During the first Trump administration, I learned about the immigration legal system—first, as an interpreter and advocate for asylum applicants, then as a court observer, and finally as a communications staffer at an immigration legal-services provider. I learned the acronyms and the names of forms, learned what made one asylum claim stronger than another, learned enough to become outraged when a new executive rule had violated existing law and precedent in some way. I believed that laws would help set people free—and I watched it happen, over and over again. People winning cases, getting work permits and visas; attorneys grinning as they handed over the envelopes with brand new green cards; people crying with relief.
I also was able to see all the ways in which the system was fundamentally unjust—the ways in which it allowed people to be hurt, to be denied the help they needed. I saw illegal actions carried out by the government, yes: the aftermath of family separations, applications denied because every single box on a form didn’t contain at least an “N/A,” illegal traffic stops. I also saw actions that were totally legal and no less devastating. Parents who lost custody of their kids after their stay in immigration detention was lengthened by their inability to pay a bond. People deported and sent away from their families and loved ones. People who weren’t eligible for asylum because they experienced violence and fear in the wrong kinds of ways.
For a long time, I really believed in the whole project of American democracy. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a journalist because I believed in freedom of speech. I thought we lived in a place where, if the laws fell short of justice, it was just an oversight, that it would be corrected in the way an open fly would be corrected—quickly and with embarrassment. I haven’t believed in that version of the United States for a long time, but I think I see, in my work with the immigration legal system, the lingering traces of that belief.
Lent is a season of reflection—a season to look back and evaluate, but also to prepare for the work ahead, to sweep aside everything that has not worked, to find new ways through the desert. In Isaiah, God tells the prophet, who has just praised him for his parting of the Red Sea, to “[f]orget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”
It is time for me to forget the former things. It has become clear to me in the past few months that the immigration legal system has dropped even the slightest pretense of its orientation toward justice, and while things like “know your rights” presentations, impact litigation, and individual cases remain important, they are not—and really never were—our salvation. They provided a way through an impassable system, a sense of control amid the chaos, but the waves would always flood back after any individual person passed. And funnily enough, I start to suspect that the new ways are, in fact, springing up in the wilderness.
I spent a week in Tucson earlier in March for the Festival of Books. Tucson is the birthplace of the sanctuary movement—a coalition of churches and religious spaces that helped usher people to safety during the migration movements of the 1980s. It is also the home of organizations like No More Deaths—famous for their water walks, bringing water into the desert for those forced to migrate through the most dangerous parts of the U.S. borderlands. The sanctuary movement and No More Deaths were both born out of people looking around to see what the needs of the community were, to determine what resources they had, and to put them to use. Not waiting for a legal system or a trial to wind its way through court, not feeling like they needed a certain kind of expertise to make a change.
This is the kind of organizing and action-taking that first led me into the immigration movement, via a pro se asylum clinic staffed mostly by non-lawyers. It’s also the same kind of organizing that’s most needed now—to make a way in the wilderness and streams in the desert, following new ways of understanding to adapt to what’s needed.
