Terminated employees at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie speak out about job loss

Four former employees at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Wilmington are upset about being terminated for “poor performance” when they feel their performance has been anything but.

Abbot Hays, 27, of Chicago, youth program coordinator; Erick “Iggy” Ignaczak, 44, of Berwyn, facilities operations specialist; Harsha Pandaraboyina, 23, of Crest Hill, range ecologist; and Emily Harvey, 35, of Manhattan, natural resource education specialist, feel they lost their jobs as part of President Donald Trump’s federal spending cuts.

The U.S. Forest Service recently fired 3,400 employees – which included employees at Midewin – and the National Park Service recently terminated 1,000.

Harvey said it wasn’t her supervisor who “decided I should lose my job.”

“It was literally that my name was on a list of people who worked there under two years,” Harvey said.

A written statement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture said the agency had to make the “difficult decision” to release “2,000 probationary, non-firefighting employees from the Forest Service,” stressing that the employees who lost their job were “probationary in status, many of whom were compensated by temporary [Inflation Reduction Act] funding.”

“Right now, there’s a lot of lawyers and unions and other people fighting it.”

—  Abbot Hays, youth program coordinator at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

‘Easy target’

Hays, a former Student Conservation Association employee, said she started working full time at Midewin 18 months ago as the youth program coordinator, where she presented programming for high school youth, participated in career fairs and ran the summer Youth Conservation Corps.

Hays said she worked on a four-person education team and said all four received the same paperwork and packets, and “no severance or recourse.”

Hays called the firing “illegal” because federal employees are not at-will employees; federal firings are based on performance reviews and “lots and lots of data built up over time.”

She said she was simply “an easy target” because she still was on probation, and she feels badly for longtime employees who recently transitioned into new roles and also were terminated.

“Right now, there’s a lot of lawyers and unions and other people fighting it,” Hays said.

She said she planned to build her life’s career at Midewin since she’s passionate about educating youth about conservation, restoration and sustainability, “but that was pulled out from underneath me, and now I have to make a new plan.”

“It’s already hard enough to find work that’s meaningful and pays well and respects you,” Hays said. “I was lucky enough to find that job.”

Ignaczak said he brought 20 years of experience to his role when he came to Midewin 13 months ago to fill a longtime vacant post to maintain the facilities “wall to wall, ceiling to ceiling.”

“I was an independent contractor beforehand, and I liked the stability of a federal job,” Ignaczak said, adding that he planned to stay at Midewin until retirement. “It took me about five and a half months of going through the process onboarding and actually walking through the front door for the first day.”

Ignaczak said he was fired Feb. 15 while on vacation in California meeting his 4-month-old nephew for the first time.

He said the people “let go” at Midewin were hardworking people who didn’t deserve the terminations. He planned to add his name to two class-action lawsuits that are being filed.

“I’m happy to fight,” Ignaczak said. “But it all seems futile now.”

Pandaraboyina said he was the “point of contact for all the things that go into wildlife botany.” He was a conservation land management intern in the summer of 2023 and started working at Midewin when his internship ended.

He was “horrified” to be fired on President’s Day and said the firing was the “worst thing that happened to me in my life.”

A Massachusetts native, Pandaraboyina said he had just signed a new lease to his apartment Feb. 16.

Still, Pandaraboyina considered himself luckier than the rest.

“I don’t have kids to feed or sick parents to buy medicine for,” he said. “I could travel the world and find myself – who knows?”

Pandaraboyina is actually moving back into his parents’ home to “find a job, I guess.”

But Pandaraboyina is not happy about it.

“I had planned to be with the forest service for decades,” he said. “I’m not really a big change kind of guy.”

‘Not going down quietly’

Harvey recalled “absolutely traumatizing” days leading up to the terminations.

This included a “barrage of emails that came almost every day at 1 in the morning or 4:30 on a Friday” that “stripped away everyone’s rights,” including pronoun preferences and LGBTQ+ emblems around signatures, Harvey said.

Harvey said the emails, many from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, often had the tone of “we’re lazy people who don’t work hard.”

“The fact we were fired is a slap in the face,” Harvey said.

Harvey said she’s “not going down quietly.” People need to understand the long-term impact on thousands of people and national parks, she said.

“This is much bigger to me than me personally losing my job,” Harvey said.