I live on an island in Casco Bay. I don’t own a car, so whenever I’m in Portland and I need to go any distance, I call an Uber.

Most, maybe 80%, of my Uber drivers have been new Mainers, mostly Africans. I’ve lived in Africa myself for nine years in three different countries, and I always welcome an opportunity to reconnect with the continent I spent so much of my life on.

So we’ll talk about music and food and languages and, on rare occasions, if I ask and if they trust me enough, we’ll talk about their immigration story. Typically, they are asylum seekers.

As Judd Legum recently wrote in his newsletter Popular Information, “Immigration law in the United States is based on the idea that all people, regardless of how they entered the country, have rights. Respecting the fundamental human rights of all people is not a ‘woke’ idea invented by liberals in the last few years. The Refugee Act of 1980, which passed Congress unanimously, gives migrants inside the United States the right to claim asylum based on ‘a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion. It was enacted in part to make amends for the country’s shameful refusal to accept Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.'”

The current administration is ignoring the Refugee Act. I wasn’t alive during World War II and so did not feel the shame of turning away Jewish refugees, but I’m alive now, and I’m deeply ashamed of the way my government is behaving. This administration’s deportation policy isn’t just offensive; it is, in a very literal sense, un-American.

The African new Mainers who’ve been driving me around this city for the past five years, the people I so look forward to meeting and talking with every time I go into town, have all disappeared. I don’t think they’ve been deported; that would, I hope, have made the news. I think they’ve gone into hiding. They’re not going out in public. They’re afraid.

I don’t want anyone to be afraid in Portland. I don’t want anyone to be afraid in Maine.

These new Mainers have revived my city and my state. I’ve loved shopping in the new halal markets, I’ve loved eating Colombian arepas out on Forest Avenue, I’ve loved drinking coffee from Burundi in the cafe across from Maine Hardware. These new Mainers have brought the world to us, and I’ve been proud of the way Maine has welcomed them.

I still want to be proud.