He didn’t follow orders
As snow turns to spring in Montana, Jordon Dyrdahl-Roberts is turning his hand to helping the immigrants he had in mind when he quit his job rather than cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Working at the state’s labor department, he was told he’d have to hand over workers’ data to ICE — paperwork he figured would be used to sweep up undocumented workers. The donations, and the attaboys from total strangers — such as DACA parents and the grandchild of Holocaust survivors — redirected his life more than he could have imagined.
One week you’re a legal secretary, and a week later you’re a hero of what people call “the resistance.” What happened?
When I had sent out the tweet discussing why I had quit my job, I thought I was just talking to 50 or so people I converse with regularly on Twitter. I turned off my phone and had dinner. And then, just before we were about to get my kid to bed, I checked Twitter and something had happened. This had resonated. I got messages from all sorts of people, words of encouragement.
Everyone talks about “the resistance.” I was actually presented with a choice. It was a hard decision, in that I knew what it meant for my family. But it wasn’t a hard decision to actually choose.
ICE has never been my favorite part of the government, but they’ve become this entirely different agency under Trump. To have handed this information over, knowing what they would do with it, was just not a thing I could have done.
I had what you might describe as a really rough childhood. It was a lot of chaos. It was a lot of abuse. But it’s a lesson in radical empathy. I feel very deeply for people who might feel like they don’t have control of their life, to not know where you’re going to be in a week, to understand that those in authority over you may not have your best interests at heart. So if I can do anything to make it less awful for people, I’m going to do that.
I’ve been trying to organize on the ground here. Montana is a predominantly white state, which means if you’re an immigrant, even a fully documented, fully naturalized immigrant, you stand out. There’s a danger for anybody who steps forward. So it really becomes the work of very white people like me to try to take some of that heat off those people.
Your wife was fine with this. How did you explain this to your 4-year-old?
The night I quit, as we were driving home, I’m trying to explain, we may have to do things a little differently at home. And I got the famous toddler question: Why?
I said, because I didn’t want to help break up families. And the response I got turned me into a blubbering mess: Why would anyone want to break up families? My kid gets it. My child understands that you don’t break up families.
As parents, we’re supposed to do the right thing. And — with the full understanding of the historical context of these words — had I just followed orders, I couldn’t tell my kid, you have to do the right thing even if it’s hard, [but instead say that] you have to do the right thing unless it’s really difficult, and then just fold.
The paper work that you quit rather than do — presumably someone else did it. So what difference do you think you made?
I alerted a bunch of people to what was going on. At least I gave them a heads-up that this could be coming.
What did you learn about your fellow Americans?
I was pretty close to giving up hope on America, because we were marching toward authoritarianism. But all you need is the numbers. The teachers’ strike in West Virginia — that was technically illegal. But there were so many of them that, had they fired everyone who took part, they’d have no teachers. We could all just join hands and step over the line and say, we’re not going to put up with this.