On December 16th, I mailed out the final 990 from North Carolina Immigration Law & Justice Center (founded as Fayetteville Justice for Our Neighbors) to the IRS. I notified Truist Bank and the NCDOR that the organization has dissolved.
I loved this organization. I was present at the planning meetings in 2018 and 2019 and have had the unfortunate distinction of being its final board chair.
As part of the Immigration Law & Justice Network, NCILJC provided free consultations and low-cost legal representation to thousands of immigrants from across North Carolina. I joined the board in October 2021, and became board chair in October 2023 on the resignation of the previous chair. We fought for a year and a half to keep the organization alive but in the end the board, to avoid insolvency, voted for dissolution in July.
Since July, I’ve worked to close out vendors, gain access to login credentials, find representation for our clients, and carry out due diligence in work that at times became akin to a part-time job. I have spent hours looking at bank statements, working to liquidate assets, filing and carrying out a lawsuit, and boxing up legal files. The log I’ve kept since July 1st has grown to be 9,000 words long.
It’s hard to articulate how painful it has been to work so diligently on closing an organization that is so desperately needed. I’m a writer. I teach writing. But I can’t articulate it. The sense of personal failure is mingled with the horror of watching ICE rampage unchecked across my home state, and knowing that beliefs which were once held by white nationalist extremists are now informing federal policy — and federal policy has never been kind to immigrants in the first place.
But North Carolina Immigration Law & Justice Center no longer exists, and I have to try to figure out what to do next. Activism, for me, is as much compulsion as anything else. I need to be able to live with myself when, twenty or thirty years from now, I look back on my life. I need to know that I did what I could, even if it wasn’t always done well. Even if I made mistakes. I need to be able to look at my son, though he will not be able to ask me what I did during this time, and know that I tried.
For me, activism is not just about justice: it serves as a living amends. That’s another story entirely, and one I’ll never tell.
An Unhappy Consciousness 