SEYMOUR — Residents filled Seymour City Hall’s council chambers to capacity. Some sat on the floor or stood along the walls. Those who couldn’t get in waited outside the building.
Nearly the entire crowd was there in March for one reason: to speak out against a proposal to bring an immigrant welcome center to the city to help newly arrived people find housing, enroll kids in school and access healthcare and other services.
Seymour resident Dana Clark, shouting nearly at full volume, claimed that immigrants lacking permanent legal status were bringing drugs and gangs to the city of 21,600 people. Why would the city want to welcome them?
“I’m pissed,” Clark yelled. “The drugs are flowing in here. The cartels in Jackson County are here so deep the cops can’t do nothing about it! Shut it down!”
State Rep. Jim Lucas, who represents Seymour, told the crowd that although he welcomed legal immigrants, many undocumented people participated in “occupancy abuse” by living in groups inside apartments. He claimed that drove up rental rates in the city.
Jill Robbins, an accountant from Seymour, told the council that because of immigrants who lack permanent legal status, “We’re losing our country, and you’re bringing it into our backyards.”
“We don’t want these people,” she said. “I don’t want them in the schools with my grandchildren. I don’t want to build houses for these people. They’re illegal. Illegal means you don’t belong.”
After hours of fierce pushback from residents, a council member submitted a resolution opposing the immigrant welcome center. It easily passed with just one vote against it.
Parts of the crowd began chanting “USA! USA!”
‘COMPLETELY BLINDSIDED’
Ashley Caceres listened to the comments with alarm and fear.
The Seymour native and first-generation American grew up among the town’s immigrant community. Her mom is from Mexico and her dad is from El Salvador. The couple settled in Seymour in the late 1990s.
What she heard her neighbors saying during the meeting about those she knows and loves cut deep.
“In every part of my life, the support I received was from an immigrant,” she said. “The community helped me apply for college and helped me look for scholarships, supported me when I was sick and took care of us when we were children.”
Sehrish Sangamkar, a U.S. citizen and Seymour resident who immigrated from Pakistan nearly 20 years ago, explained her biggest concern after the meeting came from some residents falsely assuming all immigrants in town are undocumented and violent.
“I’ve lived here for going on 14 years and I really enjoy living here,” she said. “But in this moment, I feel like I was also lumped into that category because I have a different skin color and I have a different accent.”
Caceres, who today serves as the executive director of Su Casa, a Columbus-based nonprofit that helps the area’s Latino communities, said many claims made by residents aren’t true and have no evidence to back them.
That makes her sad, but it doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The town has seen a notable influx of immigrants over the last two decades. Non-native people now make up about 20% of the population.
Some residents at the meeting expressed concerns Seymour is losing its identity — the one celebrated in the hit song “Small Town” by John Mellencamp, who was born in Seymour. Others claimed immigrants there aren’t “assimilating” to the town’s culture.
What surprised Caceres the most is how residents now feel “emboldened to say really awful things” about the town’s immigrants and efforts to help them.
“I didn’t expect people to feel so strongly against it,” she said. “You can grow up and live in a community and still feel completely blindsided by comments like this.”
Why the change? The central reason lies with the scorched-earth immigration rhetoric employed by former President Donald Trump, argued James McCann, a political scientist at Purdue University.
“The Trump administration opened up this new divide in American politics and society of pro-immigrant versus anti-immigrant,” he said. “The former president is now doubling down.”
‘POISIONING OUR COUNTRY’
Trump’s campaign cornerstone from the beginning has been attacking and demonizing immigrants, explained McCann, who wrote a book about how Latino communities responded to the former president’s first term.
“He really landed on that issue in 2016 and landed hard,” McCann said.
Trump is again employing his trademark rhetoric in the 2024 campaign, vilifying immigrants as the source of many of America’s woes. A case in point: he told his supporters in December that immigrants coming to the U.S. are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Democrats said the comments echoed the words of Adolf Hitler.
Trump has repeatedly pushed the false claim that millions of illegal immigrants are coming from prisons, jails and mental institutions to “destroy our country.” Immigration experts say no evidence exists to support Trump’s claim.
In 2016, the former president mostly heaped blame on immigrants for crime and violence, argued Miriam Acevedo Davis, president of La Plaza, an immigrant and Latino outreach in Indianapolis.
This year, he is pushing for specific policies, like using the military to launch the largest deportation effort in U.S. history. Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top immigration advisors, is suggesting vast detention camps along the southern border.
“If they’re talking about rounding up people and deputizing everyone to do this, then there’s a real fear, rational or not, about how far this could all go,” Davis said.
INDIANA GOP FOLLOWS SUIT
Such policies and rhetoric have become baked into the MAGA faction of the Republican Party, including many elected officials in Indiana.
U.S. Rep. Jim Baird, who is running for reelection in Indiana’s 4th District, in a campaign email this month asked supporters to sign a petition to demand every illegal immigrant be deported if Trump wins back the White House. The email shows two photos of Baird and Trump in front of an American flag.
“Our country is going to become unrecognizable if we don’t address the surge of illegal immigration that DC Democrats are facilitating,” the email stated.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a vocal Trump supporter, filed lawsuits last month against East Chicago and Monroe County for their alleged status as sanctuary cities. The term is applied to cities or towns where local laws tend to protect immigrants from deportation or prosecution.
Indiana lawmakers this year empowered Rokita’s office to enforce a 13-year-old ban on sanctuary cities, requiring local governments or postsecondary educational institutions to cooperate with federal immigration officials.
“The flood of illegal immigrants entering the United States is a problem that harms all of us,” Rokita said in a release about the lawsuits. “The ones paying the price for this lawlessness are Hoosier taxpayers.”
But state Sen. Shelli Yoder, D-Bloomington, who represents Monroe County, argued the litigation only aims to instill fear among the immigrant communities in her district and across the state.
“He’s making it into a culture war and really targeting people who are vulnerable,” she said. “That rhetoric definitely exacerbates this notion of distrust in our immigrant communities, and that is the opposite of what we should be doing as a country.”
IMMIGRANTS PUSH BACK
Back at the Seymour council meeting, vitriol for the city’s growing immigrant population continued.
Solomon Rust, who owns a German restaurant in town, was one of just two people who spoke in favor of the proposed welcome center. He said an immigrant friend who has been “vetted and is legal” refused to come to the meeting out of fear of being lynched.
“His words, not mine,” Rust said as some in the crowd scoffed at the statement.
That fear among Seymour’s immigrants has grown since the meeting, explained Caceres with Su Casa, the nonprofit Latino outreach. Some feel they need to take safety precautions to avoid trouble in town, she said.
“I really hate to say that, but safety is really just a big concern for us now, and I think a lot of our families as well,” Caceres said.
Gurinder Kaur, CEO of the Immigrant Welcome Center in Indianapolis, said an anti-immigration group that formed in Seymour following the meeting made so many hateful and untrue posts on her nonprofit’s Facebook page that they turned off the comments section.
“The Seymour coalition was just using our page to propagate their propaganda,” said Kaur, who came to the U.S. from India. “That is very, very troubling.”
The amped-up rhetoric has emboldened some Hoosier immigrants to take action. Kaur said her nonprofit for the first time has a waiting list of people who want to take naturalization classes to prepare to apply for U.S. citizenship.
The influx comes from many immigrants’ desire to vote in this year’s election, she explained, “so that their voice is counted.”
One immigrant, who didn’t provide their name, said in an email that they have long wanted to become a U.S. citizen, but “found the process to be anxiety inducing.” This year, they overcame that anxiety and filed for citizenship. The person now has to wait seven months before the application is processed.
“I am a little sad about that because I hoped to enter into this election come November,” they said.
A growing number of naturalized citizens in Seymour have also rallied together to push back against false claims about the town’s immigrant population and educate the community about how U.S. immigration laws sometimes make it hard to enter the country legally.
Sangamkar, the immigrant from Pakistan, said a growing coalition is working to ensure the town’s immigrant communities feel safe and welcomed. Others are attending council meetings to refute any false claims that may come up about immigration.
“Yes, there’s hate,” Sangamkar said. “There’s also people who are happy to help them while they’re here trying to make better choices, to find a better future not only for themselves, but for their kids.”
In the meantime, many Hoosier immigrants are keeping an eye on the outcome of November’s election and thinking how best to prepare if Trump wins a second term in office, explained Davis with La Plaza.
“There’s a real concern should that become reality,” she said.
