At 17 years old, the woman I would later marry left East Africa for the U.K. Her mom after having sold the family jewels to fund the plane ticket, instructed her to request asylum when she arrived. Although she was initially put up in a dormitory with other asylum seekers and permitted to go to school, her asylum request was ultimately denied and she was rendered undocumented.

She could not go to college or work. Being unable to generate a real income, she couldn’t pay rent for an apartment. She often ended up at a train station, begging passersby for some spare change. Her sleeping arrangements were subject to the whim of her friends’ schedules; who was available on a particular night to let her in to rest on a couch or on the floor. When no one was, she would spend the night on a bus.

When she was lucky, she would be taken in by a family for some time, to be a live-in domestic worker, taking care of kids and doing housework. Other than food and lodging, she would receive no pay. Meanwhile, in those formative years when one transitions from a teenager to an adult, she was cut off from her family; she would not see her mom, sister or brother again for 15 years.

She did consider trying to return to Africa, but after the U.K. immigration authorities lost her passport, her home country would not issue her another one, insinuating she might be a spy for a neighboring nation. Despite this, she was terrified of authorities, having had friends caught up in 4 a.m. raids on their apartments and having heard stories of people imprisoned in detention camps awaiting deportation.

As her daily existence descended into the abyss for years to come, there arose an entire cottage industry of pundits, aspiring politicians and modern-day snake-oil salesmen, tripping over themselves in their urgency to announce they had finally identified the singular cause of working people’s problems: immigrants.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the same people who opposed increasing the minimum wage and trade unions were suddenly concerned with how much working-class wages were suffering because of immigrant labor. The same people who were content with businesses flouting workers’ rights laws were now crowing about the necessity of enforcing the law. It was people like my wife, these charlatans professed, who caused working-class problems, not the politicians and policies that have created a hardship for many of America’s workers virtually unparalleled in other rich nations.

The absurdity of the proposition is almost as extreme as its depravity. Despite the well-oiled comms machine painting images of Venezuelan gangs and pet-eating Haitians, the typical experience of an undocumented, low-paid worker in this country is characterized by its brutality.

This toxic narrative will soon be translated into federal government policy. And in delivering on his promise to deport 11 million people, President Trump will be less constrained than he was in his first term. His top officials are likely to be more loyal, his party – which controls Congress – more obedient, and the Supreme Court more solidly right-wing. In America’s governmental system of distributed power, the one potential bulwark that remains is state governments, particularly those that are controlled by Democrats, like Maine. It is incumbent upon these governments to be that bulwark.

I am not advocating for pointless provocation. Indeed, one can see the attractiveness of Gov. Janet Mills’ approach of cool-headed pragmatism. Why wave a red flag at a bull? But when the governor leaves open the possibility that state resources might be used for Trump’s mass deportations, as she recently did, the approach ceases to be pragmatic. When state and local authorities become potential agents for deportation, many immigrants and asylum-seekers will no longer trust them.

This does not apply only to those who are undocumented, but also to those who today are here lawfully but who tomorrow Trump might render unlawful through executive action. And when thousands of people are cut off from interaction with the state, their health, their children’s education, their safety and the moral character of our society will suffer.

We must be bold in our defense of immigrants and asylum seekers, not succumb to a hysteria that thrives most vivaciously in the absence of an effective counternarrative. Such a counternarrative cannot be based solely on the fact that immigrants pay taxes and are useful inputs in the state’s economy. It must also be based on the fact that they, like us, are human.