Partner Profile: No One Left Behind

Their Story is Our Story and No One Left Behind (NOLB) joined forces in 2025 to launch the StoryShield program.

StoryShield workshops teach immigrant families to create personal, phone-based video stories that highlight their community contributions and ties. If they are detained or deported, their story can be used to raise public awareness and rally community support.

NOLB clients - Afghan allies who served with the U.S. Armed Forces - are the first group to test and shape the StoryShield program. We are running workshops in multiple states, with NOLB inviting participants through their network and TSOS staff leading the storytelling/ video production workshops.

We spoke with Matthew Marcellus, Director of Communications with NOLB, and asked what the partnership with TSOS has meant for his organization and their Afghan clients.

Carla (TSOS): Why did NOLB decide to collaborate with TSOS?

Matthew (NOLB): We work with TSOS because they do not summarize people. The person who lived the experience is the one telling it, not a third-party reporter, and the organization stays out of the frame.

Our clients are Afghan and Iraqi wartime allies. Most hold a Special Immigrant Visa or are waiting on one, so they are not refugees in the legal sense, and the public conversation about displacement has never been sure where to put them. We didn’t need to explain the importance of that to TSOS. They understood that these are men and women targeted by America’s enemies for their service and sacrifices on America’s behalf.

Their team also includes refugees and former refugees, and an organization staffed in part by the people it serves does not attempt to speak for them. We build our resettlement work around SIV Ambassadors, themselves recipients of an SIV, on the similar principle that those with lived experiences help run the room.

Five years after the ‘Fall of Kabul’, our allies are still being explained to the American public by people who were not there. TSOS is one of the few places where the allies themselves do the explaining.

Carla: How has StoryShield benefited NOLB’s clients up to now?

Matthew: The honest measure, so far, is a video that nobody has had to post.

A family walks out of a StoryShield workshop with a finished recording on their own phone, in their own language, describing their service alongside U.S. forces and naming the neighbors and coworkers who would speak for them should they be detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. NOLB ran three of these workshops with TSOS in northern Virginia in March. Our Ambassadors, SIV recipients themselves, helped shape the curriculum and staffed the rooms. TSOS ran three more in the Seattle area in June, which we supported.

The value is timing. If that story is ever needed, it already exists, in their words, instead of being assembled from the outside.

The people best positioned to explain what an ally is worth to this country are the allies themselves, and this puts that ability in their hands before anyone asks for it. And a family that has walked through their own story before, in a room with people they trust and in a medium that is wholly theirs, will not have to do it for the first time on the worst day of their life.

No NOLB client has needed to use a StoryShield video, and that is the answer we hope to keep giving.

Carla: In your own words, why is it important to give refugees the opportunity to share their story with the American public?​

Matthew: I would put it a little differently. Nobody needs to be given the opportunity, because the story already belongs to them. And in my experience, many of our allies are very willing and candid about their story. What they need is for the room to be safe enough to use it.

Unfortunately, that second part is often the deciding factor. A family with a brother still in Kandahar weighs a video story against what the Taliban does with names, and the answer is a clear “no.” And that “no” may never change, but our job is to make that decision an informed one, not to fill a content calendar with it.

Immigration policy will get argued in aggregates, in visa classes and caseloads, and nobody arguing about a caseload has to picture a real person inside it. That is what makes their argument comfortable to make; the aggregate dilutes any feelings tied to an inherently emotional situation. When an interpreter who spent four years with an infantry battalion says the name of their unit, the American who served in it knows exactly what he is describing. The distance closes, and the argument becomes uncomfortable.

But those stories naturally come with a risk. They are telling their experiences and names to a public that will never say theirs back to them, and their story travels in places they can not control. Every story and account that you read was made by someone who decided that that risk was worth it.