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Atlantic
09-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
How Joseph Kurihara Lost His Faith in America
Joseph Kurihara watched the furniture pile higher and higher on the streets of Terminal Island. Tables and chairs, mattresses and bed frames, refrigerators and radio consoles had been dragged into alleyways and arranged in haphazard stacks. It was February 25, 1942, two and a half months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. Navy had given the island's residents 48 hours to pack up and leave. An industrial stretch of land in the Port of Los Angeles, Terminal Island was home to a string of canneries, a Japanese American fishing community of about 3,500, and, crucially, a naval base. A week earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing military commanders to designate areas from which 'any or all persons may be excluded.' The order made no mention of race, but its target was clear: people who were ethnically Japanese. FBI agents had already rounded up and arrested most of Terminal Island's men, leaving women to choose what to keep and what to leave behind. Kurihara watched as children cried in the street and peddlers bought air-conditioning units and pianos from evacuating families for prices he described as 'next to robbery.' 'Could this be America,' he later wrote, 'the America which so blatantly preaches 'Democracy'? ' Before long, the chaos Kurihara witnessed on Terminal Island was playing out elsewhere. In March, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, the head of the Western Defense Command, began using Roosevelt's executive order to exclude all people 'of Japanese ancestry' from large swaths of the West Coast. The Japanese, DeWitt reasoned, were racially untrustworthy, and thus even people like Kurihara, an American citizen who had joined the Army and deployed to the Western Front during the First World War, posed an espionage risk. ' A Jap is a Jap,' DeWitt told newspapers. The military forced Kurihara and more than 125,000 others from their homes, confining them to a circuit of remote prison camps. Many Japanese Americans attempted to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States through stoic acceptance of the government's orders. Some even volunteered to fight for the country that had imprisoned them: The 442nd Regimental Combat Team and 100th Infantry Battalion, a segregated Army unit of Japanese Americans, became the most decorated military unit in American history (relative to its size and length of service), fighting the Nazis through Italy and into France. Scouts from the unit were among the first troops to liberate one of Dachau's camps. In the years after the war, their feats helped burnish a legend of Asian American exceptionalism; their sacrifice affirmed their belonging. This was the narrative of 'Japanese internment' that reigned among my father's generation. When my grandmother was 20, she and her family were uprooted from Los Angeles and sent to a barbed-wire-enclosed camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, for nearly a year; my grandfather volunteered for the 442nd from Hawaii and was wounded by a grenade fragment in northern Italy. I grew up understanding the 442nd's success as a triumphant denouement to internment, which in turn obscured the suffering of the period. I didn't have to think too hard about what had happened at Terminal Island or Heart Mountain, or what either said about America. Kurihara, though, was unwilling to ignore the gap between his country's stated principles and its actions. He had always believed in democracy, he wrote, but what he saw at Terminal Island demonstrated that 'even democracy is a demon in time of war.' During the years he spent incarcerated, shuttled through a succession of punitive detention sites, his doubts festered. He had already served in a war for the United States, and still the country accused him of disloyalty. Kurihara became a scourge of the Japanese Americans urging acquiescence, a radical who for a time openly embraced violence. If America had no faith in him, why would he have faith in America? The care package, it seemed, had meant a lot. 'I hereby most sincerely thank you for the generous package you have sent us Soldier Boys,' Kurihara wrote to the Red Cross chapter of Hurley, Wisconsin. It was 1917, the era of the original I WANT YOU poster, and the 22-year-old Kurihara had volunteered for the Army. Stationed at Camp Custer, in Michigan, he was the only nonwhite soldier in his 1,100-man artillery unit. 'By the name you will note that I am a Japanese,' his letter continued, 'but just the same I'm an American. An American to the last.' Kurihara was born in Hawaii in 1895. His parents had emigrated from Japan as plantation workers, joining a cohort that came to be known as the issei, or first generation of the Japanese diaspora. Kurihara and his four siblings were nisei, members of the second generation. After Hawaii was seized by the United States in 1898, Kurihara and others born in the islands were granted U.S. citizenship. From the January 2025 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on what America owes Hawai'i In 1915, he moved to California alone, in hopes of eventually attending medical school. There, his biographer, Eileen Tamura, notes, he was shocked to discover widespread antipathy toward Asians. Once, as Kurihara walked through central Sacramento, a man approached and kicked him in the stomach. Elsewhere in the city, children pelted him with rocks. The word Jap, he wrote in an unpublished autobiography, was almost a 'universal title.' But Kurihara seemed to believe that this was the bigotry of individuals, not of the country itself. A friend told Kurihara that midwesterners were more tolerant, so he moved to Michigan. Not long afterward, he enlisted. On July 30, 1918, Kurihara's division deployed to the Western Front and prepared to drive into Germany, but its planned assault never occurred: On November 11, the armistice ended the war. The following September, Kurihara returned to the United States and was discharged in San Francisco. On a streetcar in the city, still wearing his Army uniform, he heard a man spit 'Jap.' After the war, Kurihara settled in Los Angeles, working as an accountant and then as a navigator on fishing boats. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, he was more than 3,000 miles south of California, plying the waters off the Galápagos Islands for tuna. The ship returned to San Diego Bay just after daybreak on December 29 and found a country at war. Soon after, Kurihara's captain informed him that government officials had banned him from serving as the ship's navigator. Suddenly out of a job, he sought work that might aid the war effort. But at shipbuilding and steel yards, he was rebuffed for being Japanese. He returned to Los Angeles just in time to see Terminal Island depopulated. Kurihara wanted to fight DeWitt's removal orders. But nisei leaders in the Japanese American community were taking a different tack. At a meeting of a group affiliated with the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), an ardently pro-American civil-rights organization, Kurihara heard Mike Masaoka, the group's national secretary, tell the attendees that he had met with DeWitt and urged that they comply with his orders. Kurihara was furious. 'These boys claiming to be the leaders of the Niseis were a bunch of spineless Americans,' he wrote. Japanese Americans of my grandparents' generation tend to refer to the period that followed as 'camp'—just 'camp'—cloaking it in a protective shield of euphemism. Academics refer to the relocation centers with the more charged term concentration camps, borrowing the language used by Roosevelt and his administration. Regardless of their name, though, the sites had a clear function: They were open-air prisons. Kurihara's was called Manzanar. Built on 6,200 acres of desert at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains in eastern California, Manzanar held about 10,000 Japanese Americans at its peak. They were crammed into 504 plywood barracks, fenced in by barbed wire and guard towers. Families each received a 20-by-25-foot room; bachelors like Kurihara were assigned roommates. Everyone shared the latrines. Kurihara was among the first at the camp, arriving in March 1942. The government needed workers to construct the facility, and Kurihara's priest had encouraged single, able-bodied men to sign up, so that it might be livable by the time families arrived. Aware that he'd wind up there anyway and tempted by the promise of work, Kurihara reluctantly agreed, helping build the camp that would imprison him. In Focus: World War II internment of Japanese Americans Construction was still ongoing when incarcerees began to arrive in April. That summer, a group of nisei aligned with Masaoka and the JACL created the 'Manzanar Citizens' Federation,' hoping to prove the community's loyalty to the United States and assert a leadership role at the camp. Kurihara, rankled by the suggestion that he had anything to prove, was determined to undermine them. At meetings held during the summer of 1942, Kurihara delivered a series of speeches—'dynamites,' he later called them—meant to 'bomb the Manzanar Citizens Federation out of existence.' To one rapturous crowd he exclaimed, 'If we must prove our loyalty to enjoy the full privileges of American citizens, then why and for what reasons are the Japanese American veterans of World War I doing here? Have they not proven their loyalty already?' The people at Manzanar were incarcerated not because they were 'unloyal,' he argued. 'It is because we are what we are—Japs! Then, if such is the case, let us be Japs! Japs through and through, to the very marrow of our bones.' Being incarcerated at a place like Manzanar convinced Kurihara that America—both its people and its government—held DeWitt's view that 'a Jap is a Jap'; nothing could ever prove his loyalty. Kurihara wasn't alone. In her book Impossible Subjects, the historian Mae Ngai argues that the experience of internment ultimately fostered in many Japanese Americans what the removal orders had been meant to contain: disloyalty. Tensions between supporters of the JACL and dissidents like Kurihara exploded on December 5, 1942, when masked men entered the barrack of Fred Tayama, the president of the organization's Los Angeles chapter, and beat him with clubs. Tayama identified Harry Ueno, an ally of Kurihara's, as one of his assailants. Ueno was arrested by camp authorities, though he was widely perceived as innocent. The next day, thousands of Ueno's supporters rallied outside the mess hall, where Kurihara accused Tayama and other JACL leaders of informing on incarcerees deemed insufficiently pro-American to camp administrators and the FBI. 'Why permit that sneak to pollute the air we breathe?' he asked, referring to Tayama. 'Let's kill him and feed him to the roving coyotes!' When negotiations with camp administrators over Ueno's release collapsed, a crowd mobilized to free him from the camp's jail and hunt down Tayama and the others Kurihara had condemned. At the jail, military police deployed tear gas to disperse them. Amid the smoke, two soldiers fired live rounds. Two young men were killed; 10 others were wounded. The shooting ended what became known to some as the 'Manzanar Uprising,' and to others as the 'Manzanar Riot.' The men Kurihara had threatened were removed from the camp and eventually resettled throughout the country; their status as his targets was apparently sufficient proof of their loyalty. Kurihara, it turned out, was correct—Tayama and the others he'd identified had been reporting 'pro-Japanese' incarcerees to camp administrators and the FBI. Kurihara, Ueno, and other 'troublemakers' were arrested and moved through a series of 'isolation centers' for dissidents. Finally, they landed at a camp called Tule Lake, in remote Northern California, where they were initially held in a stockade. The Friendship Files: Two Boy Scouts met in an internment camp, and grew up to work in Congress Devastated by the deaths of the two men, Kurihara swore off camp politics and spent most of his time alone, reading his Bible and studying Japanese, a language he'd never mastered. Regardless of the war's outcome, he had decided that as soon as he could, he would leave America forever. On December 8, 1945, as an American bomber circled overhead, Kurihara and some 1,500 other Japanese Americans stepped off a naval transport ship at Uraga, a port on Tokyo Bay. The bomber was a reminder of what Japan had endured over the preceding months: The United States had firebombed Tokyo in March, destroying much of the city and leaving more than 1 million people homeless; in August, it had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered not long after. As the war had stretched on and the American government's legal authority to incarcerate Japanese Americans had worn thin, Congress had passed a law to allow them to renounce their citizenship; the government had greater leeway to detain and even deport noncitizens under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Only a small minority of those incarcerated took the government up on its offer. Kurihara was among the first and asked to be on the first ship to Japan. From Uraga, Kurihara traveled to the village of Oshima, where his older sister Kawayo had relocated from Hawaii in 1920. Oshima was about 36 miles across a bay from Hiroshima; on August 6, Kawayo may have felt the shock wave from the first atomic bomb. Not wanting to burden her family, Kurihara moved to Sasebo, a city in the Nagasaki prefecture about 30 miles from where the second atomic bomb had been dropped. As in Hiroshima, the bomb had destroyed nearly every structure within a mile and a half of its point of detonation; even a month later, a U.S. naval officer reported that the city was suffused with 'a smell of death.' Lacking employment options, Kurihara took a job with the occupation forces, working for the country he had grown to despise. The U.S. military needed interpreters and recruited Japanese Americans off the docks as their ships arrived. These jobs offered relatively high pay—and guaranteed access to food. It's unclear whether Kurihara lingered on the irony of his position. In his correspondence back to the United States, he acknowledged no regrets. 'Here I am in Sasebo, working for the Occupational Forces and am doing exceedingly well,' he wrote in a 1946 letter to Dorothy Thomas, a sociologist he had met at Tule Lake. In a Christmas message to Thomas later that year, he requested a pair of black dress shoes, size 7E. Morgan Ome: What reparations actually bought His time working for the military proved short-lived. The occupation needed people who could translate complex legal documents; Kurihara's abilities were likely insufficient. After a year in Sasebo, he moved to Tokyo and resumed work as an accountant. He and other repatriates stuck out in postwar Japan. Many were referred to by a racial epithet Kurihara likely never would have heard directed at him before: keto, Japanese for 'white man.' In April 1949, David Itami, a fellow nisei who had also worked for the occupation, wrote a letter to Dorothy Thomas to see if something might be done on Kurihara's behalf. Kurihara, he said, 'does not belong here and does not deserve to be left forgotten.' Kurihara had struggled to adapt to life in Japan; he longed to return to Hawaii. But he hadn't forgiven the United States. In the fall of 1962, Kurihara wrote a letter to Robert F. Kennedy, then the attorney general, asking why the U.S. had not reached out to renunciants to restore their citizenship. A lawyer at the Department of Justice replied, noting that, thanks to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, renunciants simply had to apply to get their cases reviewed. Indeed, among the 5,589 renunciants Kurihara was one of the only ones who by the 1960s had not had their citizenship restored. The Justice Department lawyer failed to grasp what Kurihara demanded: that the U.S. government make the first move. Kurihara remained principled—or imperiously stubborn—to the end. He never returned to Hawaii. He died of a stroke in Tokyo on November 26, 1965. Mike Masaoka and the JACL seemed to win their debate with Kurihara. Not long after Pearl Harbor, Masaoka had proposed that the Army create a 'suicide battalion' of nisei volunteers to fight for the U.S. while their parents were held as hostages in the camps. The Army declined, but the 442nd wasn't functionally all that different from what Masaoka had suggested. He became its first volunteer, and over the course of the war, the unit earned more than 4,000 Purple Hearts and 21 Medals of Honor. Speaking at its discharge in 1946, President Harry Truman suggested that the 442nd had affirmed that 'Americanism is not a matter of race or creed; it is a matter of the heart.' He continued: 'You fought not only the enemy, but you fought prejudice—and you have won.' Pronouncements like Truman's bolstered a narrative of internment as America's 'worst wartime mistake,' as the Yale Law professor Eugene Rostow argued in Harper's in 1945. Remembering it as a mistake, rather than as the result of decades of policy that had excluded Asian immigrants from public life in America, allowed those who had experienced it to move on and ascend into middle-class life. If they shared Kurihara's sense of betrayal, they didn't express it and instead worked to rebuild their lives in the United States. My grandfather kept his Purple Heart tucked away in his sock drawer; my grandmother never spoke of her time at Heart Mountain. As historians came to question the triumphalist story of Japanese American history and activists lobbied for redress from the U.S. government, some came to celebrate Kurihara as a resistance icon. Roy Sano, writing a column in 1970 for the JACL's newspaper, the Pacific Citizen, called him 'a hero for the 1970s.' He continued: 'Every JACL banquet which has a special table for veterans should leave an open seat for Joe Kurihara.' Others couldn't look past the death threats he made at Manzanar. Writing in the Japanese American newspaper Hokubei Mainichi in 1983, Elaine Yoneda, who had been incarcerated with Kurihara at Manzanar, called him 'an embittered manipulator who helped turn some camp residents' frustrations into a pro-Japan cause.' Kurihara had named her husband a 'stool pigeon'; on the night of the Manzanar Uprising, Yoneda and her son had barricaded themselves in their barrack, fearing for their lives. His rhetoric, she argued, 'meant and still means plaudits for the rapists of Nanking and Hitler's butchers.' Harry Ueno, though, continued to defend his ally. Ueno had renounced his citizenship, but when he heard about the dire conditions in Japan, he fought to remain in the U.S. He and Kurihara kept in touch until Kurihara's death. 'Deep in his heart,' Ueno wrote, 'he cried a hundred times for the country he once loved and trusted and fought for.' In February, I traveled to Washington, D.C., with my parents and two of my siblings to see a book, called the Ireichō, that lists every Japanese American who had been incarcerated. Its creators had invited descendants to mark their relatives' names with a small stamp, in the hope that all of the 125,284 people in the book might eventually be acknowledged. Gathered in its pages were those who had renounced their citizenship alongside those who had volunteered for the 442nd. Tayama, Yoneda, Ueno, and Kurihara, together just as they had been at Manzanar. In a small room off the Culture Wing of the National Museum of American History, we placed a neat row of blue dots beneath my grandmother's name—Misao Hatakeyama—and that of her brother, Kimio, and parents, Yasuji and Kisaburo, and a neighbor my father had grown up with in L.A., and her brother, who had been killed in Italy with the 442nd in April 1945, only days before Germany's surrender. I thought of those names when, just a few weeks later, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to accelerate the deportation of Venezuelan migrants, the first time the law had been used since it helped provide a legal framework for internment. I wonder what my grandmother might have thought of Kurihara, or if my grandfather would have welcomed him at the veterans' table. I have no way of knowing. I imagine they would have disapproved of his tactics and his choice to leave America. But I think they might have understood his anger at the country that had broken his trust, that had practiced values so different from the ones it proclaimed.
USA Today
30-06-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Iowa women's basketball offers standout 2026 Georgia PG Leah DeWitt
Iowa women's basketball continued their hunt for the next great name to represent the Hawkeyes on Sunday by extending an offer to 2028 point guard recruit Leah DeWitt. The 5-foot-8 native of Marietta, GA, stars for Marietta High School and plays club for AEBL Girlz. While it is a bit too early for most recruiting sites to ranks the 2028 recruiting class, Prep Girls Hoops ranks DeWitt as both the No. 2 recruit and point guard in the state. In her first season on Marietta's varsity squad, DeWitt averaged 25.4 points on 52% shooting from the field, 35% from 3-point territory, and 80% from the free-throw line in 29 games, according to MaxPreps. In addition to her high scoring numbers, DeWitt averages 6.4 rebounds, 2.4 assists, 2.3 steals, and 1.2 blocks per game. Along with Iowa, DeWitt holds offers from numberous premier programs such as Georgia Tech, Miami, Virginia Tech, Auburn, Baylor, Florida State, and Oklahoma. While DeWitt will crtainly get more offers as he recruitment continues, new Iowa assistant coach Lasondra Barrett could be a secret weapon in DeWitt's recruitment due to her familiarity with the state. In the same notion, Barrett will be a valuable asset to the Hawkeyes throughout Georgia as well. Barrett joined the Hawkeyes' staff this offseason after three years as an assistant coach for Georgia Tech. Contact/Follow us @HawkeyesWire on X and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Iowa news, notes, and opinions. Follow Scout on X: @SpringgateNews
Irish Times
22-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
‘We don't know what to expect tomorrow': Ukrainians in Trump stronghold fear deportation as refugee scheme halted
When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, many Americans rallied behind Ukrainians in a rare moment of solidarity. Charity drives sprang up. Ukrainian flags hung from shop fronts. And in a corner of the Midwest that had sheltered southeast Asian refugees half a century before, Angela Boelens was determined to see her community become part of the effort to protect Ukrainians fleeing the war. After months of winding her way through a detailed government vetting process, Boelens became one of the first Americans to bring over a Ukrainian family: the Hedzhymanovis (and their big, fluffy white cat, a Turkish Angora mix named Barzick). Business and community leaders across eastern Iowa and western Illinois came together to help the family and other Ukrainian arrivals find housing and jobs. Boelens, a college professor, started a non-profit initiative called IA Nice that helped more than 75 refugees resettle in DeWitt, Iowa, a Republican stronghold of 5,000 people just north of Davenport. Some people now call the community 'Little Ukraine'. READ MORE But the Ukrainian families that thought they had found refuge in DeWitt have been plunged into increasing uncertainty since Donald Trump returned to the White House. Angela Boelens, founder of IA Nice, talks on her phone in DeWitt, Iowa. Photograph: Jamie Kelter Davis/The New York Times Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office to terminate legal protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who had entered the United States through Biden-era humanitarian programmes. Three days later, US Citizenship and Immigration Services suspended the processing of petitions and renewals for Uniting for Ukraine, a Biden-era programme that allowed more than 240,000 Ukrainians to live and work lawfully in the US. Even after a federal judge ordered the government to continue the Uniting for Ukraine programme, many Ukrainians have seen their deportation protections, driving licences and work permits expire with no indication of when, or whether, they would be reinstated. And after the US Supreme Court allowed the government to terminate, for now, a similar programme for more than 500,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, there is growing concern among the Ukrainians that they are next. Stepped-up immigration enforcement efforts across the country, which touched off days of protests this month in Los Angeles , are adding to the Ukrainians' fears that the protections provided by the Biden administration won't shield them much longer, even though their new neighbours want them to stay. [ Los Angeles is only the beginning: Trump is normalising military enforcement of law and order Opens in new window ] 'We are forcing people to either become illegal or to become a burden on the community, and that doesn't feel good for these families, and it doesn't feel good for the community, and it makes absolutely no sense,' Boelens said. The Hedzhymanovis, one of the first Ukrainian families to be sponsored as refugees in DeWitt. Photograph: Jamie Kelter Davis/The New York Times At their white-panelled home on a quiet street in DeWitt, Olena and Maksym Hedzhymanovi were trying on a recent evening to make sense of how the ground had shifted so quickly. Olena Hedzhymanovi recalled waking up as missiles flew over their house in Kharkiv, near Ukraine's northeast border with Russia. She began shoving the family's belongings into suitcases, she said. Her older daughter, Anhelina, wept. 'Mom, please tell me this is fireworks,' Olena recalled Anhelina, who is now 20, saying to her. ''No,' I said, 'this is war.'' Her younger daughter, Sofiia (12), said she had been preparing for an acrobatic gymnastic competition – 'the first I had in my life' – but the building where she had spent months practising was bombed after they fled. For six days, the family took shelter in a friend's cold, muddy basement. Then they sought refuge in western Ukraine, far from the border with Russia. 'It was very difficult to make a decision to pack my whole life into three suitcases and come to live in America,' Maksym said. 'We can't imagine how to pack our lives again – three suitcases again and go somewhere again. Our big dream is to stay and live here, as we have already fallen in love with this place.' DeWitt's weekly farmers market. 'We are forcing people to either become illegal or to become a burden on the community ... and it makes absolutely no sense,' says Angela Boelens. Photograph: Jamie Kelter Davis/The New York Times DeWitt and Clinton County, which surrounds it, are just north of the Quad Cities, an urban strip of eastern Iowa and western Illinois that hugs the Mississippi river. Decades ago, governor Robert D Ray, a Republican who was a vocal proponent of efforts to resettle refugees in the United States, urged Iowans to show moral courage and accept thousands of southeast Asian refugees , including Tai Dam people in 1974, and refugees from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam in 1977. Those efforts were part of Cold War-era politics that viewed the United States as a beacon of democracy. It was that sense of civic obligation, along with the memory of her Polish American great-grandmother, that motivated Angela Boelens. When her great-grandmother arrived in Chicago as a refugee during the second World War, pregnant and speaking no English, an Italian American family offered her a home. But over the past decade, Trump has led a growing segment of the Republican Party to embrace a deep scepticism of global co-operation and American leadership abroad, and he won Clinton County with 59 per cent of the vote last November. So Boelens, a Democrat, worried that she would be dismissed as a 'bleeding heart'. She had initially planned to serve as a financial sponsor for just one Ukrainian family. Soon, though, she sponsored a second. Then a third family reached out. And a fourth. She did not have the resources to take them all in, so she began to seek other sponsors to help. To her surprise, a banking executive whom she approached offered a plan. He persuaded about 20 business leaders to come together to raise more than $400,000 to buy two houses in DeWitt. Arriving Ukrainian families would be able to stay in the houses temporarily while they searched for jobs and looked for permanent residences. Boelens, who served on several non-profit boards before going into teaching college business courses, established her charitable organisation to manage the funds, and the IA Nice initiative grew. A hospital system in the area gave them ownership of two more houses. A businessman lent another. A farmer donated a car. Volunteers helped the refugee families find work, fill out immigration and loan paperwork and enrol children in school. Within three months, most of the newcomers no longer needed financial support. The Ukrainian families blended readily into the predominantly white Iowan communities of Clinton County, where German, Irish and other European lines of ancestry run deep. Many conservative Iowans who had grown up facing the spectre of communist Russia during the Cold War recognised an American duty to aid refugees from imperilled and democratically-aligned nations. Olena and Maksym Hedzhymanovi went to work for a construction company for nearly a year, and then Maksym opened up his own construction business with friends. Olena is now a nursing assistant. Anhelina hopes to attend college, and Sofiia has joined a cheerleading squad. The family took out loans to buy a house and a car. They found peace in the vast Iowa fields of corn, soybeans and sunflowers that remind them of the countryside in their native Ukraine, long one of Europe's agricultural engines for its oilseed and grain production. Other Ukrainian families have followed a similar path into the state, filling labour shortages at construction sites, hospitals and small businesses. 'That's an economic boost for us,' said Jim Irwin, a Republican who serves on the Clinton County Board of Supervisors, noting that the county's population had declined by more residents since 2010 than any other in the state. Angela Boelens (right) helps a Ukrainian refugee family secure a car loan at DeWitt Bank & Trust Co in DeWitt, Iowa. Photograph: Jamie Kelter Davis/The New York Times Supporters of the group believed they had developed a model for helping refugees and immigrants settle in an orderly way. But as Trump campaigned for a second term last year, he and his allies attacked the Biden-era programmes for refugees, arguing that the protections they offered were meant to be temporary but were being exploited by people who intended to stay in the United States permanently. In DeWitt and the Quad Cities, some Republican community and business leaders say now that they have been struggling to reconcile their support for Trump's hard-line immigration policies with their frustrations over losing immigrant workers and the new cultural vibrancy the immigrants brought to their communities. Some local leaders have bombarded senator Charles E Grassley and other lawmakers with calls for legislative action. Students have written letters to legislators in support of their Ukrainian classmates, and Boelens and IA Nice organisers have begun petitioning Congress to create a new immigration pathway they are calling a 'Heartland Economic Growth Visa'. To garner allies at the state level, some DeWitt families have visited with state lawmakers in the Iowa Legislature. Iowans are not alone in their sentiments. From Springfield, Ohio, to Kennett, Missouri, to Prince George's County, Maryland, some supporters of Trump's aggressive immigration measures have felt blindsided or betrayed as their friends, neighbours and workers face deportation or lose their livelihoods. Cousins Alina Mirzoian (left) and Liana Avetisian, who fled from Kyiv two years ago, work their last day finishing window fixtures in Davenport, Iowa. Photograph: Jamie Kelter Davis/The New York Times At Renewal by Andersen, a local window-replacement company in Davenport, Sam Heer, a Republican who voted for Trump, said the president had been right in attempting to curb the number of people entering the country without valid asylum claims. But he hoped that his party could reach 'a happy medium' by providing lawful pathways for immigrant workers. [ Europe should stop whining and 'act like the superpower' it is, former US general warns Opens in new window ] Heer said he had spent thousands of dollars trying to secure work visas for two of his Ukrainian employees who refurbish windows. Their applications are likely to take a few more years to be processed. While they wait, he estimates, he will have to hire and fire at least 20 workers to fill their shoes. 'It's not as though the very specific job is that technical or hard to do, but the reality is people that will do it, and do it to their ability, are incredibly hard to find,' he said. His two Ukrainian workers, Liana Avetisian and her cousin Alina Mirzoian, fled from Kyiv in the spring of 2023. Back in Ukraine, Avetisian and her husband, Sergei, had been real estate agents, shuttling their daughter, Karine, now 14, between school and horseback-riding lessons, vacationing in Turkey and Egypt and planning family cookouts. Mirzoian had been a graphic design student. In Iowa, they all went into painting and construction, and Avetisian and Mirzoian learned to paint walls on stilts and to dress windows. In late May, they went to work at Renewal by Andersen one last time before their protections expired. Standing on a buzzing factory floor, Avetisian tried to focus on staining a large window frame that was splayed out on the worktable before her. Wipe. Brush. Dab. Repeat. 'We do not know what to expect tomorrow,' Avetisian said in an interview, adding that headaches from the stress grip her on most days. Her family has cobbled together only enough savings and donations to pay their mortgage and other bills for the next two months. She said most of her co-workers did not understand the tenuous nature of their immigration status. In the office kitchen, a cake they brought in for her and Mirzoian was decorated in sprinkles and red, white and navy blue frosting. It optimistically read: 'It's Not Goodbye, See You Soon.' – This article originally appeared in The New York Times .
New York Times
19-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
In Deep Red Iowa, Ukrainians Found Home and Community. Now Their Fate Is in Limbo.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, many Americans rallied behind Ukrainians in a rare moment of solidarity. Charity drives sprung up. Ukrainian flags hung from storefronts. And in a corner of the Midwest that had sheltered Southeast Asian refugees half a century before, Angela Boelens was determined to see her community become part of the effort to protect Ukrainians fleeing the war. After months of winding her way through a detailed government vetting process, Ms. Boelens became one of the first Americans to bring over a Ukrainian family: the Hedzhymanovis (and their big, fluffy white cat, a Turkish Angora mix named Barzick). Business and community leaders across eastern Iowa and western Illinois came together to help the family and other Ukrainian arrivals find housing and jobs. Ms. Boelens, a college professor, started a nonprofit called IA Nice that had helped more than 75 refugees resettle in DeWitt, Iowa, a Republican stronghold of 5,000 people just north of Davenport. Some people now call the community 'Little Ukraine.' But the Ukrainian families that thought they had found refuge in DeWitt have been plunged into increasing uncertainty since Donald J. Trump returned to the White House. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Lane closures planned for Monday and Tuesday on I-81 in DeWitt as part of Viaduct Project
DEWITT, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) — The New York State Department of Transportation is alerting motorists that Interstate 481 northbound and southbound will be reduced to one lane between Exit 4 (I-690 West/Syracuse) and Exit 5E (Kirkville Rd East) in the Town of DeWitt. The closures will be taking place from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m., on Monday, June 2, and Tuesday, June 3, to facilitate the installation of beams on the bridge over the CSX rail yard, as part of the Interstate 81 Viaduct Project. Construction activities are weather-dependent and subject to change based on conditions. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
