My latest: The lawyer, the organizer, the priest, and the sheriff

Dear friends,

The day before President Trump’s inauguration, I sat inside a church fellowship hall in Durham with about 60 people, mostly immigrants. They had arrived in winter pullovers and windbreakers, anxious about the news, wondering how much the coming years would disrupt their lives.

Among those in the room were four community leaders: an organizer, a priest, an attorney, and a sheriff. Each, in their own way, was trying to buffer the immigrants from the incoming administration’s mass-deportation efforts. If any county could offer protection, it would be Durham, which gave Trump just 18 percent of the vote last year and has a 100-year history of civil-rights activism.

Would moral conviction, teamwork, and supportive local law enforcement suffice? That’s the question my colleague Vibhav Nandagiri and I asked over the winter and early spring as we followed the foursome and watched them navigate the new reality. The Assembly, a digital magazine about North Carolina, published our article this morning:

https://www.theassemblync.com/politics/law-enforcement/durham-nc-immmigration-trump-sheriff-activists/

I hope you’ll take the time to read the story. If you like it, please share it.

Special thanks to Roderico Y. Díaz for his sensitive photographs, including the one above.

Plus, where to hear my voice:

I recently spoke to Phoebe Judge, the host of Criminal podcast, about one of the most audacious acts of journalism that I was a (small) part of: inventing Jolene Strickland, a dream candidate for North Carolina's 1996 gubernatorial race. Download and listen here:

https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-311-the-pride-of-pine-hill-4-4-2025/

Articles I’ve appreciated:

• Photographer Kaoly Gutierrez documenting her grandfather’s efforts to rebuild after Hurricane Helene, with additional text by Allison Salerno;

• Peter Rothpletz on why dads take their gay sons (like himself) to Hooters;

• Sara Gentzler uncovering the memos that state bureaucrats in Nebraska are quietly writing to each other;

• McKenzie Funk on the flight attendants on deportation flights;

• Michael Graff’s article about a lifelong Republican from Charlotte with decades of blue-chip legal experience, who took a federal consumer-protection job only to watch Elon Musk take a chainsaw to his agency;

• Jeffrey Billman and Ren Larson on a Venezuelan asylum seeker whom the Trump administration sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador; and

• Christina Greer’s op-ed about how the current political events come as no surprise to Black Americans.

A podcast episode worth your time:

From Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace: “A Brief Note Written After Learning the National Parks Service Removed the word Transgender from Stonewall's Webpage.”

And two video documentaries to look out for:

I saw these both at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and they were extraordinary.

• Ryan White’s Come See Me in the Good Light is about a remarkable spoken-word poet, Andrea Gibson, facing down cancer and determined to return to the stage. It is packed with humor and poetry and love so big it will fill your chest.

• David Borenstein’s Mr. Nobody vs. Putin tells the story of a Russian public-school videographer who recognizes that his images tell a damning story, and successfully ferrets it (and himself) out of the country.

All best,
Barry Yeoman

P.S. For years, this newsletter was so casual that it didn’t even have a name. I’ve finally dubbed it “Unabridged.” It’s a bit of a play on words. It reflects my love of longform journalism, whether in text, audio, or video format. It also reflects my deep belief in the First Amendment, which says (in part) that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”