One cool sunny morning in April 2017 Djimet Dogo asked me a third time to check my phone for the right turn we could not miss. We were in Ontario, an onion and potato-farming town on the Snake River in eastern Oregon, in a rented black Chevrolet Suburban. Djimet at the wheel picked our way through traffic in the jungle of gas stations, auto dealerships, big box stores, motels, fast-food joints, past the Flying J travel plaza and the streets that hang off Ontario’s East Idaho Avenue parallel to Interstate 84 right up to the Snake River Bridge. “If we cross the river, we’ve gone too far,” he warned, as if we risked entering some foreign land. Too far was the town of Fruitland, state of Idaho, over the bridge, east of the Snake River. Djimet Dogo was 50 at the time and he taught me, five years older, to look again at things I took for granted—like seemingly inconsequential border crossings through America’s open spaces. I pointed at a right turn short of the bridge and a whitewashed building, the one with an olive-green A-frame over the entrance to the Oregon Department of Human Services (DHS).
I’d invited myself along for the ride with Djimet and his crew of immigration case workers because I wanted to know if America was losing its mind in a frenzy of new anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric, calls to deport millions of people without documents, and to close the borders to just about everybody. I wanted to know whether immigrants and refugees—especially those who might look, believe, think, or speak differently—still fit in the United States of today, our so-called “nation of immigrants,” the words Senator John F. Kennedy chose for the title of his 1958 book on immigration. Kennedy’s theme is one I have always had questions about, a nation of immigrants yes but perhaps also a nation not as tolerant and open as the words of the poet Emma Lazarus under the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to
breathe free.
We were headed to a meeting about refugees from distant lands settling in Ontario, Oregon, population 11,000. It is the biggest town in Malheur County, which is just shy of 10,000 square miles of high desert forest, grassland, and sagebrush. We, as in, Djimet, four members of his staff at Africa House, the non-profit he founded in Portland, and me. His team: three women, Aicha, Sagal, Fatima, and one man, Aiden, sat in back. I’ve changed their names here. They were in their twenties. Fatima wore earbuds while the others debated the finer points of American food.
“American portions are too much,” complained Sagal. “And ketchup, I hate ketchup.”
“I love ketchup,” Aiden murmured under his breath.
Sagal laughed, slapping his arm. “Speak up, speak your mind!”
They were not listening to Djimet. As we pulled into the parking lot, he was deep into a story about his native Chad, in West Africa, and something terrible he witnessed in the capital city of Ndjamena as a young human rights advocate around 1998. Djimet told us how he had just bid a friend goodbye on the street, watching him ride off on a bicycle when a black Mercedes sedan slammed into the friend at high speed. His body landed on the roadside—bloody, broken, dead. The bicycle was crushed under the sedan’s front wheels.
“Two men got out and put him in the trunk,” Djimet said. “They left the bicycle.”
In Chad, by law, only government vehicles are black and Djimet knew his friend, a fellow activist, had been assassinated for working to expose political killings. Djimet was leading the investigations. He explained how he and another friend cleaned up the blood as best they could and the debris from the bicycle. They reported the killing to police, who never followed up. The victim, whose body was left at the local hospital, was one of several casualties in Djimet’s circle of friends. “That kind of thing happened a lot.” Djimet is still not sure if he was the target that day or if, as he put it, “it was a murder I was supposed to see.”
This is how Djimet Dogo’s vitae reads, like a novel where the main character moves between death defying trial and triumph, from the brutality of the field to the calm neutrality of a college campus, a conference hall, a hearing room. Months after the hit-and-run, Djimet traveled to Strasbourg, France, to present the European Parliament—the European Union’s main legislative body—with evidence of human rights abuses in Chad. Upon his return, Chadian police sacked his office and shot to death his assistant, possibly thinking they’d killed Djimet himself. That’s what he suspects. The killers took the body, which turned up at the city morgue. For years, being an army officer’s son protected Djimet, but no longer. More of his colleagues disappeared. With help from the United States embassy, Djimet and six activists fled the country. His family was spared retaliation. Djimet found himself on a global odyssey, a man without a state.
In 1999, he arrived in Washington, D.C. on a scholarship (arranged with State Department help) to study conflict resolution at George Mason University. He also applied for political asylum and made a home in Portland, where he knew one person, an old friend from Chad. He returned to Strasbourg to study mediation at the European Court of Human Rights. That got him an assignment as a United Nations observer during the Balkans War. He returned to Chad (with U.S. Embassy protection) to see family. He married a woman from his neighborhood in N’Djamena. They settled in Portland. He earned a master’s in public policy at Portland State University. In 2003, he became a U.S. citizen. His wife became a citizen soon after. They have four children: two daughters and two sons. In 2006 he founded Africa House to serve Portland’s African community of some 3,000 immigrants and refugees.
*
Djimet was now in Ontario because his work was expanding beyond Portland. We were early to the meeting at DHS, so we waited in the Suburban, listening to Djimet talk of his past and the experiences of other refugees. Hard-to-take, sometimes violent details and odd jokes punctuated with a chuckle or his high-pitched laugh. I studied his face, his pale green eyes, for signs of how he coped with such memories. Telling stories helped. Djimet—six feet tall, lean with a narrow angular face and close-cut graying hair—looked back at me, as if to be sure he had my attention. He works people through eye contact, showing respect while demanding accountability. He covers his pain with humor, tainted dry, a bit flirtatious, and a work ethic that explains the astonishing hours he keeps, on call seven days a week as if the work helps pay off the fact that he is still alive.
I asked more questions. I was scribbling in my notebook when Djimet poked my shoulder and turned his head to grin at his staff. “He is a writer,” he announced. Djimet grinned a lot. “Do we like writers?” No one said anything. He did this for sport, testing people he didn’t know well to see where we stood, how we’d react, what kind of travel companion I would be. The technique reminded me of the counter-culture novelist, Ken Kesey, who received visitors to his Oregon farm with an invitation to “get naked” and go for a bike ride, a way to separate “weekend hippies” from true believers.
Aiden picked up on Djimet’s technique. He sat behind me and poked his head between the seats. “What are you writing?” he asked. I tilted my notebook to let him see my scrawl. “You have awful handwriting,” he said. “How can you read that?”
I showed him my phone recorder was on.
Djimet’s gang of four spoke fluent English and Arabic and languages specific to East and Central Africa. I felt unprepared, inadequate, with just one other language, French, and a few words of Hausa from my Peace Corps service in West Africa in the 1980s. Aiden, Sagal, and Aicha called Somalia home. They spoke Maay Maay, Arabic, and Swahili, and English, of course. They shared a background in a string of United Nations camps in Kenya on the Somali border, though they met for the first time as refugees in Portland. The camps in Kenya are among the world’s largest and oldest refugee settlements, each holding hundreds of thousands of people who’ve fled regional wars that have plagued the Horn of Africa since Britain surrendered its East African colonies in the late 1950s. The third woman, Fatima, fled anti-Muslim violence in the former French colony of Central African Republic. To the language pool, she added French, Sara, and Lingala. All four were enrolled in community college. Aiden was studying business. Aicha and Sagal were pursuing social work degrees, while Fatima was working toward enough humanities credits to go on to university. They carried stories of war and disease, losses of brothers, sisters, parents, of shocking violence they kept to themselves. And here they were, listening to Djimet and me stir it all up, enough heartbreak and violence to speak for them all.
Aiden slumped in his seat and groaned as Djimet continued with another story. “Oh, please, we have heard this so many times.” His tone was more teasing than annoyed.
Djimet jerked his thumb at me. “Yes! But he hasn’t.”
I hadn’t heard how in 1979, when Djimet turned 12, Toubou rebels overran the Chadian military base in the Sahara where he lived with his father, the army captain. The rebels turned the base into a prisoner of war camp, and they spent two years there. Djimet was freed at the age of 14 when the rebels finally toppled Chad’s rulers. His father was repatriated into the new army at his old rank in charge of combat training. They rejoined family in Ndjamena. Years later, Djimet the 25-year-old student at the University of Ndjamena founded the human rights group Chad Nonviolence with other students to monitor government abuses and the national culture of revenge that had grown out of decades of conflict. He’d taught himself English in high school by reading books and magazines and watching videos at the American Cultural Center. He memorized Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech from the 1963 March on Washington by watching the video over and over. King, he likes to say, was his first English teacher. Djimet didn’t talk to his father about his work and his father didn’t intervene, perhaps to be able to claim ignorance of his son’s activities.
“He didn’t punish me,” Djimet said of his father. “He did not praise the work I did or criticize it. He raised me in a POW camp. I think he was proud.”
Before visiting Ontario, I’d interviewed Djimet but never been in the field with him. He’s easy to Google. Dozens of citations spill down the screen: interviews, YouTube presentations, clips of TV appearances, numerous awards, articles he’s written. As a refugee advocate Djimet is a calming spokesman before local governments, police, the FBI, a lifeline to people from the hardest hit regions of Africa. Academics love him. So does the camera. He’s Portland’s go-to guy for refugee issues. Always impeccably dressed and at ease with journalists, and skeptics. He knows what rights refugees have and don’t have.
But in Ontario he was beyond his resources, where Africa House had no staff and there was no TV station to play to. This was Djimet’s third visit to a town that was home to some eighty Somali, Sudanese, Congolese, Iraqi, and Syrian families who’d come to this farm and ranch country because they couldn’t afford to live where the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement had dropped them—in places like Seattle, Portland, Boise, Salt Lake, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver. The word among migrant workers across the West has long been that Ontario is livable with jobs in vegetable processing plants, at Walmart, in hotels and restaurants off the Interstate. Life is hard enough for Latino workers, legal and not, living on low wages and no benefits, fearing immigration raids. But for refugees the reality is different—different languages, religions, customs, food—and different because refugees are vetted through the UN and federal agencies. They have papers. Their legal status is not an issue. But just about everything else is.
Djimet told me about an encounter he had in Ontario in 2015, as he was leaving a meeting at City Hall. A woman confronted him outside. “Why are they here? We haven’t got resources for these people. Where will it end? Can you guarantee they are not terrorists?”
They stood on the sidewalk, talking. “I told her refugees have been running from terrorists all their lives. They’re decent, hardworking people who want to be free. Go talk to them. Go and meet them in their homes. Eat with them. She walked away. I guess she didn’t like what I said.”
Djimet wasn’t discouraged. “I get that kind of thing in Portland, too. I know Ontario is full of good people who care.”
*
Ontario is not a town you choose casually. To live here more than a few years is to know exactly where you are. Voters supported Donald Trump in three straight presidential elections and yet Ontario runs on volunteers, might even collapse without them. Volunteers manage the Malheur County Fair. They sweep streets, pick up garbage, back up police and fire departments, run after-school programs, coach school athletic teams, fill in at food banks, staff medical programs for the poor, domestic abuse hotlines and events like Mexican Independence Day, the Japanese Obon Festival, the Global Village Festival. So, who needs public meetings? Volunteers lay low. They let political types do the public work, argue over turf and credit until things are set and the blood has dried, and city councilors, committee appointees, and board members have stopped the grandstanding, the jockeying, stopped accusing each other of graft, assault, domestic abuse, triggering the odd police investigation that turns up little to nothing. Ontario, one local reporter wrote, has “one of the most politically charged small town climates in eastern Oregon.”
Ontario politics is hand to hand: “Well, if what I said isn’t true,” one city council member taunted another on Facebook, “why aren’t you suing me for slander?”
Better to keep a low profile.
Which is not in Djimet Dogo’s nature. Djimet—whose last name, “Dogo,” means “man of strength” and “tall man” in Hausa and southern Chadian languages—cultivates crisp chic, like an African diplomat on a goodwill tour. Thoughtful. Careful. Artful. Sitting in the suburban, I made notes of his clothing: a perfectly fitted blue blazer and trousers, a dark purple dress shirt, black tie, and tan leather wingtips. Before we went into the DHS, I asked what he thought of a speech by Jeff Sessions, the new Attorney General. I read aloud from my phone: Immigrants, Sessions complained, beget “lawlessness.” They denied jobs to “hundreds of thousands of Americans,” and turned our cities into “warzones.”
Djimet’s staff in the back seats stopped talking after I read the quote. Djimet broke into a “Gotcha!” grin. “Warzones,” he repeated. “Americans don’t understand what that word means.”
He talked about living through the rebel siege of the army base where he lived with his father and about the morning they became prisoners of war. How in the house they shared, he woke up before dawn to get ready for school. How the sounds of shooting, screaming, and explosions shattered the routine. Aicha, Fatima, Sagal and Aiden resumed their small talk as Djimet went on about dressing in his school khaki shorts and shirt before the reality outside forced him to crouch against a wall, fingers in his ears to block the sounds of battle. How he felt the staccato vibration of bullets hitting the concrete walls. Glass and bits of concrete sprayed about as bullets shattered windows and hit the interior. His voice intensified over the details of what happened when a dud mortar shell, or maybe a rocket propelled grenade, crashed through the roof, landing nose down in a barrel of flour. Djimet recalled hugging his knees to his chest, watching the propeller blades spin. He looked up to see two men with guns and filthy green turbans, cloth drawn over their faces, gazing down at him. They took him by the shoulders into a field where the rebels were holding his father and dozens of government soldiers.
They imprisoned him as a child soldier. Djimet insists he’s never picked up a gun in his life. And yet all of that—the war, the violence, the prison camp—were not enough to compel him to leave his country. Not yet. Chad’s civil war, he explained, was a tangle of old and new conflicts over ethnic differences and oil, in a country of 16 million people and more than 100 distinct languages. His stories are consistent. He tells them on demand—every gut-wrenching detail because, as he puts it, “People need to know what it’s like.”
His staff calls them “rants.” Sitting in the DHS parking lot, I listened to Djimet, notebook on my knees while Sagal, Aiden and Fatima compared thoughts over case files for families they would visit later in the week. Aicha rested her head against the window, hand covering her face as if in prayer. Djimet said he decided to leave Chad after the killing of his colleague on the bicycle. “I’d had enough. I’d witnessed war and inter-tribal violence my entire life. I wanted to go to America because even more than Europe this is a place where everyone has rights, no matter where you come from.” Now, in the spring of 2017, even as the Trump administration was making its first moves on immigration, Djimet didn’t believe bigotry had a chance in the long run, not in a land so large and complex as the United States. “I have faith in this country.”
But the United States in 2017 was afraid of itself. In Kansas that February a man, shouting “Get out of my country,” shot to death a Sikh bar patron. Months later, in Montana, a border patrol officer confronted two American women at a gas station because he heard them speaking Spanish. In September, ICE agents cornered a laborer on a Portland, Oregon construction job where his co-workers refused the agents access to detain him.
Right then, just as Fatima said, “Okay, Djimet, time to go,” Djimet did that thing he likes to do, that test. He touched my shoulder and turned to grin at his team. “But we’re safe now, right guys?”
“Safe?” Aiden frowned through a mouth full of almonds. “Safe from what?”
Djimet erupted in his high-pitched laugh. He pointed at me. “Safe from everything. We have a white man with us.” I kept my head in my notes, scribbling, aware that Djimet was mocking the way in which liberal white people talk about themselves, giving the appearance of apologizing for their privilege while simultaneously reaffirming it.
“Well, that’s it then,” said Sagal. She sat beside Aiden in a bright orange hijab. She shuffled a file on her lap, pen in one hand. I could not ignore the brittle in her voice, each word like a dead leaf. “No more worries.”
No more worries. Sagal’s words felt bitterly funny. I hadn’t experienced their six-hour journey east from Portland across the state of Oregon on I-84—five new American citizens of African origin in a rented Suburban. I’d driven to meet them from my home in Idaho. People stared, Sagal said, studied them across gas pumps and over snack racks at convenience stores. They asked things like, “What’s your business here?” and “Where are you from?” When the group stopped for breakfast in The Dalles, a town on the Columbia River, they laughed as they ordered, giddy from the hours in a car. A waiter said, “You guys seem so happy,” as if, Aiden recalled, laughing was strange. Oregon, he said, is “the state of scrutiny.”
A sheriff’s deputy pulled up behind the Suburban, as Djimet drove out of a gas station in Pendleton, Oregon, halfway between Portland and Ontario. The deputy tailed them down the on-ramp to the freeway for a mile before turning on the emergency lights. He handed Djimet a speeding ticket. Maybe the stop was routine. Maybe it wasn’t. “He was parked at the gas station,” Djimet said, “watching us.”
*
Djimet strode into the Ontario DHS like he knew the place. Through the glass doors he led the way up a hallway to a big meeting room where about 60 people waited. Staffers from DHS headquarters in Salem, the state capital, had put out the word. This group was all volunteer and understood the general issues of the U.S.-Mexico border, the migrant pressures from countries in Central and South America, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few people spoke Spanish. Some had been missionaries overseas, and some had been Peace Corps volunteers. Some were military veterans, religious leaders, social workers. One spoke Arabic.
Nearly every seat was taken in a room with steel gray carpets and fluorescent lights. Faces turned on Sagal who stood against a wall with her legal pad. She was collecting material for a paper in one of her classes at Portland Community College. Tall, with a long neck and powerful chin, she radiated confidence in a traditional Somalian dirac, a colorful flowing light cotton dress that fell to her ankles. She’d recrafted her orange hijab into a headwrap several inches above her skull, like a crown. Aiden, Aicha, and Fatima sat in front observing their boss.
Beside the podium, touching his hands at the fingertips, Djimet faced the crowd of sunburnt souls. Social workers shared the room with ranchers, farmers, pastors and priests, nuns, realtors, shopkeepers, teachers, and retirees. They wore jeans, khakis, long dresses, field shorts, muddy boots, sneakers, habits and Roman collars, ball caps, cowboy hats. They were Buddhist, Baptist, Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish, Lutheran, Methodist, Protestant, and one Muslim, an Iraqi man who’d been an interpreter for the U.S. Army in Baghdad.
Djimet looked from face to face, nodding here and there like he knew everybody. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “I’m Djimet Dogo. My first name is a little like ‘Jimmy.’ It comes from the Arabic word for Friday, the day I was born. And I am here to tell you about a new community of refugees here in Ontario. I come from Chad, from the south, along the Chari River and the border with Central African Republic… and now I am American. I am also Muslim. That’s important to me… The land around Ontario is like my homeland. It’s dry and grassy. Where I come from, elephants trample crops and hyenas attack people. Here you worry about wolves and coyotes. I understand that.”
I wondered: Who can say who is welcome, and who is not? Who grants freedom to enter, and freedom to stay?
