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Local news
In which my steady, inexorable, mostly intentional retreat from the media fast lane takes a new turn
Hello and season’s greetings!
Admittedly, when I moved upstate in the summer of 2020 after decades in Brooklyn, it was with some trepidation. The issue wasn’t solitude. By that point, the Covid pandemic along with certain conspicuous changes in the character of urban life (it got lame) had somehow cured me of the chronic FOMO I’d suffered since before the acronym. Meanwhile, what I might once have viewed as endless drudgery—the slow rebuilding an old farmhouse, along with a growing list of other chores—had come to resemble a kind of spiritual calling, maybe a form of penance.
What did worry me a bit was how I’d adjust to a more conservative climate, especially during a period of alarming political upheaval.
The question lurking in the back of my mind back then, when we slept on air mattresses and wondered if that staccato fanfare echoing off the nearby hills was the sound of a machine gun, was basically this: Would my new neighbors kill me?
During the Trump era, I did a little reporting on the kind of far-right fever that can overwhelm a community. I visited a preenactment of the much-awaited second civil war. I chatted with a Qanon researcher. I profiled a family destroyed by bigotry and wrote about a small Ohio town swept up by a hallucinatory Antifa panic.
I soon determined that my adopted home was different. Yes, there are three registered Republicans here for every two Democrats, but the paranoia, outrage and hostility I have seen elsewhere seems absent. The poison didn’t quite take.
I attribute that to two things: First, the internet service here is spotty, and cell towers are few and far between. Many folks rarely venture online at all. One guy I know has dialup, but he can’t remember his Facebook password. Another denounces smartphones with all the righteous fervor of a Edward R. Murrow junior. Yes, as we’re constantly hearing, the digital divide is a serious problem for rural communities. But I suspect it’s also a blessing when it comes to how people treat one another.
The other factor, I think, is the local paper. We actually have one. At a time when such institutions are struggling—2,500 have shut down since 2005, according to the one newspaper in the country that seems to be thriving—The Reporter (formerly The Walton Reporter) remains an independent operation.
The paper comes out once a week. Its focus is town council and school board meetings and high-school sporting events (most games are covered by parents). It features a police blotter (my least favorite feature), a ridiculous, slightly denialist weather column (no Tom Scocca, alas), and folksy dispatches from around the county detailing upcoming church suppers and bingo nights, with a sprinkling of homespun humor (“What’s the best way to stuff a turkey? Feed him lots of pizza and ice cream”). It also runs a beloved feature reprinting its century-old scoops (“Crushed Under Log When Chain Broke”). It’s solid, unfussy, and mostly endearing, except when the County Sheriff opines on bail reform.
Anyway, since settling in here, it’s been my secret dream to file an occasional story—a bit of Big Media noblesse oblige akin to when Roger Ailes bought the Putnam County News and Reporter but less evil. It doesn’t pay a lot (a cool two figures for a feature story) and will probably never “win the morning.” But when time allows, I’m hoping to contribute something more in-depth than what the regular reporting staff can take on. Maybe in the process I’ll help support this struggling endeavor that we all keep saying is an essential component of a maintaining a healthy democratic society.
Besides, what else am I going to do with all the time and creative fire I used to put into tweeting?
Anyway, I have written letters to the editor before, but following is my first commissioned piece, reprinted with permission. Yes, the Times got to this first, but that’s ok. Nobody up here reads the Times.
Enjoy and Happy Holidays!
Moscow on the Delaware
Local Residents Extend a Hand to Two Russian Asylum Seekers
On a temperate day in late April, Mariia Shemiatina and Boris Shevchuk steered their old green Ford Expedition—a beater, purchased just days before from a Tijuana used car lot—north toward the Otai Mesa border crossing for the fifth time. On each previous trip, they’d been turned away by US border patrol agents stationed on the Mexico side. This time, mysteriously, they rolled through. Once on US soil, they presented themselves to the first officer they saw and declared their request for asylum.
Finally, they thought, they were safe.
Both physicians in their late 20s, the married Russian couple shared their story with The Reporter in mid-November, sitting in a tidy Delhi guest house. The home had been offered up a local couple, members of a hastily organized collection of neighbors who’d been scrambling to get the newcomers housing, legal assistance, clothing, food and a crash course in English. (Mariia speaks the language haltingly; Boris, though less confident, is a determined student.) Both appeared buoyed by the community’s show of support, eager to please, and in good spirits, considering the circumstances they’d endured.
The couple had fled their home in Olenogorsk reluctantly back in March, after Mariia’s mother received a call from police threatening her daughter with 15 years in prison. Her crime: social media posts in which she voiced support for opposition leader Alexei Navalny and denounced the war in Ukraine.
Russia began experimenting with democracy in the 1990s, but repression returned under President Vladimir Putin. The regime’s critics have come under attack (Navalny himself is in prison, having barely survived a poisoning attempt). Protesters are sometimes sent to penal colonies. And recently, trained medical professionals like Boris and Mariia, an infectious disease specialist and radiologist, respectively, have been pressed into military service in Ukraine.
For the young couple, as for some 900,000 of their compatriots who have fled the country since the war began in February, the decision to flee was a no-brainer.
The EU wasn’t an option, but when the couple learned that Mexico allows entry to Russian citizens without a visa, they made their way to Cancun and then to Tijuana—the doorway, they hoped, to a new life.
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The USA is, as President Kennedy put it, a nation of immigrants. With the notable exception of Native Americans, we all descend from people who journeyed here, voluntarily or in bondage, from a foreign land. The couple knew this history, and as they kissed each other goodbye and were taken into custody, segregated by gender, they saw themselves as part of a venerable American tradition.
The reality has always been more complicated, and in recent years the subject has become highly politicized. President Biden has discontinued some of the harsher measures, including family separation, imposed during the Trump years. But even the current policies seem a far cry from either the famous Statue of Liberty inscription (“Give me your tired, your poor...”) or the “open borders” of nativist nightmares. Last week, 100 human rights groups issued a public letter to the Biden administration deploring “inhumane conditions” throughout the system.
Mariia and Boris’s story lends credence to this claim. They spent their first days in America shivering in small, windowless holding cells (detainees have nicknamed them “hieleras,” or iceboxes, due to the frigid air conditioning). There were more than two dozen packed into each room—people fleeing persecution, violence, poverty and climate catastrophes back home—made to share a single metal toilet tucked behind a low partition. Each was offered a yoga mat to sleep on (some had to take shifts, due to overcrowding) and a sheet of mylar with which to wrap themselves. There was a sink, but no soap or toothpaste. The lights shone all night long.
After six days, Boris and Mariia were shackled at the wrists and ankles for a flight to Louisiana, where they were placed in his-and-hers detention centers to await a hearing of their asylum claim. Conditions initially seemed like an improvement (detainees slept in bunks, barracks-style, for instance). But in other ways, things were worse. Meals were often inedible, they say, and Covid-19 was rampant. Despite the Biden administration’s continued reliance on a pandemic-related rule to expel thousands of people without a hearing (now the subject of a legal battle), neither Boris nor Mariia ever saw anyone tested or provided with a mask. And Boris, who somehow managed to avoid the illness while directing his hospital’s pandemic response back in Russia, believes he contracted coronavirus multiple times in Louisiana.
Both developed other serious medical ailments they say went untreated for months. Boris says he was roughed up by guards after requesting protection from another detainee. Eventually he went on a weeklong hunger strike in an attempt to force the authorities to take his and Mariia’s plight seriously.
In an emailed response to the couple’s claims of maltreatment, a spokesperson for the GEO Group, which runs both facilities, rejected their claims, “including the allegation that a denial of medical care led to the deterioration of an individual’s health.” (The for-profit prison company, which reported revenues of more than $2.2 billion in 2021, has been the subject of numerous federal lawsuits over its treatment of detainees.)
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One day in late June, Boris dialed an immigration hotline. The voice at the other end belonged to Delhi resident Daniel Gashler, who has devoted two hours a week for several years taking calls on behalf of Freedom for Immigrants, a nonprofit. “I speak with people all the time who feel like nobody cares,” he says. “There’s so little we can do, but most people are incredibly grateful just for talking.”
Gashler, who teaches history at SUNY Delhi and has lived in the village since 2016, speaks Russian fluently.
Boris’s goals were simple: He wanted was to secure medical care for Mariia, who was suffering severe pelvic pain, later diagnosed as cystitis, and numbness on her left side. He wanted to file an official complaint over detention conditions he believes would shock most Americans. And he wanted to find a lawyer to help with the asylum claim. Gashler said he’d do his best.
For more than a year, Gashler had been meeting with a small group of area residents, brainstorming ways to help asylum seekers. They’d been stirred to action by scenes from Kabul during the military’s disastrous withdrawal, and spent the next year learning about the issue and establishing an organization they called Delaware County Citizens for Refugee Support.
Sangeeta Pratap, one of the group’s founding members and a professor of economics at Hunter College who lives part-time in Bovina, views support for refugees as an economic issue as well as a human one. While immigration can sometimes depress wages for laborers in urban centers, she says, less densely populated areas like Delaware County, where unemployment is low, reap significant economic benefits from newcomers, the presence of whom “creates demand for more goods and services” and provides necessary labor.
Welcoming refugees, she adds, “is an issue that cuts across political boundaries. It’s a humanitarian issue, and humanitarians exist in both parties.”
It also draws interest from diverse age groups. When Gashler screened a videoconference interview with Boris as part of SUNY Delhi’s Constitution Day, more than 100 students showed up.
As Mariia’s health deteriorated throughout the late summer and early fall, Gashler brought the group regular updates from Boris. “His story just got worse and worse,” Takahashi recalls. “Mariia’s condition and how she was treated got to the point where, I don’t think any of us was sure she was going to make it. We just thought, We got to get them out of there.”
After an immigration attorney from a New Orleans nonprofit got involved, a judge ordered couple released on bond of $15,000 each, an unusually high amount according to the couple’s lawyer. The figure was later reduced to $10,000 each after Mariia began experiencing seizures, collapsed and was rushed to a local hospital. By then, Gashler and his wife, Krisy, had resolved to sponsor the pair themselves.
In short order, the group got a tax ID and a bank account, and created a GoFundMe page to cover Boris’s bond (Mariia’s was furnished by former Russian detainees) and other necessities. The fundraiser quickly pulled in $7000, and a community event hosted by Delhi’s Bushel Collective in October raised an additional $3500 in just two hours.
On November 10, Boris and Mariia stepped off a jetbridge at Newark Airport. Gashler was there to greet them. So was Pratap, who had brought some New York delicacies: smoked salmon sandwiches and black-and-white cookies. Esther Lee, another Bovinian and DCCRS founding member, arrived bearing new winter clothes from Target.
The couple’s first weeks in Delaware County have been busy with medical appointments, legal meetings, visits to the Department of Social Services office and the DMV, and dinner invites. They’ve also been in touch with local medical networks about volunteering their services while they pursue medical accreditation and permission to work legally, and are doing all they can to help the friends they made in detention who have not been as lucky. (They agreed to be featured in a recent New York Times article to bring more attention to the issue.)
Local residents have been busy too, contributing home-cooked meals via Meal Train and showering the pair with offers of housing, rides, English lessons, electronics, and even a guitar. The Catskills Agrarian Alliance is pitching in with CSA shares. Robson’s Christmas Trees in Bovina pledged a choice evergreen, and retired Walton schoolteacher Jan Bray organized a drive that netted dozens of Christmas ornaments with which to decorate it. When people understand the need, Pratap says, “Help pours in like crazy.”
For Boris and Mariia, the reception has been overwhelming. “We are very surprised by the support that the people of Delaware County have given us, although they do not know us,” they wrote in an email. “They have no reason to do this, which reflects the personal qualities of people.”
There have been lessons for area residents as well. “We’ve all heard about how awful these detention centers are,” Takahashi notes. “But when you’re in direct contact with two real human beings, you experience it in a completely different way.”
Esther Lee, another DCCRS cofounder, wasn’t surprised that people pitched in. “But what I didn’t expect,” she adds, “was the level of genuine warmth and caring. This has really brought the community together, brought out our collective generosity, and given us something to fight for and believe in.”
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