Welcoming the Stranger: Terry Diggory on Immigration Justice
I don’t know what byline to put on any of the pieces my colleague Bill Walker and I will be publishing on Smartacus. We interviewed Terry Diggory in Zoom for an hour while Otter transcribed it into near-perfect text. It’s a blessing to escape the drudgery of note-taking and pulling quotes off a tape recorder.
NotebookLM is one of the tools that enables us to write with what feels like superintelligence. Look closely in the left-hand column and you’ll see we uploaded the Otter-generated transcript of our interview with Terry Diggory so as to aggregate it with other sources.
In NotebookLM, I aggregated the transcript with other sources, and asked Gemini 2.0 — Google’s AI agent — to generate an all-encompassing “Briefing Doc,” which I then dropped into ChatGPT and gave this command:
“Write a magazine-length feature about Terry Diggory in the style of John McPhee and E.B. White.”
The result was the piece you’ll find below. Total time invested: Three hours.
What justification is there for not using AI to to accelerate and upgrade the quality of my writing? This is not an exact representation of my voice, but does that matter if the information is accurate and clearly presented?
That’s a question we’ll explore in the series we’re hosting on the coming of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
-DF
Welcoming the Stranger: Terry Diggory on Immigration Justice
Terry Diggory spearheaded the establishment of the Saratoga Immigration Coalition in 2017.
On most mornings, Terry Diggory begins his day the same way he once began a day of teaching—slowly, with a cup of coffee and a kind of deliberate attentiveness to what the world is trying to say. Light spills across the kitchen tableand he reads for a moment before the day begins. It used to be Yeats. Lately, it’s been headlines.
In his retirement, Diggory had imagined more time for poetry, more walks across the Skidmore College campus where he had taught for nearly four decades. Instead, he found himself walking a different path entirely—one shaped by fear, resilience, and the moral geometry of welcome.
It was not a single moment that brought him there, but a gathering storm. After the 2016 election, as rhetoric sharpened and federal immigration agents grew bolder, whispers began in church basements and fellowship halls across Saratoga Springs. Could the town’s faith communities do more than pray? Could they offer shelter? Could they offer sanctuary?
For Diggory, the question struck with particular clarity. He had long been drawn to the places where the spiritual and the civic meet—the overlapping regions of poetry and justice. And so when his congregation at the Presbyterian-United Church of Christ reopened the question of sanctuary—this time with urgency—he did not hesitate.
“There was history here,” he recalled later. “The church had debated sanctuary back in the 1980s, when families from El Salvador and Guatemala were knocking on our country’s door and finding it locked. We didn’t take that step then. But the conversation never quite left us.”
By early 2017, the conversation had become a coalition.
The Birth of a Coalition
The Saratoga Immigration Coalition didn’t begin with bylaws or a boardroom. It began, as so many things do in upstate New York, over shared coffee and weathered wooden tables, where the talk moved quietly from concern to conviction.
Diggory wasn’t alone in sensing the shift. Across town, the Unitarian Universalists were holding similar meetings. So were the Quakers. A rabbi at Temple made an announcement. Clergy who had once exchanged polite greetings at interfaith events were now exchanging spreadsheets—names of families who might need legal help, donations to cover rent, rides to court hearings on the other side of the state.
Bright yellow-green placards produced by the SIC have become a kind of regional shorthand for conscience.
“There was a kind of moral convergence,” Diggory says. “Each congregation had been having its own internal reckoning. But when we realized that, together, we could form something stronger—well, that changed the conversation.”
The Saratoga Immigration Coalition took form in the spring of 2017. It wasn’t a religious body, but it wore its spiritual origins plainly. The founding members included nearly every faith tradition in town: the Presbyterian--United Church of Christ, Saint Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, the Saratoga Friends Meeting (Quakers), the United Methodist Church, Temple Sinai, and the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Saratoga Springs and, more recently, Glens Falls. What united them wasn’t doctrine, but something older and more elemental: the belief that no person is illegal, and every person deserves welcome.
From the beginning, the Coalition understood that welcome had to mean more than words. They raised an emergency fund for families suddenly left without income when a breadwinner was detained. They offered rides to immigration check-ins and court dates. They hosted “Know Your Rights” workshops and provided connections to legal aid groups from Albany to Glens Falls. In time, they established a modest scholarship fund for students from immigrant families. And in quieter moments, they showed up—with groceries, with bus fare, with presence.
But even as the work expanded with the passing of time, so did the climate of fear.
ICE operations, once rare in Saratoga County, have grown bolder and more visible. One man was pulled from a car on Broadway in broad daylight. Rumors of unmarked vans began to circulate. Parents left for work unsure if they would make it home for dinner. And through it all, the Coalition fielded calls—urgent, sometimes frantic—from neighbors, coworkers, teachers. Can you help? Do you know someone? Can you come now?
The question, again and again, was not why help—but how fast.
Fear on Broadway
It was a Tuesday morning when it happened, April 15, 2025—one of those days in early spring when the sun feels warmer than it should, and people step a little lighter along Broadway, pausing at shop windows, saying hello.
The car was moving slowly through traffic, an Uber or maybe just a friend giving a ride. No one noticed the second vehicle until it pulled up fast—government-run but unmarked, the kind that’s come to signal trouble in certain communities. In an instant, the doors opened, and the man in the back seat was pulled out, shoved into the ICE vehicle, and taken away.
Word spread quickly, along with a video taken by an alert passer-by that went viral on social media.
The arrest happened in plain view, just blocks from where Diggory once taught at Skidmore and where dozens of Coalition members lived and worked. To some, it looked surgical, targeted. To others, it was a public message.
“Terror,” one neighbor called it. Not just for the man taken, but for everyone who knew someone who could be next. For mothers who began leaving home less often. For teenagers who stopped attending extracurriculars. For workers who asked not to be paid by check, not to have their names recorded, not to be seen.
For Diggory, the moment confirmed something he had long suspected—that fear, as a tool of policy, was being wielded deliberately.
“These kinds of arrests don’t just affect one person,” he said later. “They send ripples through entire neighborhoods. They say: you are not safe here. You are not welcome.”
The Saratoga Immigration Coalition responded the way it always did—with quiet coordination. Through contacts with other immigrant members of the community, the man detained was identified, and a family member located. The process of providing legal representation could begin. Diggory responded patiently to inquiries from the press, balancing the detainee’s right to privacy against the public’s right to know. If they didn’t know, how could they be expected to care?
In the background, a kind of moral calculus played out. What do you say to a child who asks why their father isn’t home? How do you comfort a mother who won’t open her blinds?
There was no simple script for such moments. Only presence. Only the soft steadiness of people showing up, again and again, not because they had all the answers, but because not showing up would be unthinkable.
The Quiet Work of Welcome
The public sees the signs. The bright yellow-green placards staked in lawns and pressed into shop windows—All Are Welcome Here spelled out in rainbow colors—have become a kind of regional shorthand for conscience. But most of the work of the Saratoga Immigration Coalition happens less visibly: in back pews and Google spreadsheets, in quiet conversations and silent donations slid across folding tables.
There’s the emergency fund, for instance—a pool of donations that can mean the difference between eviction and stability. It’s not large, but it stretches. When a father was taken into ICE custody, leaving his wife and three childen without their principal source of income, the Coalition’s ‘s emergency fund made up the shortfall in rent, supplemented by a special donation from the Saratoga UU congregation.. No fanfare. Just neighbors doing what they could.
Or the scholarship program: modest awards for local students from immigrant families, sometimes the first in their households to consider college. Funded through contributions from congregations, individual gifts, and, thanks to a generous grant, an endowment from the Alfred Z. Solomon Charitable Trust, the scholarships are small but meaningful—seed money for a future in which more doors might open.
“We can’t tell you who the students are,” Diggory explains. “Even if they themselves are documented, their families may not be. And so we err on the side of caution—always.”
This tension—between celebration and discretion—is constant. The stories the Coalition cherishes most can rarely be told in full. The Nigerian man granted asylum after months in limbo. The mother reunited with her children. The high schooler whose college acceptance letter brought a room of volunteers to tears. Each story is a triumph, but also a risk. A name published, a photo posted, and someone’s safety could be compromised.
A Contested Terrain
If the Coalition’s work is built on welcome, it often operates in the shadow of something colder: fear of detention and possible deporation.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the uneasy line drawn between local and federal authority—a boundary that, depending on the agency, may or may not be respected.
In Saratoga Springs, that line is guarded. Following the Broadway arrest, both the city’s Public Safety Commissioner and its Chief of Police reaffirmed a policy that local police would not collaborate with ICE. They would not initiate contact with immigration authorities. They would not detain someone for civil immigration violations. It was, as Diggory put it, “a boundary worth honoring.”
The Saratoga County Sheriff’s office, by contrast, holds a different posture—one that Diggory describes with careful understatement. “Unapologetic,” he says. The Sheriff has made clear that if his deputies suspect someone of an immigration violation, they will notify ICE. They consider it a duty, not a choice.
The result is what Diggory calls a “contested terrain”—a patchwork of practices within a single county, where an immigrant’s experience may shift dramatically depending on where they are pulled over, or who knocks on the door.
The Spiritual Imperative
For all the legal strategies, policy debates, and coalition-building that define Diggory’s work, its foundation rests on something older and less negotiable—a spiritual imperative shaped by ancient texts and modern experience.
“The basic attitude in the Judeo-Christian tradition,” he says, “has to do with welcoming the stranger.”
He doesn’t say it lightly. The words arrive with the kind of quiet conviction that comes not from argument but from long contemplation. To Diggory, hospitality is not an act of charity—it’s an act of recognition. A way of seeing the divine not just in the sanctuary, but on the doorstep.
“There is that sense,” he continues, “that the person who shows up on your doorstep is sent by God. And we need to respond as if that person carries a spark of the divine.”
It is this belief that shapes his understanding of freedom—not just as political condition, but as a spiritual state. When we welcome the stranger, we are freed from fear.
“Welcoming the stranger,”Diggory says,“is a message I take very much to heart. Or, to use another well-known commandment: love your neighbor.”
In that commandment is a whole theology. A politics, too. But more than anything, it is a kind of compass. One that points not north or south, but inward.
“We talk about the stranger at the door,” Diggory says. “But maybe the deeper question is: Are we willing to be the kind of people who open it?”
And so the work continues. Not with noise, but with fidelity. Not with power, but with presence.
And always with the door left open.
