Casey Rollins hasn’t always slept well this summer, but the cross she carries, her yearning to help Haitians who have migrated to her hometown of Springfield, Ohio, gives her a sense of purpose.
“Helping these people every day, talking to them, being with them, is where I’ve found real community,” the 66-year-old says when we sit down for dinner at a local Mexican restaurant with her husband Rob.
Ms. Rollins’s eyes well up. It’s a pristine summer evening, a week after the Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration could deport more of the people she is trying to help.
What looks to outsiders like a futile battle against a cruel bureaucracy has given Ms. Rollins’s life an extra dose of meaning and purpose. “This is love,” she says.
Ms. Rollins is the volunteer executive director of the Springfield chapter of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, a Catholic organization that helps the poor and needy in 155 countries. That has given her a heavy load to bear as she tries to help the 12,000 to 15,000 Haitian immigrants who have settled in Springfield and rebuilt its economy but faced xenophobia and hate from online groups, and threats of arrest and deportation from President Trump and his administration.
In the last few weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has ordered hundreds or possibly thousands of Haitian immigrants in Ohio to “check in” at local offices and receive ankle monitors. Those immigrants have been flooding St. Vincent de Paul daily asking for help, says Ms. Rollins. “They’ve been told they have to self-deport, or keep wearing those monitors,” she says. “We help them talk to a lawyer, and make plans if they decide to leave.”
“Her life’s been threatened, her family’s been threatened, but she continues to live out the Gospel teaching of loving your neighbor and the society’s teaching of ensuring charity and justice,” John Berry, the national president and board chairman of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, says. “The beauty of the society is that each individual society molds itself to the needs of the community.”
The Catholicism that Ms. Rollins incarnates is heavy on practical assistance. Her question to people is not “What do you believe?” It’s “How can I help you?”
The history of immigration in America has long been fraught. We are a nation of immigrants that at times has tried to keep out people based on their religion and the color of their skin. A country that has been the last best hope for millions fleeing persecution and, at the same time, once practiced legal enslavement.
All along, there have always been people like Casey Rollins. Helpers.
This Midwestern church lady who spent 34 years teaching high school art in a sleepy Ohio town is living an extraordinary third act as an internationally known face of American kindness.
Ms. Rollins gets through her days with old-fashioned stubbornness and her Midwestern deadpan sense of humor. “Mother always said never get your name in the paper unless you’re dead,” she says. “Oh, well.”
Four television stations in Japan have made the trek to Springfield to talk to Rollins. “Each one says they’re the biggest television station in Japan, and I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah. What do I know about any of this?” The day I visited, there were messages from two Canadian TV stations waiting for her.
Ms. Rollins has been living with media madness and scrutiny since 2024. That’s when President Trump and his running mate JD Vance made an online conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were eating dogs and cats a part of their campaign.
Dozens of bomb threats that year caused City Hall to close and evacuations at hospitals, schools and businesses. That August, a neo-Nazi organization marched in the streets of Springfield. Ms. Rollins herself was threatened and mocked online.
The Republican ticket then doubled down, saying their lies were valid arguments in service of a greater cause. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Mr. Vance said on CNN.
Ms. Rollins couldn’t believe her eyes. “We’re not political, but we have to be on the side of the truth, and that wasn’t true,” she says.
A community in decline
Even without the federal government planning possible ICE raids in your backyard, life hasn’t been easy in this town of 60,000.
Like many people all over the Rust Belt, Ms. Rollins has seen the material fortunes of her community decline. She has watched sisters and cousins and neighbors move away.
People left because life in Springfield was no longer prosperous like it was when Ms. Rollins’s grandfather moved here a century ago. It’s hard to step out your front door every day and instead of people going to work, see a parade of homeless teenage moms, winos riding park benches and skinny men nodding out on opioids.
Ms. Rollins first became a helper to love those people. But then 10 or so years ago, the Haitians showed up. Local civic and business leaders encouraged the immigration. They needed workers for the Amazon sorting center, the slaughterhouse and the metal and auto parts factories.
Suddenly, these people were coming in for help with translation, paperwork and financial assistance. So she started helping them.
“It’s just about loving your neighbor,” she says.
Ms. Rollins was born in Springfield. Her grandfather was an executive for a local manufacturing company that had government and military contracts. Her mom was active in the church.
“When I first met Casey in 1971 on the playground of St. Teresa School in Springfield, she was an energetic red-haired child from a large Irish Catholic family,” Sister Georgia Kitt wrote in a recent tribute. “Little did I know that, 50 years later, our paths would cross again; both of us living out similar calls rooted in faith, service, and a desire to build a more just world.”
As a child, Casey assisted her mom in her own work for St. Vincent de Paul. People from the community came in needing help with paying their rent or grocery bills. Back then, it was a gentler form of poverty. Less homelessness. No opiates.
In her teens, Casey drove cribs and other baby supplies to new mothers.
After she got married, she and Rob, a mechanical designer for industrial equipment, raised a son while she taught art, mostly in a public high school in Springfield. Students loved her. She was the kind of teacher who never seemed to judge or scold. That life fostered a web of connections all over Springfield. If Ms. Rollins is trying to help somebody and an ambulance pulls up, odds are she taught one of the drivers or emergency workers.
It was a former student, now an attorney, that she called when she was trying to figure out how to deal with the children born to Haitian immigrants.
“We started without any money, without anything,” Ms. Rollins says. “We just started doing passports. I just started telling my little small volunteer group we’re gonna do this, and they said, started whispering to me, ‘I’ll give you 500 bucks to do it. I’ll give you 200. I’ll give you 1,000’…. That’s how it started.
“The passports are so the kids can travel if the parents are deported,” she says. “These children are not citizens of another country, so they can’t get passports unless they’re U.S. passports.”
Now Ms. Rollins and her team of volunteers must get ready for ICE.
Following the Supreme Court ruling in June that signaled the end of T.P.S. for Haitians and other groups, the Department of Homeland Security told CBS News: “What we would say now is it’s closing time, which means you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here…. The good news is it’s not too late to get a $2,600 check and a free flight home.”
Ms. Rollins has received clear instructions for when ICE shows up. “Resist as passively and lovingly as we can,” Mr. Berry, the St. Vincent de Paul national director, says. “We have to obey the law. That’s a requirement of Catholic social teaching and the right thing to do. If they start pulling guns, we’ve told them your safety and the safety of the people you’re trying to help is paramount.”
Catholic leaders in Springfield are busy. They are helping Haitians obtain lawyers to call if they get detained, resolve paperwork issues and make plans to leave if they have to. In addition, they are assisting Haitians with English lessons, job training and driving instruction. They have also forged alliances with non-Catholic groups eager to help. St. Vincent de Paul in Springfield also runs a thrift store and provides language services for Haitians who speak French or Creole, their national language.
When I visited a few weeks ago, Casey pulled out three binders of clippings and printouts from media companies covering events in Springfield. “The teacher in me, I’ve got to have everything in sleeves,” she says.
Why all the clippings?
“One of my board members said early on…. Casey, start documenting everything,” she says. She’s added to the record with diary reflections. “I reflect on things, which becomes the documentation, so there’s a lot of reflections in here.”
She pulls out handwritten notes from Mike DeWine, the 79-year-old governor of Ohio. He is a Catholic and a Republican who has drawn fire from people in his party for his support of the Haitian community in Springfield.
“Dear Casey, We just read the Springfield News story about St. Vincent de Paul’s work with the Haitian community in Clark Co. Thank you for what you are doing to help them…. Our best,” Fran+Mike.”
When she wrote Gov. DeWine a letter thanking him for his faith, he wrote back to say: “It’s you we have faith in.”
The support is meaningful; Ms. Rollins has lost relationships with relatives and friends because not everybody approves of her activism.
But her leadership has attracted people to her mission. Most of the people who come to help are not Catholic, she says. But they fall in love with the work. “In the end, they call themselves Catholic-adjacent,” she says.
Jen Casto, a member of the group Indivisible Springfield, says she considers Ms. Rollins a personal hero even though she herself is not religious. “I knew I had to do something when we were driving through town during a neo-Nazi rally, and my daughter asked what that was,” she tells me. “I knew I didn’t want to normalize having that in my town, and Casey is showing us all what we can do.”
Viles Bounsainvil, a Haitian immigrant living in Springfield who himself faces deportation, is the co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center and a Protestant pastor.
“I first contacted Casey because we needed help with doing the paperwork to help people with their rent,” he says. “Now we speak almost every day. She’s a true ally.”
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts