During the current president’s last term, a large group of undocumented immigrants from Russia was deported. Somewhere in that motley crowd was a young man with an ordinary Slavic name, let’s say Slava. After being deported, Slava quickly found work on a construction site in Moscow, but he couldn’t shake the idea of getting back to the United States.
The next president launched a de-deportation program. Slava returned on a flight organized specifically for people like him. A military plane triumphantly carried back exactly one passenger: de-deported Slava. Nobody else had signed up. He quickly found his niche in home remodeling. He worked fast. He worked well. But his real competitive edge was cost: Slava lived in the very houses he was renovating. He preferred not to finish one job until he had lined up the next. Clients were never in short supply, and he drifted across Oregon, leaving behind remodeled homes and satisfied homeowners.
Then the current president took office again. Slava wrapped up a renovation the day before the inauguration, crossed the Canadian border on foot, and moved into another house waiting to be renovated, this time on more promising ground.
Dress warm—it’s freezing in there, warned people who had experienced the cold of the facility firsthand. Don’t wear anything with zippers or buttons, or they’ll leave you freezing in just a T-shirt. I packed those warnings with me for the three-hour drive to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, the temporary home for immigrants detained in Oregon.
I’m sitting in a room that feels like a perfectly functioning DMV. It is silent, people are neatly dressed, a muted fishing show plays on TV, and in front of me is a stack of The Times and Good Housekeeping. The only thing that breaks the spell is the posters advertising the center’s amenities—the cafeteria, the law library, the fitness room, and spacious cells.
I’m fidgeting in my chair, shivering. They’ve already taken my phone, my pen, my notebook, and my sweatshirt. Even the short zipper at the collar counted as a no-go. It’s hard to prepare for an encounter with the law, and sometimes knowing the rules is not enough to stay fully clothed. A faint vibration fills the room. Everyone, including the people wearing sweaters, taps a nervous rhythm against the floor with the soles of their shoes. The cold has nothing to do with it.
ICE agents knock on doors in a very particular way. It’s not the hesitant half-knock of an Amazon delivery driver, but nor is it the righteous knock of a landlord or police officer. ICE agents knock like they’re trying to wake you without causing you to panic and try to climb out the back window. There’s already an agent waiting by the back window, anyway.
In January, a Russian woman, I’ll call her Iskra, opens the door wearing her husband’s T-shirt—he’s already left for work—and Christmas pajama pants that stopped being seasonally appropriate a week ago. Instead of a delayed New Year’s gift, she finds a group of politely tense men pressed against the walls of the apartment hallway.
Courteous but insistent, they ask Iskra to come with them to clear up a few formalities. Gently, almost casually, they urge her not to bring too many belongings. She can go exactly as she is: in her husband’s T-shirt and pajama pants covered in ornaments and reindeer antlers.
This won't take long, they tell her. If the misunderstanding gets cleared up quickly, you’ll still make it to work.
Beneath the polite phrasing, Iskra can make out the cold undertone of a protocol. So she puts on two sweaters and a pair of warm sweatpants. This is her third detention in the year and a half she has been in the United States. She knows what comes next; she just doesn’t know how long she will be locked up this time.
She calls her husband and delivers the news in a giddy tone, even as she chokes on the feeling of injustice.
The immigrant community is split into different camps: those who whisper in private group chats, and those who loudly support the president’s policies while accusing undocumented immigrants of being reckless and foolish. Those who are waiting for papers (for status, for a court date), and those who are already naturalized. The “undocumented” and the “good-hearted legal” ones. Those who are desperately trying to decode the advice of far-from-affordable attorneys, and those who blame newcomers for not understanding the legal system of the country they fled to escape war.
Both sides are speaking at the same time, but not to each other. A low hum of offended justice, mixed with anxiety, fills the vacuum of social media.
Suddenly, it matters when and how you arrived: your arrival status becomes a marker; it colors your main identity and fractures a community that had barely held together even before.
Imagine you have transitional legal status. That means long hours and long miles. And lately, the hours have gotten even longer. You finish your shift delivering for Amazon, drive home, and then make an extra loop around your apartment complex. You learn new skills every day, you already know what undercover law enforcement vehicles look like. You scan the parking lot for any signs of a coordinated operation. Only then you let yourself go inside and grab a quick bite before starting your shift for DoorDash. This is the most vulnerable part of your day: being at home. That’s when you’re exposed. At any time, there could be that knock on the door, someone asking you to take care of some formalities. Knock, knock, knock… It reminds you of the home where you used to walk the streets looking over your shoulder. But now that feeling of displacement only intensifies: it seems like you’re back home, but you’re not home. It feels like you may never settle here. It’s too similar to the home you ran from.
It’s hard to get used to the cold in a detention center. Eventually, I just stop noticing it. The visitation room is a narrow space lined with a strip of windows through which I can see the faces of detainees in their duckling-yellow jumpsuits. Men on the left, women on the right. A portrait gallery of detention: people on either side of the glass barely speaking, because there’s not much left to say. They just stare into familiar faces framed by the window panes. It feels like random chance decides which side of the glass you end up on in the visitation room.
I sit down in front of a young man with red, irritated eyes. I wasn’t crying, he says before I can even ask anything. The guards say it’s allergies. Pink eye, if you ask me, but I’m here not to diagnose. What draws my attention is the lopsided smile accompanying his story.
The young man—I’ll call him Bogatyr—tells me about crossing the border with his spouse, Raduga, and ending up in a detention center in California. There, they are split up and sent to different states: Bogatyr to a criminal facility in Nevada, Raduga to Louisiana. For a year, they hear nothing from each other. Detainees are allowed to write letters to the free world, but never to another facility.
During that time, Bogatyr and Raduga go through two court hearings, each in a different detention center, with different judges. Each time, they have to prove they have a justified fear of returning to Russia. Both times, the judge orders their release; both times, on the final day, an appeal arrives. A new hearing is scheduled, and they are each transferred to another state, another detention center. Again.
Bogatyr is familiar with this kind of legal whiplash. In Russia, it’s called a “carousel,” when your detention is extended on the very day you’re supposed to be released. You’re handed your personal belongings only to be re-arrested at the exit. The local version of the carousel is quieter, more procedural: an endless chain of court rulings and appeals meant to keep you detained unless deportation orders finally come through. Once the legal limit on detention without deportation expires, and you remain in the country, you’re transferred to another state.
For Bogatyr and Raduga, the carousel keeps spinning for a year and a half until Bogatyr goes on a two-week hunger strike. Eventually, he ends up in the same facility as his wife. They’re allowed to see each other once a week, and even exchange small gifts from the commissary. The only thing they’re not allowed to do is plan a future. They have been traveling through the country of freedom for 22 months, and every state is the same, with bars and the cold concrete floor beneath their feet.
Listening to the story, I develop a lopsided smile of my own. It never leaves my face. Inside, there’s helplessness and despair, but I still want to offer some outward show of support. Words don’t work; promises don’t matter. That’s why the awkward smile appears.
The most popular Russian-language books in detention are a manual on intelligence recruitment and a collection of Sergey Dovlatov’s short stories about a Soviet prison camp, a place where neither inmates nor guards have any real freedom. Books are officially prohibited, but sometimes they make it in disguised as important legal documents delivered by volunteers.
Besides the volunteers, detainees often have no one. The local immigrant community doesn’t even know they exist, that they were transferred from another state or brought straight from the border. They arrive without language, without contacts, and without any real ability to change their situation. There’s no time to become part of a community, form connections, or see the United States. The runaway carousel keeps carrying them forward, spitting them out into different states, sometimes even different countries.
For everyone else, those of us who are not detained, there’s comfort in the belief that the system is working. It’s imperfect, there are failures, but it adapts itself. It corrects small mistakes and refines procedures, becoming more “human,” meaning more subjective and imprecise.
We crave more information. So we start exchanging anything we can get your hands on, often unverified, sometimes just rumors. At first, it’s panic. Then survival mode. Information becomes the only way to keep panic under control. We start collecting more and more details just to feel safe. We prefer the most alarming news stories, preparing ourselves for the worst. We discover new depths of the conditional tense, constantly running scenarios of what could go wrong. We start questioning our green card status, consider delaying our delay citizenship exams just in case something goes wrong. We put together “emergency kits” with bank passwords and temporary custody documents for our kids. We pack winter jackets and heavy pants for a vacation at the beach, just in case of an unexpected detention.
I’m back in Portland, but I still feel that cold of the detention center, even in a zip-up sweatshirt. I’m standing in front of a class of students learning Russian. I taught here a year ago. I remember it clearly: 24 smart, sometimes annoyed teenagers. Okay, often annoyed. They spoke different versions of Russian. Some were born here, some had rediscovered a connection to their ancestral language, some had fled a recent war.
This year, there are only nine students left, and they mostly prefer to speak English. Language is an important part of identity, but for young people, it gets in the way of faster adaptation, of blending into the cultural landscape. Often, they decide that identity is something best kept at home.
There should be an answer. Sometimes I hear: Outrage leads to action. We will be heard. We need to be visible, to act the way other communities do. But ask yourself: what rights do you have if you’ve been stripped of a voice and can protest only in your own language, speaking to people who would not understand you? Maybe the only option is to turn inward: to shift from community to diaspora, to live in anticipation of better times.
Early one Sunday morning, I hear a knock at the door. Dawn hasn’t yet dispersed the yellow haze of the porch light bleeding through the blinds. Through a narrow slit, I check the empty parking lot for an oversized SUV capable of housing a party of special agents. I look through the peephole. A man in black is pressed against the wall. That familiar chill comes back. The doorknob turns a few times, hurrying me to make a decision. I don’t know why I open the door. I just can’t sit with the growing certainty that something from those Tacoma stories is about to become true. So I open the door and step into the night.
The man in black is flattened against the wall, as if he’s trying to become part of it. He hits me with the question: Where am I? He is trying to sound disoriented, and honestly, he is doing a good job. He sounds like a well-paid actor in a Broadway show about being lost. Except his confusion doesn’t match his appearance: black knit cap, gloves, a small black bag, a neatly trimmed goatee on a wide face. I admire how convincingly he handles his second language. Is he naturalized, or just lucky enough to be born here? He keeps firing questions at me, one after another. He isn’t confused. He isn’t disoriented. If anything, he is the only one of us who understands exactly what is going on. You shouldn’t be here, I say, and close the door.
Ten minutes later, I am trying to calm down and fall back asleep, but one thought won’t leave me alone. I breathe a deep sigh of relief when I realize my early morning visitor is just a burglar.
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