I’ve worked for the American Friends Service Committee in Des Moines, Iowa since 2008, providing legal services to hundreds of immigrants and refugees every year. Last fall, I traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border as a volunteer to help migrants understand their legal rights and their options for seeking asylum in the United States.   

Nikki Richards was born in Silver Spring, Maryland and grew up in Baltimore. Before working with AFSC, she co-founded a nonprofit called the Maryland Clean Energy Jobs Initiative where she managed a campaign to increase renewable electricity and clean energy jobs in the state of Maryland. While working to pass the Clean Energy Jobs Act, Nikki served as lead fundraiser and planned dozens of fundraising events to support the campaign. The law passed in April 2019.

William Faulkner told us that “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” History may not repeat itself, but often it returns in rhyme or costume. Last year's massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and last Saturday’s shooting in Poway, California should be powerful lessons to us all that while the hatred that fueled pogroms across Eastern Europe and Russia and that fueled Hitler’s “final solution” has been largely dormant, but certainly not dead. Once again, it is inflicting a terrible toll and generating the fear that is the mother of totalitarianism.