Bryan Christopher: Stopping the Deportation Machine | Bloomsbury Academic; September 18
During his first year as adviser to the Riverside High School newspaper, Bryan Christopher oversaw perhaps the biggest story the publication had ever covered: the arrest and months-long detention of a Honduran student, Wildin Acosta, who faced deportation to the country he’d fled at 16 to escape gang violence.
While some of Christopher’s journalism students documented the ordeal, others joined a groundswell of community activism that has been widely credited with securing Acosta’s release and 2016 return to Durham.
Nearly a decade after these events, it’s Christopher’s turn to document the story. Stopping the Deportation Machine, his first book, interweaves Acosta’s story with that of the four students who crusaded to bring their classmate home. Acosta was involved in the book from the start, and Christopher conducted dozens of interviews with him through an interpreter, grounding the story in what’s at stake when federal mandates collide with public education.
Christopher also draws in his own narrative thread, emerging as a valuable proxy for readers who wonder if they’re prepared for the current moment. His learning curve—from just beginning to understand how immigration enforcement impacts students to weighing whether to break protocol for a last-minute field trip to Washington when it was the students’ only chance to lobby lawmakers—indicates that you don’t need to be an expert to take meaningful action, and that professional constraints don’t have to mean sitting on the sidelines.
The INDY spoke with Christopher about why he felt compelled to write Stopping the Deportation Machine, strategic tensions in advocacy work, and why he believes local journalism saved this story from being forgotten.
INDY: As a narrator, you’re quite self-aware, almost self-conscious, of the fact that you’re limited in your understanding of Wildin’s experience. You’re also aware of the extent to which you were involved—or not involved—in the advocacy effort around preventing his deportation. What made you decide that you wanted to tell this story despite those limitations—or perhaps because of them?
Bryan Christopher: When Wildin was arrested, and when students at Riverside started covering the events and advocating for his right to graduate, I started to get the sense that what was happening was really special. There were professional journalists that covered it relentlessly as it was happening. But once Wildin came back and graduated, those journalists had to move on, and the full story was never told in one singular place.
In the winter of 2018, there was a migrant caravan moving through Central America to the Southern border, and President Trump was vilifying it like he often does. The characterizations that I was reading about in the headlines were fundamentally opposed to what I had experienced as an educator in Durham Public Schools. I wanted something to challenge that narrative. I was reluctant to take it on myself because I thought the students who advocated for Wildin were the best ones to tell the story. But they had made it clear to me by then that they weren’t going to do it. They were in college, pursuing their own careers.
I reached out to Wildin to see if he’d be interested in collaborating to try to put together a more complete story of what he experienced. In the spring of 2019, we started meeting regularly.
The other part of your question, in terms of struggling with my place in the whole thing—I started writing in 2019, and then we had the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement through 2020. That was really influential on my writing process, because it kept me really keenly aware of not just the story, but also who should tell it and how. When I made the decision to tell the story, I wanted to be as clear as I could about who I was and why we were doing this.
Wildin’s arrest and detention took place under the Obama administration. It can be easy to forget that this stuff was happening before the Trump era. How do you see the continuity between what was happening then and what’s happened since Trump’s time in office?
One of the things I learned from being immersed in immigration policy is that it’s been messy for so long, and that it’s been really hard for our government to reach any kind of bipartisan common ground. Like you said, that was true before Trump’s first term. But I think the biggest thing I’ve seen change is the ability to respectfully disagree and the effort made to make a good-faith effort to at least hear an opposing side.
People spend too much time deciding if this kid is a good kid or a bad kid—it doesn’t matter. They have a right to an education, whether they’re an A student or less than an A student.”
President Obama’s criteria for the raids that were happening in North Carolina and through parts of the country—they were clear. And the individuals who were arrested met the criteria. But when people disagreed with it, there were people in pretty high-ranking positions that at least agreed to talk about it and to hear these kids who were advocating for his right to graduate regardless of his immigration status. I think that’s been the most pronounced shift, that it’s not about conversation and dialogue, it’s much more about—choose whatever word you want. A lot of grandstanding and a lot of really loud talk.
A driving force of the advocacy campaign was that Wildin wanted to graduate and was trying to do schoolwork that teachers were sending him in the detention centers. It was interesting to me that parts of the book characterized Wildin as being more into socializing than academics when he was at Riverside. When you were writing, did you feel a tension between the “model student” narrative used for advocacy and the more complex reality of who Wildin is?
I think effective advocacy is always strategic. These were effective advocates who knew what they were doing to best help his case. I was never super conflicted about it, because ultimately, he was a kid. The Supreme Court ruled years ago that every child has a right to a public education regardless of immigration status. People spend too much time deciding if this kid is a good kid or a bad kid—it doesn’t matter. They have a right to an education, whether they’re an A student or less than an A student. I understood certain narratives that were pushed up the chain to fight for his right to return. But I think ultimately, he was a kid, and like every kid, he had his rights, and graduating was one of them.
There’s a tension throughout the book around what would constitute crossing the line into advocacy for you as a teacher. When navigating that boundary, how much were you worried about actual consequences from the district versus working through your own sense of what a teacher should do? I’m interested in how much self-policing boxes us into smaller zones of action.
It’s something I thought about a lot. As a journalism teacher, if students were covering it, it was literally part of my job to help them do that effectively and show them best practices. So I approached it as a teacher of journalism first, helping student journalists the same way I would with any story.
We had early conversations with students about keeping coverage and advocacy separate—if you’re covering the event, cover the event. If you’re advocating for his right to graduate, don’t also write the news stories. We tried to stay aware of best practices.
As the story grew and more people took up the cause, I asked myself more questions. As a classroom teacher in a community rattled by immigration raids, there were clear academic outcomes being impacted. We saw changes in attendance. We saw it affect students’ mental health. Very visible things were happening that made my job harder—helping them build reading, writing, and communication skills. Since it was making that more difficult, I had educational ground to stand on when I started advocating for change. It didn’t feel like a big sidestep from my work.
I wasn’t someone who was super politically active. I hadn’t attended protests or done many of the things I was suddenly focused on intensely. So I thought a lot about why I was doing it and for whom. Because there were educational outcomes at stake for kids in my school and classroom, it felt tangible enough to be a cause I could get behind.
That makes sense. There’s so much in here about how hard it is to be a teacher. Seeing all the different roles teachers take on beyond educator, it makes sense that this wouldn’t feel like a drastic change when you already wear so many hats.
Yeah, and it’s important that it happened in Durham. Our community is inclusive. This scenario wouldn’t have had the same support in other places. That matters—it made my decision to get involved easier because I knew about the widespread support and how progressive and inclusive the community was before, during, and after this happened.
What else would you like to say about the book?
I always like to plug high school journalism and the importance of local journalism. I don’t think this book would’ve happened without the diligent reporting of a small group of reporters covering things as they happened in the Triangle. That was incredible source material for me to cross-check dates and events, build a timeline. I’m grateful to live in a place where we have local reporters still covering these things. That was invaluable for the writing process—they left great resources for me.
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