Mayor Deanna Reed to host immigration forum with congressional candidate Beth Macy | Harrisonburg

City officials and nonprofit leaders from both Harrisonburg and Roanoke will get together Tuesday to discuss an issue important to both communities: immigration. 

The roundtable and discussion, organized by Harrisonburg Mayor Deanna Reed, will feature 6th district congressional candidate Beth Macy, as well as local leaders, service providers, and advocates, and will be at 6 p.m. at the Lucy F. Simms Continuing Education Center in Harrisonburg. 

One of the participants, Susannah Lepley, Virginia Director of Church World Service, said she was invited to the forum by Reed. 

As a nonprofit, CPS doesn’t support any particular candidate or party, Lepley said, but will instead share insights and stories. 

“We will be talking primarily about the issues that affect refugees and immigrants in our community,” Lepley said. “Basically, we’re going to be sharing experiences and challenges that refugees face in our community.” 

When refugees come to a new region, Lepley said, “they often come with little to nothing, and we talk about key help at key times. When they first arrive, they really need help until they can get a job.” 

What they often need upon arriving in the United States is rent assistance and food assistance, but only at first, Lepley said. 

“This is literally for just a couple of months, before they can get a job, because the refugee resettlement program in our country is self-sufficiency and early self-sufficiency. So, as soon as we can get people a job, they go off food stamps and generally off government assistance of any kind. The Big Beautiful Bill has created an issue because it doesn’t allow newly arrived refugees to have very much assistance.”   

The help that refugees generally need is just short-term and temporary, Lepley said. 

“Refugees and immigrants come here to contribute to our economy,” she said. “They are a net positive for our economy, and they just need a little bit of help to get started.” 

In general, “immigrants are net contributors to our economy and our community,” Lepley said. “They open businesses, they get jobs, they buy houses. They want to contribute to the economy and our community.” 

Macy said her goal in participating in the event is to listen and to learn. 

“I’m trying to get to know Harrisonburg better because it’s in both versions of the CD-6,” Macy said.

The sixth congressional district, currently represented by Rep. Ben Cline, R-Botetourt, could be reshaped if a redistricting referendum on the ballot for a special April 21st election pass. If that happens, the sixth district could go from being a district that runs along the Interstate 81 corridor from Winchester to Roanoke to a district that includes many of the college towns in the region including Blacksburg, Charlottesville and Harrisonburg. But both the current and proposed 6th District include Harrisonburg.  

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who began her term in January, signed an executive directive in early February that ended many law-enforcement cooperation agreements with ICE. 

Spanberger said she canceled the partnerships “because Virginians deserve to have their state and local law enforcement resources devoted to the safety and security of their communities, not federal civil immigration enforcement.” 

However, Cline and Second Congressional District Rep. Jen Kiggans, also a Republican, have introduced a bill in Congress that would require states to cooperate with ICE to receive certain types of grant funding. 

According to the Virginian-Pilot, “We want to obviously prioritize safe communities,” Kiggans said. “The shooting that happened at ODU was really kind of a wake-up call.”

The shooting that occurred at Old Dominion University in late March resulted in the death of Lt. Col. Brandon Shah, a ROTC instructor who was shot and killed after a gunman, Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, 36, opened fire in his classroom. Jalloh was a Sierra Leone-born U.S. citizen who spent eight years in jail after attempting to provide support to the terrorist organization, ISIS. 

A YouGov poll taken in early March showed that 50% of respondents “strongly or somewhat” want to see ICE abolished. In January, U.S. citizen anti-ICE activists Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by immigration officers during confrontations with the officers in Minneapolis.

Macy said she has spent a good deal of time in Harrisonburg, but she is interested in learning more about the town and how recent ICE actions have impacted the community. 

“My youngest child was a Duke, spent a lot of time at the Forbes Center because they were in orchestra and plays and [we] have supported them all along and have a few friends in Harrisonburg, but I’m obviously much more grounded in the Roanoke and New River Valleys because I’ve lived here, and I’ve been covering it for 40 years.” 

For many of her 40 years in Roanoke, Macy was a reporter for The Roanoke Times. As such, she told the stories of outsiders and underdogs, including those living in economically depressed Virginia towns ravaged by the loss of factory jobs and then the opioid crisis. 

In “Dopesick” (2018) Macy tells the story of how Purdue Pharma pushed drugs it knew were addictive on poor Appalachian towns and essentially caused the opioid epidemic. The Washington Post called “Dopesick” “exhaustively reported” while the New York Times called it “A masterwork of narrative journalism.” In 2021, David Dorschu, CEO of Recovery Centers of America at Raritan Bay in South Amboy, New Jersey, said the limited Hulu series based on the book, which starred Michael Keaton, “accurately portrays the controversy surrounding the OxyContin crisis and the pharmaceutical companies, such as Purdue Pharma, who preyed on everyday people’s pain.”

Now, Macy wants to learn about how a different set of policies are affecting local communities and what kind of action can be taken to help those negatively impacted. 

“I want to learn more, and I asked the mayor if she’d be willing to set something up, and she seemed very supportive of the local refugee and immigrant community,” Macy said. “Roanoke is also a refugee resettlement area [like Harrisonburg]. My husband and I have volunteered with [immigrants] since the early 2000s. We have a family from Liberia that we’ve been mentoring for 25 years.”

Macy said that though she’s told refugee and immigrant stories for many years as a journalist, “I’ve never seen anything like what we have going on now. One of the stories I like to tell is that, in 2005, I followed a Honduran woman up to the ICE office [in Harrisonburg] because her only son had been coming across the border with a coyote. They left him behind because they said he got sick, and she took a big risk, this mother, and went to ICE for help, and rather than arrest her, the ICE office helped her apply for a victim VISA and tried to help her find her son. That’s what ICE was meant to be, not just meant to terrorize your neighbors who are in the gardens … and shoot citizens who are standing up to them in the back.”  

Macy said she has not only reported on the issue of immigration locally but also personally witnessed how targeted enforcement actions have negatively impacted community members. 

“I have a good friend who’s Haitian, who’s staring at the speedometer because he knows he can’t go too fast, he can’t go too slow,” Macy said. “I just think these policies, these Trump-Cline policies, are cruel, they’re a huge distraction from everything the government’s not doing with regard to our healthcare and affordability, and they are just appealing to the basest of the base… We need people in Congress who are willing to take this on.” 

Macy said the American economy depends on immigrants, a point she made in her most recent book, “Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America,” which explores the causes and effects of increasing polarization in the factory town of Urbana, Ohio, where Macy was born and raised. 

“They’re appealing to our worst racist tendencies and our fears of each other,” Macy said.  

Participants from the Harrisonburg area include Chris Hoover of New Bridges; Lepley and Rodrigue Makele, both of Church World Service; Nelly Shenk, executive director of Skyline Literacy; Sal Romero, chief of staff at Harrisonburg City Public Schools; Jeremy Samsoe of Eastern Mennonite University’s Intensive English Program; and Jason Kidd, captain of the Harrisonburg Police Department. Roanoke nonprofit leaders will join the Harrisonburg area experts: Rev. Joy Sylvester-Johnson, CEO Emeritus at The Rescue Mission of Roanoke, who works with Roanoke Asylum Seekers Network; Ahoo Salem, an Iranian immigrant who runs Blue Ridge Literacy; and Dina Imbriani, head organizer of DoGood Virginia. 

The immigration roundtable will take place at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Lucy F. Simms Continuing Education Center, located at 620 Simms Ave., Harrisonburg.