Dr. Tamsyn Mahoney-Steel is a Digital Scholarship Specialist and Adjunct Professor of Digital Humanities at Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries, where she has been working for the past 5 years. She is an important and valued member of our university, providing leadership in building our digital humanities community, helping our patrons and staff develop much-needed skills in this area, and maintaining a crucial link between the library and the faculty, students and staff we serve. Due to recent changes to US immigration policy, Tamsyn is being forced to move back to the UK, where she holds citizenship. She has been given less than two weeks to dispose of her house, home, and nearly all of her possessions. The university has declined to assist her with a Green Card and work permit application and the library has decided not to hold her position open until a more just solution might be found. Tamsyn was fully prepared to repay the university for help with the visa and to use her 403b retirement savings to live on while the process went through in order to keep the job and life she valued.

We, the undersigned, protest the policies of our government, and all such policies, which callously damage lives such as Tamsyn's, and communities such as ours. These policies claim to protect our interests, but instead impoverish us of the wealth we find in our diversity. We call upon the university, its peer institutions, and all employers, to sponsor all workers who face displacement. To fail to do so is to surrender a much-needed tool for resisting the ongoing assault to the values that are the bedrock of our society. We call upon the library and all workplaces to hold open the positions of all workers who are being torn from their livelihoods and their lives by these policies. To carry on with business as usual is to signal that the contributions of our international colleagues are not a valued and vital part of our work and culture. We call upon all workers to raise our voices in support of Tamsyn and all those who are being mistreated in our names. Every worker matters. We are better than this.