At his first inaugural on March 4, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said this: “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
The words are familiar, but until now, as we watch fear spreading across our country, I have not fully understood what Roosevelt meant. In an astonishingly short time, fear has been effectively deployed by those who seek profound and devastating changes in our systems of government, criminal justice, immigration, environmental protection, health care, disaster relief, education, and our social safety net.
An imagined violent crime wave has led many Americans to condone the wholesale imprisonment and deportation of immigrants regardless of whether they have been convicted of such crimes. The fact that every study shows that immigrants are far less likely to be lawbreakers than native-born Americans makes no difference to those who are captives of fear.
“Trump hammered hard on the demonization of immigrants,” writes Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson. Lies are his cudgel. “He lied that Aurora, Colorado, was a ‘war zone’ that had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs — Aurora’s Republican mayor and police chief said this wasn’t true — and that Haitian immigrants to Springfield, Ohio, were ‘eating the dogs … they are eating the pets of the people that live there.’ ”
The lies worked. A June 2024 Gallup poll found that 55 percent of American adults wanted fewer immigrants in the U.S.
We see the spreading fear in our work. Fewer people — including employees of federal agencies like the National Park Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — are willing to talk to us about the effects of rapidly changing government policies on their ability to do their jobs. The families of undocumented people who have been detained by masked and unidentified Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are too terrified to speak with reporters. The people who are willing to talk are more likely to ask not to be named — which makes the work of responsible journalists extremely difficult.
And it’s not only the undocumented who are afraid. A person we interviewed for a recent news story about housing asked not to be named. She was an immigrant but also a naturalized U.S. citizen. This fear of being unjustly targeted is sure to get worse with the massive increase in funding for ICE in the new federal budget.
If government employees and ordinary people who suffer harassment, injustice, and retaliation are too scared to talk to reporters, the entire enterprise of journalism is at risk and with it, the stories of our communities and our freedoms.
Fear can be contagious — but so can courage, the opposite of fear. Telling our stories, writing, and reading them, we are all practicing the courage to speak out, as journalists and as citizens.
