Greensboro, North Carolina

October 27, 2025
Presenter: UNCG Center for New North Carolinians
Venue: East Side Immigrant Center
Population: 307,400
Demographic: 39% White, 41% Black, 5% Asian, 4% Mixed, 10% Hispanic
19% below poverty line. 12% estimated to be foreign-born

As an immigrant myself, I care deeply about the state of immigration in this country. Our previous tour had taken place in Maine, during the fall pre-election season of 2024. Immigration was being weaponized then as a powerful campaign tool, stoking fear in citizens through false or exaggerated narratives about immigrants (remember the Haitiains-eating-dogs-and-cats propaganda?), followed by promises of forceful and violent action against them. It already felt like a terrible and hostile situation then; in solidarity, we served the large immigrant and migrant population or the state in Lewiston, Maine during the tour, featuring Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services. 

If the situation felt bad then, it was worse by the time I was planning this North Carolina tour in the summer of 2025. In January 2025, as soon as Trump took office, ICE began their massive, violent, cruel detention and deportation activities. Again I felt it was imperative to serve the immigrant/refugee community, and learned that Charlotte and Greensboro have sizable migrant populations. Since Chris and I already had ties to UNC Greensboro, so we dialed in to Greensboro.

I was impressed to learn that UNCG has its own service center for immigrants, called Center for New North Carolinians (CNNC). CNNC works in tandem with the state to provide immigration services, health access, education, as well as running three community centers in neighborhoods across Greensboro. We partnered with the East Side Immigrant Center, one of those three community centers. They have after school programs for immigrant and refugee kids every day, and offer additional services like case management support. The center was inside what looked like a small, unassuming house.

Since we were performing for kids, we altered our program to be shorter and more interactive, with kids coming up with words or phrases to be incorporated into original lyrics for “Spira” through Chris improv rapping. We also collaborated with UNCG’s Keyboard Department and had a couple students (Carter and Angelita) and a professor (my good friend, Dr. Annie Jeng) perform.

Almost all of the kids at the center are from African countries, with Swahili, French, and English exchanged freely among them. We performed music by composers from the USA, Brazil, China, and Peru. We performed for two different groups of kids, and they could not be more different from each other! One was boisterous and hard to settle, very excited; the other was very serious and attentive, seemingly soaking up all of the music. We had a great time with both.

My favorite moment was when a girl who is very interested in piano and has started tinkering with a family friend’s acoustic piano came up to me after the event. She asked me for any advice I had for her for piano playing, and I was impressed that she took initiative to ask me - how smart of her to seize the opportunity. 

In a conversation with Allyson, the coordinator of this center, I asked how ICE activities were currently affecting their community, either through direct action or things like elevated anxiety levels. She said that ICE had not come to the area yet (though that would end up changing in the coming weeks), but everyone’s top-of-mind issue was the impending shut down of SNAP programs on November 1. It was October 37 then; she said many of the families they serve were dependent on SNAP to have access to food. 

Yes, so much has been happening in this country at an unbelievable rate that as I’m writing this entry 3 months later, I almost forgot about this. The federal government had been in the middle of the longest shutdown in history from October 1 to November 12, 2025.

It always feels in the moment as if things can’t get much worse, and then they do. We look back on the events that felt insane or like a seismic shift back when they were happening, and see that they were only foreshocks to larger earthquakes to come. As of this writing in January 2026, ICE has murdered a US citizen, Renee Good. 

The government and its supporters do not condemn this murder.