VTDigger22%
Vermont Conversation: ‘I’m sorry that this isn’t what we promised.’ Immigration attorney Jill Martin Diaz on fear and hope in Vermont’s immigrant community 69%
By David Goodman91%
7/22/2026, 2:01:53 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 19 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Loss Aversion, and Anecdotal, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 20.4% saturation with 124 hits. Analysis detected 813 faulty-reasoning hits from 608 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 62.2% and a BS Rank of 69% (6,838 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 68.80% of the article peer group.
The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues.
Listen and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , YouTube or wherever you get podcasts.
Jill Martin Diaz, executive director of the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project in Burlington in Aug.
2025.
File photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is intensifying.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained over 10,000 people just in the last week of June.
This month, ICE agents killed two men in less than a week, including a young Columbian father in Maine who reportedly had legal status .
Despite the Trump administration’s insistence that it is only arresting “the worst of the worst,” most of the people arrested by ICE have no criminal convictions .
Fear is now a constant in immigrant communities.
“It’s like watching a slow car crash every day,” said Jill Martin Diaz, an immigration attorney and executive director of the Vermont Asylum Assistance Project .
VAAP is a rapidly growing legal services and technical assistance organization for immigrants.
Since becoming VAAP’s first paid staff member in January 2024, Martin Diaz now oversees a paid staff of 10, a network of 28 volunteer attorneys and over two dozen volunteer interpreters, among others.
VAAP is also the hub of a newly formed network that now offers coordinated immigration legal services throughout the state.
The network includes the Association of Africans Living in Vermont, the Center for Justice Reform Clinic at Vermont Law and Graduate School, Vermont Afghan Alliance, and Vermont Legal Aid.
“We’ve seen a really steady stream of people being arrested in Vermont,” said Martin Diaz.
VAAP attorneys make weekly visits to Northwest State Correctional Facility and report encountering an average of 12 to 18 immigrants in detention.
Martin Diaz warned that “rights and protections are being stripped away every day in mundane-seeming memos and orders from courts.
And we’re just watching the system slip between our fingers as we’re trying to support Vermonters to access their needs.”
Anxiety has been compounded by a Supreme Court decision that allows the Trump administration to end temporary protected status .
The decision may result in the loss of legal protection for over a million immigrants who have fled war or environmental disasters in their home countries.
Martin Diaz said this Supreme Court decision will impact several dozen Haitians, some of whom have lived in Vermont for decades and “find themselves now without temporary protected status, vulnerable to being arrested by ICE and prosecuted for removal proceedings, and most acutely unauthorized to work.”
Martin Diaz formerly taught immigration law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, directed its Center for Justice Reform Clinic and practiced at Vermont Legal Aid, and was a lecturer in the department of social work at the University of Vermont.
In 2023, Martin Diaz was named by the LGBTQ+ Bar Association as one of the 40 best LGBTQ+ lawyers under 40 and has received awards from the Vermont Bar Association and American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont.
Martin Diaz said “that for every terrifying story about ICE hurting people, killing people in the streets, the stories about unfair things happening in courts of law, there are also stories of hope, of the system working as it should, of things going well, that doesn’t make the news.”
The attorney and activist concluded with a message for immigrants who are fearful: “I’m just so sorry that this is happening.
I’m sorry that this isn’t what we promised.”
Speakers
1speaker34%attributed speech403writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageJill Martin Diaz
205 attributed words100% of attributed speech56% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.