Compassion, not crackdowns for asylum-seekers

When President Joe Biden recently announced his administration’s plan to increase measures to deter asylum-seekers, I thought about a nearly empty closet for dresses.

Last month, I traveled to El Paso and Ciudad Juárez as part of a rabbinic delegation organized by the immigration group HIAS and the rabbinic human rights organization T’ruah to see firsthand the situation at the Southern border. On our last day in El Paso, we visited a shelter for refugees and asylum-seekers journeying to be reunited with friends and relatives across the United States.

A young volunteer took us to the basement, which the shelter uses as a pantry for clothing, shoes, toiletries, and nonperishable foods. At one point in our tour, the volunteer walked over to a somewhat anemic selection of dresses and shared with us that the shelter rarely gets enough dresses to meet the needs of its guests. I immediately questioned why anyone would choose to wear a dress when they are preparing for a journey to freedom. Because of the broken legs, the volunteer replied. So many women arrive at the shelter with broken legs after jumping off the border wall, and simply cannot wear pants.

I am a rabbi and the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. I grew up with the stories of survivors who, rather than stay in camps where death was inevitable, shed their clothes in the middle of winter and climbed a barbed wire fence just for the possibility of survival. My own grandmother fled Austria as a child. She and her family narrowly escaped being sent to Dachau by securing false visas which would carry them to Cuba and, a few years later, to New York.

I know that my grandmother was one of the lucky ones whose journey ended with asylum and a new life in the United States, and that for every refugee who made it, there are thousands more who did not, who were told by the United States that they were not welcome, and were forced to return to their countries where terror, torture, and often death awaited them.

As I stood in the basement of the El Paso shelter next to the scarce offerings of summer dresses, I wondered what terror these women must have been running from to make jumping off a nearly 30-foot fence — with the best-case scenario being a shattered leg — seem like the optimal and only option. I have to think that like so many of my grandmother’s generation, there were no deterrents or policies that would have kept them from trying to find safety in the United States.

I believe in America and its promise. And I would have hoped that in the years since my grandmother sought safety on these shores, our country would have only expanded its opportunities to welcome refugees and asylum-seekers. I fear, however, that rather than building a culture of compassion, we have instead fostered a culture of fear of immigrants and have perpetuated a system that seeks to keep people out, detained, or deported at all costs.

This is not the time to close our borders or to turn our backs on those individuals and families fleeing for their lives. Now, more than ever, we need to articulate a new vision for asylum, one rooted in human dignity and empathy. We need to shift the narrative and re-imagine a system of welcome rather than deportation.