Our border policies are the real crisis
I am appalled, ashamed and astounded. I am a rabbi who just returned from participating in a rabbinic delegation to El Paso, Ciudad Juarez and the southern border to learn about the conditions of asylum-seekers at that crossing.
Yes, we are in the midst of a crisis – but the crisis is not due to the volume or urgency of the flow of immigrants to the United States. Rather, we are consumed in a crisis generated by faulty governmental policies, xenophobic values, and tragic, moral indifference to the meaning, nobility and potential of human life.
While in El Paso and Juarez, our group of 15 rabbis from the humanitarian/human rights groups HIAS and T’ruah visited shelters on both sides of the border, which were teeming with good people with American Dreams. We met with nonprofit agency staff working 24/7 to aid victims of violence seeking refuge, and we visited an ICE detention center that warehoused human beings in windowless “dorms.” We also attended immigration court, where asylum-seekers, despite sustaining heinous violence in their home countries, were nearly guaranteed denial of asylum while subjected to administrative red tape.
As an American rabbi, my life is informed by two aligned value systems. On the base of the Statue of Liberty are words from the poem penned by the 19th-century American Jewish poet Emma Lazarus: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” And in the Torah we read, “We know the heart of the stranger, because we were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Both messages assert a common ethic: that we share a moral grounding in caring with empathy for the vulnerable, whose lives are at best tenuous due to conditions and violence in a faraway place.
In El Paso, it was evident that recent governmental policies — some very recent, like employing Title 42 during COVID to maliciously use the pandemic as an excuse to reject asylum-seekers under the guise of public health — had the effect of codifying anti-immigrant xenophobia in our public policy.
One afternoon we walked across the border-crossing bridge between Mexico and the United States. Looking down on the Rio Grande flowing 50 feet be
low, I saw a group of about ten who had just taken the risk, plunged into the cold waters, and emerged on the American side. The group included men, women and children. They likely had endured a monthslong harrowing journey on foot, eluding traffickers and cartels, just for the chance to present themselves at our border and ask for safety. What courage! What hope! How much they believed in America, even in an America that did not believe in them!
Those ten people below me on the riverbank would now be detained, processed, and likely undergo brutalizing court proceedings lasting months, maybe years, and resulting in most of them being sent back to the torture they were seeking to leave behind.
Between 1882 and 1924, millions of immigrants found haven on our American shores. Many came for economic opportunity, but many more came to escape persecution, pogroms and violence. Moreover, the children and grandchildren of those immigrants are now leading figures in our nation – Supreme Court justices, corporate leaders, legislative officials, school principals and even presidents of our United States.
The Trump-era use of Title 42 was set to end in December, allowing asylum-seekers to seek refuge in the U.S. However, a last-minute decision by Chief Justice Roberts, and the Court’s subsequent 5-to-4 ruling to sustain Title 42 and hear arguments regarding its legality next month, has halted the termination of the xenophobic policy. Title 42 has already resulted in over a million expulsions, and that number will only rise, with hope, opportunity and life itself as collateral damage.
From our 17th-century pilgrims to today’s arrivals from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba and Haiti, immigrants are the moral foundation of America. We must be a beacon of justice in an otherwise dark world. So, too, our religious ethics assert this moral truth.
That beacon may be the only inner sustenance upon which oppressed people can rely. That’s why they come to America. Is that a crisis? Or is a broken immigration system, institutional indifference, the dehumanization of asylumseekers, and gruff border policing the true crisis of America today? These people deserve better. They deserve what my forbears experienced: open arms and an open heart crossing into America.