"Look for the Helpers"

On Seeing Immigration Differently

Originally published October 13, 2025

By Alex Gervasi

There are plenty of things I can complain about when it comes to my American Evangelical schooling, but one thing I believe they got right was extensively teaching us about the Holocaust and what led to it. From the time I was in elementary school, we were taught about the persecution and genocide of the Jews under Nazi Germany, and about the Christians who risked everything to help and hide their Jewish neighbors.

I remember lying in bed one night, maybe eight or nine years old, asking my Mom if we would have been one of those families—if we would have hidden the Jews. She paused, thoughtful, and then assured me that yes, we would have.

How certain we can be about who we would have been in history. I’ve thought about this moment often. How could we ever truly know how we’d act when faced with a moral choice? It’s comforting to imagine ourselves as the heroes. It’s harder to look around, right now, and realize that while we fantasize about “what we would have done way back when,” we are doing very little in the world we live in.

This has never been easy. Doing the right thing is often hard, but social media has made this even trickier. It gives everyone a soapbox, and while it can genuinely spread awareness, it also feeds a false sense of activism. You can repost a headline or a video, close the app, and convince yourself that you’ve done your part. In an age where things are getting so bad so quickly, I don’t believe it’s enough.

On June 6th, Donald Trump and his Border Czar, Tom Homan, decided to make an example out of Los Angeles, a place I’ve called home for over eleven years. ICE conducted raids to collect as many brown people as possible that they deemed as “illegal.” Masked agents snatched people off the streets, raided jobs, and waited outside schools, shoving people into unmarked vans. No charges. No due process. Sometimes, no trace of where they were being held.

These weren’t arrests. They were kidnappings. We watched our neighbors be disappearred.

While back on the East Coast for the Fourth of July, I was scrolling Instagram when one of my L.A. neighbors posted that ICE had raided a beloved local taco stand at the end of our street. I put my head in my hands and wept. No part of me felt patriotic; I only felt a deep sadness and despair. When would it end? Would it ever end?

When I called my boyfriend, Jeremy, he suggested maybe now was the time to get involved. I signed up for training that day. I wasn’t sure if it would make a difference, but, at the very least, bearing witness felt necessary.

For the last 3 weeks, I’ve been volunteering with a nonprofit at the immigration courts in New York City. As I took the 6 train downtown that first Friday morning, I wondered if it would really be as dramatic as the news and social media made it out to be. Part of my brain hoped it wasn’t real. Very soon, I realized that it was not only real, but it was worse.

Inside felt like a dystopian movie. Federal buildings often feature portraits of the president, but Donald Trump’s large, looming, mug-shot-styled portrait glaring down at the frightened families shuffling through security felt almost cruelly on the nose. The next four hours, I shadowed seasoned volunteers and watched, horrified, as ICE agents waited outside courtrooms, flipping through photos and names of the people inside. Like clockwork, a judge would tell someone they were good to goand give them a follow-up date, only for them to be taken the moment they stepped into the hallway.

At one point, a volunteer from another group tried to intervene for the man they were accompanying, letting ICE know that the judge had said everything was fine and had given him a follow-up court date a year from now.

“Mind your business!” one of the ICE agents snapped back.

She was the only one unmasked and I don’t think I’ll forget her face any time soon.

This ICE agent appeared to be the shift manager for the day. I’m not sure what the official title is, but she was clearly in charge. She was short with harsh features and her hair was pulled back into a tight bun. Her badge hung around her neck and her hoodie said ICE on the back.

Later, we went to a floor with a heavy ICE presence and sat outside a courtroom That same shift manager strolled in, all of five feet tall, looked at us and the small group of press that was present and muttered under her breath, “Don’t you people have jobs?” I decided it would be unwise to explain to her that we did and the press’ job was, in fact, being the press.

A fellow volunteer later told me they overheard her loudly bragging about how many people they had detained the day before. My stomach turned.

A little while later, I watched them detain a kid who looked like he was still in high school. He didn’t speak much English, and a young girl, either his girlfriend or his sister, was with him– wailing while gripping him tightly until ICE took him away. The short ICE agent cursed out a volunteer who was trying to console the crying boy, accusing her of making her job harder.

I sat there unable to look away, despite how awful it was to watch. I found myself praying for the first time in a long while.

After the last court proceedings ended, I helped walk a dad with his baby daughter out of the building with some other volunteers. She had the biggest brown eyes, and while her dad waited to go into the courtroom earlier that morning, she hugged his neck tightly while peering at me over his shoulder, blowing kisses at me. Her dad looked so tired, but I am so thankful he was one of the lucky ones to walk out of that building freely that morning.

I went home and cried. These are people trying to do things the legal and “right” way, and they are being punished for it. According to a report from the Deportation Data Project, more than half of immigrants arrested in New York City have no criminal charges or convictions—because it was never about doing things “legally” or being a “criminal.” These weren’t dangerous people.

My understanding of immigration began to deepen in 2015. I was a year into living in Los Angeles, and my once-conservative political views were shifting. Not because I was being “brainwashed” or consuming different news, but because I was meeting different people, people who looked different than me and faced struggles I had never known.

Fox News taught me all about the immigration process and how supposedly easy it was to become a citizen “the right way.” I believed it, until a girl I knew, who had lived in the country since she was six months old, was set to be deported back to South Korea--a place she had never lived.

“Why didn’t you just become a citizen?” I asked. She replied, “You really think it’s that easy? It’s a lottery system.” A green card lottery system. It came down to luck, and hers had run out that time.

Thankfully, after a year she found another job in L.A. that sponsored her return. I wish I could say she is the only person I’ve known in that situation, but she isn’t. The difference was that, at least then, there was due process—however broken it was.

Coming here “legally” is not just a one-time act of filling out a few forms. It’s a complicated, confusing, and almost impossible process filled with bad-faith actors waiting to take advantage of people at their most desperate.

And how quickly we dehumanize the desperate, when most of us would do anything to provide a better life for our family if they were in danger. How quickly the world aligns with evil out of fear of the “other.” It’s even easier when we’ve spent years labeling people “illegal” or “legal” rather than calling them what they are– people.

While I was sitting outside of the courtroom, I thought a lot about one of my favorite Fred Rogers quotes. How timely. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

There have been so many helpers. Week after week, they show up without fanfare, often quietly. I met a young woman, who had learned Spanish in school and came to translate alongside her dad. She has more courage than so many peopledouble, triple her age.

Witnessing lives being torn apart is not easy and I can’t pretend that it is. But I was surprised by how energized I felt by the “helpers.” I promise you: it feels worse to watch it unfold on TikTok from your sofa than to stand in that hallway and be a human presence when someone needs it.

Maybe your version of helping won’t involve accompanying people to their hearings. Maybe it’s something else. But I ask you, be courageous.

This is a watershed moment when history will look back and ask what we did to help.

What will you say?