The Tragedy of Being an Asylum-Seeker in the United States
Dianne Garcia, Pastor of Family Ministry at San Antonio Mennonite Church in Texas
(This was written during the Trump presidency. I am sharing it now because it is a rare voice for compassion in the midst of the suffering at our border.)
Thousands of human beings are living in trauma each day. You have the power to change that.
At the church where I am a pastor, we host asylum-seeking families from around the world. The other day I was working with them to clean up some trees in our church yard and we had to drive my truck around the corner to pick up another pile of brush. One of the women suggested with a smile that they ride in the bed of the truck, something that they did several times a day in the countries where they are from: Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. When I agreed, they cheered and happily climbed up. They shouted and smiled and took pictures and videos of the whole short ride. Then they retold the story over and over again for the rest of the day.
Their excitement was a momentary window into just how much they miss their homelands. It made me consider what it would feel like: to be separated from everything you have ever known and loved. It made me realize that they feel homesick for their old lives, for their beautiful countries, for their lost communities of shared culture.
They aren’t here because they like our country so much better than theirs. They aren’t here to pursue the American dream. They are here because they have no choice. They are here because they have watched family members killed or their homes burned down in places consumed by the perversion of extreme poverty. El Salvador and Honduras rank among the top five countries in the world with the highest rates of violent deaths.
The stories of the increasing number of asylum-seekers coming to the U.S. have been overshadowed by news about the coronavirus, racial tensions, and now the coming election. But thousands of people who are in critical need of a safe place to live have continued to suffer in inhumane conditions working through an immigration system stacked against them.
In 2018, about 260,000 people requested asylum in the United States, claiming that they feared for their lives in their home countries. In 2019, that number rose to 316,000. The number of total border crossings has decreased this year only because the Trump administration’s new Migrant Protection Protocols forced tens of thousands of asylum seekers to wait across the border in Mexico, often in crowded camps with little access to services to fill basic needs.
Almost all asylum-seekers that I have spoken with who were able to cross the border spent some time in an immigration jail. Most of them spent several months. (While ICE does not disaggregate asylum seekers from all other people spending time in detention, a 2003 report showed that 10 months is the average length of stay for asylum-seekers.)4 Only 0.1% of asylum-seekers under the Migrant Protection Protocols are granted asylum. This number also matches with my experience. Of the dozens of asylum-seekers that we have hosted in our church, we haven’t yet had one family with which we have remained in contact be granted asylum.
Still, they come, knowing they won’t be welcome and most likely will be sent back. Julia, who is 19, journeyed north from Honduras over a year ago. She traveled by train and bus to the border. She avoided human traffickers along the way though many young women aren’t so fortunate. She was also lucky to get across the border rather than to have to wait in Mexico. Julia crossed through the South Texas brush, emerging soaked through from rain, having not eaten for more than a week, and covered in dozens of cactus spines, some of which were still embedded in her skin months after her journey. Finally, she was picked up by border patrol agents.
Her trials were hardly over. She was put in handcuffs and transported to a jail where all of her possessions were taken from her. She had no way to contact her family or friends. She spent her first three days and nights freezing in a room purposefully air conditioned well below comfort level with only a thin emergency blanket for cover. Later, she had to sleep in a dormitory with dozens of other people with bright lights on all night long. She lost weight because she couldn’t stomach the poorly prepared food.
While Julia was there, some of her cellmates became her friends. But rooms were shuffled periodically so they couldn’t form lasting bonds. She was allowed to go outside each day in a dusty yard surrounded by high fences but she didn’t like to go because seeing the free people flying past in their cars on the highway made her feel too sad.
And then, by some miracle, eight months after being picked up, she was released instead of deported. Yet still everything is positioned against her. She is here now, staying in a house run by our church. It will be many months before she has a chance to obtain a work permit or a driver’s license so she cannot support herself. If she accepts government help it could harm her asylum case. Already, by far the most likely outcome is that when she eventually goes before a judge, she will lose her case and be deported back to Honduras.
What would your life have to be like to decide to leave your home, your family, your culture, your verdant, lush country? What would make you decide to endure a journey like that? To risk violence and sickness and incarceration and all forms of dehumanization? What would make you decide to take on all that risk knowing that there is almost no chance that you will be allowed to stay?
What would make you go? Only absolute, complete desperation.
But instead of welcoming those who have made that wrenching decision, we treat them like livestock. Instead of safety, we offer hopelessness. We send the message that they are worthless and unimportant. Worse than ignoring these people who are crying out for help, who miss their homes and their lives, but can’t possibly go back, we spit on them and send them back anyway.
Julia deserves much better than that. She hopes one day to finish school and get a job helping other asylum-seekers. She has a belly laugh that rises distinctly through the floorboards in the evenings. She leads a daily prayer group for all of the Spanish speakers in our church. She enjoys practicing the yoga poses that she has learned here and does them every morning as soon as she gets up.
With all the other crises swirling around us, it seems overwhelming to hold in our minds all of this suffering. But we can take action to end the horror of our current immigration system by voting in a few weeks to defeat our current president, who has tortured and then turned away so many people who are desperately asking for help, who has almost completely shut our doors to asylum-seekers. We can take a stand for compassion, for people who could be us except for being born in a hospital outside of an invisible, arbitrary line on a map.
Each person that is trapped in a detention center right now or in a migrant camp in Mexico or who is staying up late with worry about a child who has made the journey here is a human being. A human being like the person you see in the mirror each morning. And, like you, they deserve not only freedom from suffering, not only basic kindness, but an embrace of warmth and love.
Dianne Garcia is the Pastor of Family Ministry at San Antonio Mennonite Church in Texas