Dolly Parton stood up for undocumented immigrants when few others would
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My favorite Dolly Parton song is nowhere near her most famous and not even among her best.
But if you want to honor the late country music legend’s legacy — a testament to the Gospel’s radical notions of love, acceptance and uplifting the marginalized — you need to blast her cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).”
Guthrie wrote the weeper in 1948 to commemorate a plane crash in California’s Central Valley that killed all 32 on board, including 28 Mexican nationals with a one-way ticket back home. The leftist balladeer was furious that media accounts named the four white victims but none of the Mexicans, reducing them to their status as mere deportees.
Musical giants such as the Byrds, Joan Baez, Johnny Cash and Pete Seeger had covered “Deportee,” but no one with Parton’s mainstream fame. She released her version in 1980 as part of a concept album hailing blue-collar workers that was a companion to her hit film “9 to 5.”
Dolly Parton’s death has left the music, film and television worlds reeling, with stars and luminaries across those industries and more paying tribute to the beloved entertainer’s life and legacy.
Parton could have limited her tracks to farmers, coal miners, swing shifters, assembly line workers and other laborers whom country music constantly lionizes, and no one would have complained. It would have been the safe option, anyway. The Reagan revolution was remaking American politics. American sentiment was turning against newcomers, whether Vietnamese refugees, Cuban and Haitian boat people, Central Americans fleeing civil wars or Mexicans looking for economic opportunity.
But Parton felt that immigrants — legal and not — were part of America’s story, too.
She sings “Deportee” like the dirge it is — and then goes further. She recites the names of the Mexicans Guthrie envisioned on the plummeting plane — Juan, Rosalita, Jesús and María — with tenderness, not pity. With lines like “They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves,” she embodies the fears of Mexican immigrants, then and now — that an American society that works them to exhaustion will toss them like “the oranges piled in their creosote dumps” that Guthrie so memorably described.
The Tennessee native rarely injected venom into her voice, even when singing about difficult subjects — but she does it here.
“Who are these dear friends all scattered like dry leaves?” she asks toward the end of the song. “The radio said, ‘They were just deportees’” — she spits out, stating the words, not singing them.
The singer never revealed why she included “Deportee” in “9 to 5 and Odd Jobs.” It’s one of the few times she so explicitly addressed politics, which she famously and repeatedly said wasn’t her thing. In the decades that followed, Parton never brought up immigrants again — but she didn’t need to.
Honoring the undocumented and decrying their persecutors at the height of her career, against political headwinds and with nothing to gain and everything to lose, was par for her life, and a challenge for all of us to do the same.
Can someone send that memo to President Trump and his supporters as they trip over themselves with hollow praise in the wake of Parton’s death?
Trump, who has long sneered at the helpless and continues to ramp up his deportation deluge, ordered American flags on federal grounds to be flown at half-staff for a week to honor Parton.
“This is a true loss for millions of people,” he wrote on social media. “There has never been anyone like her, and never will.”
The president is definitely not like Parton. Earlier this year, his administration marked the anniversary of the “Deportee” plane crash with a social media post dismissing the victims as “illegal Mexican aliens,” even though most of them were braceros whose contracts had expired.
I can’t say I was the biggest fan of Parton’s music — Loretta Lynn and Kitty Wells are more my thing when it comes to country — but her life story and worldview long ago sealed her in my heart.
Her arc mirrored that of my Mexican immigrant parents, who were also mountain people who grew up in big farming families with no plumbing or electricity, snuggling with siblings during winter nights in unheated bedrooms. They fled to modernity — Parton to Nashville, my parents to Southern California — as soon as they could but never forsook their hometowns, helping those who remained and taking their culture with them.
Mami and Papi didn’t become multimillionaire celebrities like Parton. But they taught my siblings and me not to be ashamed of our roots and to give to those less fortunate, a philosophy that Parton practiced to the end of her 80 years. Parton and my mom taught that literacy was key to succeeding — Mami regularly took us to the library, while Dolly created a nonprofit that provides free books to young children, including Spanish-language options.
All three derived their empathy from a strong faith in Jesus — but also because that’s what small-town folks do. Compare that to America’s most famous self-proclaimed hillbilly, Vice President JD Vance. He preaches selfishness instead of selflessness, avarice instead of charity and going after the least of us instead of raising them up. His worldview has brought nothing but havoc to Americans, whereas Parton provided a guidebook for a national redemption.
No wonder Vance didn’t immediately issue a statement praising his fellow Appalachian, leaving the job to his wife, Usha.
The plight of immigrants is one of the defining moral issues of our time, and more and more big-name musicians are following the trail Parton blazed so long ago.
Earlier this year, Bruce Springsteen released “Streets of Minneapolis” to mark the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti at the guns of immigration agents. Tom Morello, Kathleen Hanna, Ozomatli and other alt-music stars will release an anti-ICE album this fall, with proceeds going to the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and Unión del Barrio.
And just last week, Kacey Musgraves urged concertgoers in Chicago to donate to a nonprofit that helps children separated from their “unfairly” deported parents.
“It’s not a political thing,” the singer said to a cheering crowd. “It’s just, these kids need help.”
MAGA-land went nuts, as it did earlier this year after Musgraves opened her shows with a mariachi quartet consisting of a father and his sons who had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Somewhere, Parton is smiling.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The column argues that Dolly Parton’s decision to record Woody Guthrie’s protest song “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” on the 1980 concept album “9 to 5 and Odd Jobs” brought the story of Mexican migrant workers and undocumented immigrants into the heart of mainstream country and pop culture at a time when such themes were largely absent from chart-topping music.[1][2][4]
The piece contends that Parton’s rendition, which names imagined victims and dwells on their humanity, honors Guthrie’s original outrage over news reports that reduced 28 Mexican farmworkers killed in the 1948 crash to anonymous “deportees” while naming only the white crew members, thereby challenging the dehumanizing language that often surrounds immigration enforcement.[2][3][7]
The article argues that including “Deportee” on an album celebrating workers—alongside songs about office staff and other laborers—signals Parton’s belief that immigrants, including those undocumented, are integral to the American working class and deserving of dignity rather than suspicion or scorn.[1][2][4]
The column suggests that Parton’s choice was especially bold because it came amid rising hostility toward refugees and migrants, yet was delivered without partisan slogans, aligning her with a tradition of artists who use storytelling and empathy, rather than explicit activism, to confront injustice.[2][3][5]
The piece highlights Parton’s broader ethic of generosity and uplift, connecting her support for literacy through the Imagination Library—which distributes free books to children regardless of family income—to a faith-driven, small-town sense of responsibility for “the least of us,” and presenting this as a model that contrasts sharply with contemporary political figures who champion punitive immigration policies.[3][4]
The article criticizes recent political rhetoric that labels immigrants as “illegal aliens” and backs aggressive deportation policies, arguing that such language and actions stand in stark tension with the compassion embodied in “Deportee” and with the broader protest-song tradition that continues to be invoked as mass deportations and enforcement crackdowns reshape U.S. immigration debates.[3][6][9]
The column places Parton within a growing chorus of musicians addressing immigration and enforcement, noting that modern artists have released protest songs and benefit projects responding to deportations and immigration-agent violence, and presenting this trend as an extension of the moral framework Guthrie and Parton helped popularize around immigrant rights and human dignity.[2][3][7]
Different views on the topic
In contrast, immigration hardliners and many Republican leaders frame expanded deportations and funding for enforcement agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security as necessary measures to uphold the rule of law and secure U.S. borders, portraying crackdowns on undocumented immigrants as a public-safety imperative rather than a moral failing.[6]
The Trump political movement frequently embraces terminology like “illegal alien” or “illegal immigrant,” arguing that such phrases accurately describe immigration status and help distinguish between lawful and unlawful entry, and rejecting criticisms that this language erases individual stories or humanity.[9]
Official communications and sympathetic commentary often describe those targeted for removal primarily in legal or bureaucratic terms—“undocumented,” “illegal,” “aliens,” or “deportees”—emphasizing compliance with statutes and sovereignty over concerns about symbolic recognition or emotional resonance, which directly counters the column’s emphasis on naming and humanizing victims.[6][9]
Some cultural commentary urges keeping Parton’s legacy above partisan politics, noting that her songs, including “9 to 5” and “Deportee,” have become widely loved worker and immigrant narratives without explicit endorsements of particular parties or policies; from this perspective, attempts to position Parton as a partisan critic of contemporary immigration enforcement risk oversimplifying a career built on broad appeal and personal storytelling rather than direct political confrontation.[2][4][5]
Music histories often present “Deportee” as one of many protest songs covered by a long list of artists—from Pete Seeger and Joan Baez to Bruce Springsteen and others—portraying Parton’s version as part of a larger canon rather than as a uniquely radical statement, which can temper claims that her recording alone marked a singular stand on undocumented immigration.[2][3][8]
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