CHICAGO — In the streets outside, agents — sent by the president she had voted for — were rounding up suspected undocumented workers. But here, in a small basement apartment, Aleah Arundale found herself hatching an escape plan for a Venezuelan woman and her family.
“It will be calmer there,” Arundale said into a translation app on her phone that showed the words on the screen in Spanish. “And there is a school 10 minutes away.”
Gabriella, 36, nodded to Arundale as she hastily stuffed clothes into a large pink suitcase in the middle of the floor. Her husband searched for the car keys. They wanted to leave that night.
Arundale’s getaway plan was to shelter the family several hours away in a home in Michigan that belonged to Arundale’s parents. Gabriella and her husband had work permits and pending asylum cases, but federal agents were patrolling their neighborhood where many immigrants lived, and they were terrified they could be picked up and separated from their 6-year-old daughter.
How Arundale, who earlier this year wore a “’Merica” T-shirt and drank mimosas at Trump Tower in Chicago to celebrate President Donald Trump’s inauguration, came to be helping a young family avoid getting swept up in his immigration crackdown illustrates the surprising ways Trump’s supporters can disagree with a man who is often said to have total control over his base.
“Conservatives have this issue wrong,” Arundale said. “I have conservative values — strong military, less government. I’m mad because I don’t think there’s compassion. These are the people that did everything for a taste of freedom. They had children die on their way here. They’re mostly Catholic, they are so into their families. They love America more than most Americans.”
Arundale met Gabriella’s family two years ago at a shelter after they were bused here by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who wanted “sanctuary cities” to take responsibility for immigrants crossing the border. (The Washington Post agreed not to use the family’s full names because they fear arrest.) Since then, Arundale has dedicated much of her life to helping migrants, many of whom are among the 50,000 Venezuelan refugees who have arrived in Chicago in recent years. She turned her garage into a free thrift store, raised tens of thousands of dollars on social media, put up families at her home and took provisional guardianship of about a dozen kids.
When the intensity of the deportation raids ramped up recently, she put together a food delivery network for more than 80 families. While the Trump administration stresses the importance of deporting as many undocumented immigrants as possible, Arundale doesn’t inquire about people’s immigration status.
With Gabriella, she examined a map showing where immigration checkpoints had been reported on the interstate in Indiana. Gabriella planned to drive through the night to avoid them.
On the couch, Gabriella motioned to Arundale. “She’s been everything for us,” she said.
A lack of empathy
Arundale, 46, was taking her daughter to dance class one winter night in 2022 when she walked past a large group of refugees shivering in the cold. She doesn’t speak Spanish and has been distrustful of the news media because of what she felt was often unfair coverage of Israel, so she printed out sheets of paper with her phone number and a message: Who are you? Why are you here? I’d like to help.
She learned that most were refugees from Venezuela. Their stories shocked her. One parent, she said, described the government murdering their son after they attended a political rally. Arundale collected coats and then strollers. Then she turned her garage into a free store packed with clothes and other items.
Her parents had fostered children when she was young, and Arundale had a long history of volunteering. She was a well-practiced networker, too, organizing aid shipments to Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. She works as a jeweler and is active on social media for her business. Now she began using it to seek help for immigrants. Donations followed. “I want a packed funeral,” she explained. “My retirement plan is to help enough people that I don’t need to worry.”
For most of her life, Arundale never considered herself overtly political. A practicing Jew, she usually voted for candidates who most strongly supported Israel. In recent years, Arundale drifted further to the right. She didn’t like President Joe Biden’s Israel policies. She believed in two genders and that trans women shouldn’t play girls’ sports. In her progressive neighborhood, bookstores sold titles like “The GayBCs.”
“I love my gay friends, but they are over-sexualizing kids,” she said.
The covid lockdowns pushed her, too. A Jewish school her kids planned to attend offered only virtual classes, so she sent them to a Catholic school that had reopened. She was invited to a spicy group chat of conservative moms and even designed the logo: a busty Statue of Liberty. She laughed at memes about the quality of public schools. Trump appealed to her.
Even as Trump promised mass deportations last year, Arundale saw nothing incompatible about supporting him while she continued the work she was doing. “He talked a lot about criminals,” she said. “So I was like, ‘Yes, take the criminals.’ I told people he [had been] president already and he didn’t do this. I never thought he could rip people away from their families.”
A lost vote?
On a recent morning, Arundale loaded up her car with supplies to deliver. There were boxes of diapers, baby formula, bags of clothes — some from her own children. She wore red heart-shaped glasses with “Diamond Queen” written in cursive on the side, and a shimmering sequin skirt with an American flag pattern.
“If you want something done, you ask a busy mom,” she said.
As she swerved through traffic (mostly) looking at the road, she scrolled through some of the requests for help that come in, sometimes a dozen in a single day. The messages had turned increasingly desperate lately, as she heard from people who had been detained and others scared to leave their houses.
At the same time, some of her conservative friends’ questions began to bother her. Why was she helping criminals, she’d been asked. To which she was quick to explain that many of the immigrants were asylum seekers and had work permits. Venezuelans, in particular, had been given temporary protected status that had been revoked. “We welcomed them here and then changed the rules,” Arundale said. “They are not illegal.”
More than anything, she was surprised by a lack of empathy. When one acquaintance suggested it would be traumatic for her children if the family’s nanny got deported, Arundale had only one thought: Wouldn’t it be more traumatic for the nanny?
Later, Arundale visited another group of Venezuelan asylum seekers. A woman named Juliandrys was taking care of her baby and her 14-year-old niece. The niece’s mother had been shot on the South Side near where they live, and Arundale had arranged for the funeral. A week before she’d brought diapers. Today, Arundale brought short-term guardianship forms. Juliandrys, whom The Post is identifying by only her first name because she fears arrest, signed them for both kids so Arundale could help the family reunite if anyone were deported.
“Aleah has been an angel,” Juliandrys said. “The best person I’ve met in the United States.”
Arundale once thought Trump was the best thing for the United States. Now she was puzzling through her own politics. Today, she said, she couldn’t vote for Trump in a hypothetical election, but she wondered if there was anything that Trump could do to redeem himself. News reports have suggested Trump might be pressuring Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the politician most responsible for the mass exodus out of the country. Sitting next to Juliandrys, Arundale spoke into her translation app:
“If you could get rid of one, Trump or Maduro, who would you pick?”
Juliandrys answered: “Maduro.”
That seemed to satisfy Arundale that Trump could still do something beneficial for the Venezuelans she’d cared for.
Back in the car, she had an update on Gabriella: The family was happy in Michigan. Gabriella’s husband already had a job and their daughter was enrolled in school. As Arundale headed to her next stop, she said: “Do you feel that? It’s the helper’s high.”
The post She’s torn over her love for Trump and her work with migrants appeared first on Washington Post.
