Awakening to the Story in My Bones: Border Crossings, Detention, and Asylum

Before September 11, it was easier to cross between El Paso and Juarez. People's families, jobs, and favorite stores existed on both sides of the border. It is closer to walk from Juarez in Mexico to El Paso in Texas than to walk from my high school to the house in which I grew up. For many there was no separation between El Paso and Juarez. You could spend all day in Juarez and return to El Paso for dinner and vice versa.

Now there is a border fence, long lines, infrared technology, sensors in the ground, and 600 new positions for Border Patrol agents in the El Paso sector alone.

I arrived in El Paso this past February carrying more than just my bags—I came carrying my identity as a third-generation Jew whose family escaped Eastern Europe during the pogroms. Traveling with a Fellowship of Reconciliation peace delegation, I came seeking to learn how the drug war, gun violence, and immigration are entwined. I came with stories of my great grandfather who left Latvia and landed in Latin America, working in the copper mines until he made his way up north. I came with stories of name changes, walking great distances, being turned away from societies, and trying to escape violence and start a better life. I came wondering how El Paso, the "number one safest city in the United States," is a ten-minute walk from what was for many years deemed the most dangerous city in the world: Ciudad Juarez.

Somewhere in the curves and lines of my body—somewhere in a memory that is deep and rooted like the trees in my parents' backyard, from before I had all my basic needs

Sidewalk art in the Juarez Valley raises a call for peace in a region riven with violence from the drug war.

met, before my family became white, and before we were privileged—there is this story of crossing borders illegally to find shelter from violence and give hope to the next generation.

The kind of violence that my family endured three generations ago is present and real and happening right now along the U.S.-Mexico border. Those of us who have been in the United States for generations need to remember that the fear and precariousness of migration is not just an ancient story left over in our bones—it is the condition of daily life for thousands of people.

Similar Stories, Different Times

While in El Paso, I met a woman around my age, thirty-two, at Annunciation House, a shelter for undocumented immigrants. She had to flee Mexico with her three children because her life was in danger from violence due to the drug war. The first time she arrived at the border, U.S. border agents turned her away and sent her back into danger. When she tried the second time, they told her they would detain her and separate her from her children—including her youngest, who was four months old. So she went back into the danger she faced in Mexico. She said four armed men who are part of the Mexican Federal Police showed up at her house and killed two of her brothers. Another brother was kidnapped. When her mother and father began to face harassment in the street as well, she realized her choice was either be killed in Mexico or detained in America.

On her third try, she and her children managed to cross the bridge border from Juarez to El Paso. The United States has given her a court date in 2015. Until that time she is undocumented in this country. The U.S. system of internal checkpoints means she can't get out of El Paso without a coyote's help, so for now she is stuck trying to eke out a living in a city filled with Border Patrol agents, wondering whether this unwelcoming country will deny her asylum and send her back into danger. She asked me not to share even her...