The day before President Trump’s inauguration, adjunct professor Barry Yeoman sat inside a church fellowship hall in his hometown of Durham with about 60 people. “The crowd of mostly immigrants had arrived in winter pullovers and windbreakers, anxious about the news, wondering how much the coming years would disrupt their lives,” he later wrote in The Assembly, a digital magazine about North Carolina.

Among those in the room were four community leaders: an organizer, a priest, an attorney, and a sheriff. Each, in their own way, was trying to buffer the immigrants from the incoming administration’s mass-deportation efforts. For almost three months, Yeoman and coauthor Vibhav Nandagiri followed those four leaders, posing the question: Could moral conviction, teamwork, and supportive local law enforcement serve as an antidote to aggressive federal policy? They published their article in April.