A friend who volunteers with the Tucson Samaritans, a humanitarian aid group, saw a remarkable gesture the other day at a section of border wall near Sasabe, Arizona.
Several migrants from West Africa were crossing into the United States. As one of them, a young man, stepped onto American soil, he got down on his hands and knees and kissed the ground. “It was beautiful,” my friend said, before shaking her head. She knew that the man would likely soon learn that, despite having fled his homeland and crossed thousands of miles to come here, his journey was not over and could still result in incarceration and deportation.
The hopeful gesture also showed the vast distance between what is happening on the border and what is happening with border policy in Washington.
Humanitarian aid is desperately needed around Sasabe. Thousands of migrants are now arriving daily in this remote region, part of a recent surge that has made Customs and Border Protection’s Tucson Sector—which covers 262 miles of the Arizona-Sonora region—the busiest on the border. On December 10, the agency announced it had apprehended 18,900 people in that sector the previous week alone.
Among them are local Mexican families fleeing cartel violence—the migrant shelter in Sasabe, a town of the same name across the border in the Mexican state of Sonora, had to close in October due to the danger—as well as asylum-seekers from Southern Mexico, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
After crossing into the United States where the fences end or where smugglers have cut holes, the migrants sit and wait to turn themselves in to the border patrol. They often wait for days in the cold, with no food or water. They build fires to keep themselves warm. Some have sick children accompanying them.
Judy Bourg
Migrants near the border wall in Sasabe, Arizona, 2023.
Groups like the Tucson Samaritans and Humane Borders are trying to help, and have put out a call for donations. But the locations where migrants are gathering—ten miles or more from populated areas over hilly, rough terrain—make them hard to reach.
My friend said the day she went to the camp outside Sasabe, she and two others, all church people in their sixties and seventies, were the only aid workers there, in a makeshift camp with more than 100 migrants. She helped distribute snacks, water, blankets, and diapers.
Due to security concerns involving not only the cartels but also groups of armed, anti-immigrant vigilantes on the U.S. side, the border patrol has discouraged aid workers from helping migrants at the fence. In March, Jane Storey, a seventy-year-old retired teacher, was arrested for stopping to give water to a migrant child. But the situation lately has been so dire these groups have begun coordinating. People are also approaching the fence from the Mexican side to sell or give away food and water through the bars.
The border patrol says it just doesn’t have the manpower to respond more quickly. On December 4, CBP announced it was closing the Lukeville port of entry, which is about seventy-five miles west of Sasabe, Arizona, near another area where large groups of migrants are gathering, so its staffers could tend to them.
The port of entry closure has been devastating for businesses that rely on travelers going through Lukeville to get to Puerto Peñasco (Rocky Point), a Mexican tourist town that is the nearest beach to Arizona’s major cities. The closure has also caused even longer lines at the Nogales port of entry, where inspectors had already been reassigned to process migrants.
Arizona and Sonora’s political and business leaders are insisting on the immediate reopening of the Lukeville port, as well as full staffing at all the ports of entry, especially with Christmas approaching. Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs asked President Joe Biden to call out the National Guard to help staff the ports, though so far he has not done so. The CBP won’t give a timeline as to when things will return to normal.
Since closing the port, the border patrol has opened a temporary tent facility in Lukeville to process migrants and transport them to the Ajo patrol station nearby. The CBP conducts criminal background and medical checks and a preliminary asylum screening. Those who pass these checks are granted humanitarian parole into the country; those who don’t are detained and deported back to their homeland, or immediately expelled to Mexico.
Most refugees who come through the Arizona-Sonora border and pass the screening are brought to Casa Alitas, a welcome center in Tucson run by Catholic Community Services of Southern Arizona. They usually stay just a few days before moving on to other parts of the country where they have family or sponsors. Lately, Casa Alitas has been receiving more than 1,000 people a day.
“One hundred percent of the people who come to us are traumatized,” Casa Alitas director Teresa Cavendish told the Arizona Daily Star. “They have been on the edge for so long and truly are not expecting kindness on any level.”
Judy Bourg
Some of the migrants staying near the border in Sasabe had spent up to three nights in the cold.
Pima County, which encompasses Tucson as well as most of Arizona’s southwest border, has been spending approximately $4 million per month to transport, feed, and shelter migrants through Casa Alitas and other organizations. Most of the money comes from the federal government. Border regions, however, are getting less now that federal funds for sheltering migrants are also going to inland cities, particularly New York City, that are seeing an influx of migrants.
With the reduced funding and an increase in asylum-seekers, county money to care for migrants that was supposed to last until April or May is now due to run out in February. If that happens, the border patrol will begin releasing people onto the street. Street releases are already happening on a smaller scale in many towns along the border, although not yet in Tucson.
In Washington, heated arguments are going on over providing more money for the border, which has been linked to money for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Republicans are refusing to authorize additional border spending unless asylum rules are tightened and far fewer people are granted humanitarian parole. They want to make it easier for migrants—like the man who kissed the ground—to be sent home.
Given the unprecedented numbers, the Biden Administration looks likely to agree. Democrats in Congress are trying to come up with a plan that will slow the flow of people arriving at the border while still protecting those with legitimate claims from being turned away or forced to wait in dangerous circumstances in Mexico.
Some Republican politicians, like Kari Lake, the failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate who is now running for U.S. Senate, say migrants are a “foreign army” invading the United States. She and other conservative hardliners have called for a militarized response.
Meanwhile, on the border, people still have hope. They keep coming because however terrible the conditions are at the border, in many cases, it is often less bad than where they’ve been and what they’ve fled.