Guest essay: Alison Stolberg on Rabbi Weiss’ Mexican border trip

Editor’s note: The following story by Alison Stolberg is an account by Rabbi Rachel Weiss of her first-hand recent experience at the U.S.-Mexico border as part of a delegation sent by the nonprofit T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights organization. Both Weiss and Stolberg are part of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston.

Judaism teaches: “Do not stand idly by while your neighbor’s blood is shed.“

On Sunday, Dec. 11, Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation Rabbi Rachel Weiss traveled to El Paso and Ciudad Juárez to join a delegation of 13 multi-denominational rabbis on a four-day pilgrimage to witness the desperate migration situation on the U.S.-Mexico border and bring a moral, religious voice to support immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. 

The exact border itself is the center of the Rio Grande, the river that flows between Mexico and the United States. 

In Judaism our foundational, communal story of liberation is one of crossing a body of water, wandering through the desert and seeking communal and individual safety and opportunity.

Jews tell it every year around our Seder table at Passover. While that story is an ancient myth, the Rio Grande is where the Exodus is happening right now.

How is it different than the Red Sea? What would it look like to call this border a holy place, where crossing this water meant access to humanitarian aid, due process and peace, rather than a militarized, barbed wire zone of fear, danger and control?

As a passport-carrying American citizen, Rabbi Weiss walked across the border on the pedestrian bridge from Mexico to the U.S. with no questions asked. Her biggest inconvenience was a 10-minute wait and a $0.35 fee. She wasn’t even asked to show her passport.

Yet hundreds of thousands of people who have migrated from Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Haiti, Colombia, El Salvador and other countries seeking asylum are not afforded the same luxury: 900 children have arrived as unaccompanied minors in 2022 alone.

Now with the Supreme Court extending Title 42 border restrictions, there is no opportunity for most of these people even to reach the U.S. border to ask for asylum. 

For those who are able to reach the physical border and ask for asylum, their painstaking journey has already involved walking for days, dangerous terrain, misinformation, threat of robbery and/or sexual and physical assault.  

Once they arrive, the process continues with detention or parole, court hearings, misinformation, financial stress and housing insecurity. Many asylum seekers will see their cases rejected and be deported to their country of origin, to dangerous circumstances.  

Migrating from one country to another is a human right and should center on human dignity. Yet, asylum seekers are often labeled criminals and treated with suspicion and neglect. 

Seeking asylum is a legal right, yet in this moment due to Title 42, those who migrate to the United States seeking asylum are unable to put a foot on American soil to begin that process.

We must connect the dots between the policies that Congress and our courts enact, our lawmakers, our culture and human dignity. 

Rabbi Weiss remarked, “the presence and absence of humanity on the borderland is palpable.”

The rabbinic delegation toured the U.S. border wall, the Otero Detention Center, U.S. immigration court hearings and shelters on both sides of the border. Humanity and inhumanity commingle:

• In the men and women in prison jumpsuits in rooms with empty walls, metal beds and no privacy, hands on hearts and pleading looks or blankness as dry as the desert landscape.
• In a judge who repeats everything slowly and makes sure defendants understand proceedings in Spanish but still has a 77% denial/deportation rate. 
• In people handing their children from one side of the river to the other.
• In the request for skirts from the shelter because many women jump over the border and fall and break bones and the only pair of pants they have don’t fit over the metal pins and cages surgically repaired. 

The role of the rabbis on this trip was to explore a different narrative of complexity, systemic abuse and xenophobia. These rabbis have returned to their communities to raise up the roots of the horror these humans are facing that cause them to flee their homes in the first place.  

Abuse, sexual assault, rape, kidnapping and extortion are often the impetus to flee and face an unknown and difficult future. 

At emergency shelter Casa Romero in Ciudad Juárez, Rabbi Weiss, a fluent Spanish speaker, met with some of the families and singles living there.  

Families from all over Central America cram into rooms with 14 or 15 bunk beds, waiting for the opportunity to request asylum. Many have been waiting for months, relying on TikTok videos and WhatsApp communications for the latest information.  

Despite so many lives in limbo, miracles and everyday tasks continued. A new baby was born and kids were picked up to go to school. HIAS Mexico and other organizations provide essential legal, psychosocial, gender-based, economic and emergency response to migrant folks.

Using social media they communicate the latest updates and information, manage misinformation, listen to stories and support people as they wait. And wait. And wait.

At Annunciation House, a shelter for paroled migrants in El Paso who are newly arrived and in transit, donations fill the pantry with foods for bag lunches while volunteers rush to book airline and bus tickets, restock shampoo and towels in bathrooms, and do load after load of laundry as families arrive for the night.

Those who crossed the border on foot in the recent mass arrivals from countries exempt from Title 42 – Nicaragua, Colombia and Cuba – stop in El Paso, but move quickly to airports and bus stations to the destination assigned them by Border Patrol.

One woman at the shelter was from Colombia and had arrived only hours earlier. She said the night before she was walking through the river and before that she was on a bus and before that everybody from her village was forced to move and her neighbors were kidnapped. Her 4-year-old daughter accompanied her.  

The airport is filled with people carrying nothing but their airline tickets and a blanket, trying to make sense of complex travel plans and long journeys ahead.  

Rabbi Weiss helped one family of four who were assigned seats on their next flight, but not together.  

“There was no way for this family to distinguish between an airline counter agent and an ICE official,” she said.  “She was terrified that her family was being separated as in recent years.  

“In a process where everything matters in making one’s case for asylum, the fear of doing wrong is always present. Even a small, normal request that an airline would accommodate any family is cause for suspicion and fear.”  

Rabbi Weiss wrote down a request on paper in English to the airline agent at her next airport to reassign seats so her 3- and 9-year-olds would not be sitting alone, and then translated the request to Spanish for the family. These small moves of humans helping humans makes all the difference in human dignity. 

Rabbi Weiss teaches, “The Mishnah commands, in a place where there is no humanity, be human. What would it look like to say America is a place of welcome and this is a place of home and this is a place of holiness? All of us need to reach hands in and say we will help you, not turn you away.  We will hold you rather than let you fall down on the other side.”

As Rabbi Weiss returns from her journey, she will continue to shine a light on the situation at the border. Join us at 7 p.m. Friday, Jan. 13, for a Kabbalat Shabbat Service at the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation, 303 Dodge Ave. in Evanston, to hear more about her first-hand experience and learn how we can work for the justice and safety of our neighbors.