low-wage hourly work. Instances of human trafficking are whispered; they don’t turn up in the newspapers.
Even so, mostly folks get along peaceably. And there is a surprisingly effective network to support the newcomers. In addition to federally-contracted services like CWS, whose work has been curtailed in the Trump Administration, there’s VANITA, the Valley Area Network for Immigration Transportation Assistance that gets immigrants to their mandatory check in’s and status hearings:
Because of their immigration status, these immigrants are not able to obtain driver’s licenses, and this subjects them to an onerous burden of getting to legally required check-ins and appointments. Appointments are either in Manassas ICE ERP (Enforcement and Removal Operations). Arlington Immigration Court, Fairfax ICE Field Office, Alexandria USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Center) Application Support Center for fingerprinting and photos, aka biometrics. The cost for hiring drivers ranges from $100 to$250 per trip. Check-in requirements can be as frequent as weekly. We’ve heard from Charlottesville counterparts that clients can be extorted for additional money on the day of travel, as they have no other arrangements and can’t afford to miss a check-in.1
There’s also the FUEGO Coalition, Friends United for Equity and Grassroots Organizing, which has taken the forefront in raising issues regarding refugees and immigrants in the community. NewBridges Immigrant Resource Center works with United Way to help immigrants with everything from finding housing and jobs to education and legal services. The Rockingham County Democratic Committee works actively in immigration issues (of course), and there is no shortage of faith-based organizations that quietly assist and serve the immigrant community.
Because the town is relatively serene and the neighbors are mostly neighborly, it’s a surprise that ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement — operates in Harrisonburg. And it was a bombshell when the news broke on Thursday, May 9, that ICE is relocating to larger facilities.
Most people didn’t know that ICE operated here at all.
But it does, and its operations have been exceedingly quiet, until now. During 2015, the latest date for which data is publicly available, Rockingham County sheriff Bryan Hutcheson, who administers the County Jail, held 45 undocumented immigrants charged with minor offenses past their release dates so they could be taken into ICE custody. According to the The Citizen blog:
Records compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), an organization based at Syracuse University that tracks and publishes data on federal law enforcement, show that ICE made 195 arrests in Rockingham County or “closely surrounding areas” between October 2014 and May 2018. The City of Harrisonburg does not appear separately in TRAC data, which is compiled through the use of Freedom of Information Act requests, and more recent data is not yet available.
In the past, local news reported when ICE has conducted raids at local industries, mostly the poultry industry, bundling up people at while they were at work and hauling them away while management performs its well-worn kabuki of “We were fooled by forged documents.” Like everywhere else, though, local media has been hollowed out by declining ad revenues. Locally, few reporters are left, in either print, radio, or television, so anyone who supposes that important local news is being covered adequately is naive.
ICE has been operating out of a building in a strip mall area. The office intended, very quietly, to move across the street, doubling its capacity for office space to almost 7,000 square feet, which will include three holding cells. It took a FOIA request from FUEGO to make the city of Harrisonburg release the building permit application, despite that building permits are public information. It’s not a stretch to say that the local government entities are either cowed or complicit. Virginia Organizing has a good report about both the coordination between Harrisonburg and ICE, and the local efforts to oppose its expansion. It’s worth noting that the small protest held Sunday, May 12, was, of course peaceful and, of course, the police were called.
ICE has not responded to any requests for information. The only person who speaks for the office in any official capacity is the developer, who is quick to stress that the renovations being done in the new office space is to expand for offices, not detention facilities. Also, the building is already zoned for this use, so it’s a “by right” use, and public opinion has no bearing on the matter.
Questions remain, and uncomfortable coincidences are lining up.
Last week a “rumor” broke on Facebook’s s Remembering Downtown Harrisonburg group site that the county is planning to acquire an large building that not long ago was turned from retail space into apartments that’s located beside the county jail and judicial center, and will take it by eminent domain if necessary.
I should note that, judging from the 123 comments, the locals are madder about eminent domain than the jail expansion. This is not really a rumor — it’s been in City/County official five year plan — but local government has been adept at keeping unpopular decisions under wraps (witness above that it took a FOIA request to release a building permit, despite that building permits are public records) until things are fait accompli.
Now ICE is doubling its office capacity. The question is: why?
At the same time, troubling developments are coalescing around the next wave of immigrant persecution nationwide. The Washington Post has just reported the Trump Administration’s planned wave of mass family arrests, the implications of which Gabe Ortiz traces out here. Whether the Administration follows through on rounding up families for detention, it also plans the wholesale curtailing of refugee and immigration admissions, coupled with cuts to services for immigrants, proposed rule changes that will separate or evict families if any members are non-citizens, redefining poverty, retroactively revoking protected status for anyone who ever received WIC, SNAP, subsidized housing, etc.: These are all very dark developments that carry 1930’s European overtones and that strike at the most vulnerable among us.
It would be foolish to write “I never thought it could happen here” — this is exactly where it could happen: where people can be targeted, followed, detained, disappeared, and most of the community will carry on as if nothing were amiss. Harrisonburg depends upon its immigrant population, not only for cheap labor but for cultural enrichment; the city’s population would be shrinking were it not for immigration. And yet, much of the white community pretends that its immigrant neighbors just don’t exist, much the same way slavery and segregation didn’t exist despite all evidence to the contrary. Our neighbors, but for a small cadre of activists who serve as the community’s conscience, would like nothing more than to pretend nothing is wrong.
Harrisonburg is just one town — a complicated town with a complicated history that it has yet to reconcile — but its experience is writ large across the nation. ICE is here; ICE is expanding. No one knows why but the portent is obvious, and local officials are either complicit or too cowed to resist.
This is the version you’re probably more familiar with.
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1 VANITA Faq, available upon request.