Center for Social Justice Online Library

Learn the human stories of what happens at the border.

A remarkable, decimating work of reporting by award-winning journalist and priest Cristina Rathbone about asylum seekers trapped at a port of entry to the US: the trauma they carry, the community they create, and the faith they maintain.

The Asylum Seekers offers a rare narrative account of the horror of the US-Mexico border. Borders run through author Cristina Rathbone too, whose mother was a Cuban refugee. So she travels to Juarez, unsure what to do but determined to learn.

Weaving intimate portraits of individuals with broader stories about the community, reporting from the border as a whole, and reflections on the meaning of faith in a place of suffering, Rathbone tells the story of Mexican asylum seekers living in a makeshift tent camp at the foot of a bridge. Life in the camp is both hectic and harrowing. Families arrive. Families leave. Families get through to the US. Families are returned from the US. Women weep, children squabble, and grown men sob over photographs of their murdered sons' mutilated bodies.

Here too, however, are beauty, and empathy, and hope. Over time, a leadership team emerges. The community begins to convene daily meetings, establish systems of distribution for donations, and start classes for the kids. Serving as an unofficial chaplain, Rathbone is there through it all: listening, receiving, assisting, and most of all learning about what authentic faith looks like under conditions such as these.

Written in the tradition of Solito and Rivermouth, The Asylum Seekers renders in startling, intimate detail the day-to-day lives of people who are determined to enter the US legally and who often suffer for it. The result is a fierce, poignant inquiry into the dignity of those who seek asylum--and into what we owe each other.

Tells of the author's near-murder, imprisonment, and torture in Kenya; his escape to the United States; and the obstacle course of ordeals and proceedings he faced as US government agencies sought to deport him to Kenya.

A young woman flees violence in Mexico and seeks protection in the United States―only to be trafficked as a domestic worker in the Bronx. A decorated immigration judge leaves his post when the policies he proudly upheld capsize in the wake of political turmoil. A Gambian translator who was granted asylum herself talks with other African women about how immigration officers expect victims of torture to behave. A border patrol officer begins to question the training that instructs him to treat the children he finds in the Arizona desert like criminals.

Through these and other powerful firsthand accounts, A Story to Save Your Life offers new insight into the harrowing realities of seeking protection in the United States. Sarah C. Bishop argues that cultural differences in communication shape every stage of the asylum process, playing a major but unexamined role. Migrants fleeing persecution must reconstruct the details of their lives so governmental authorities can determine whether their experiences justify protection. However, Bishop shows, many factors influence whether an applicant is perceived as credible, from the effects of trauma on the ability to recount an experience chronologically to culturally rooted nonverbal behaviors and displays of emotion. For asylum seekers, harnessing the power of autobiographical storytelling can mean the difference between life and death. A Story to Save Your Life emphasizes how memory, communication, and culture intertwine in migrants’ search for safety.

More children than ever are crossing international borders alone to seek asylum worldwide. In the past decade, over a half million children have fled from Central America to the United States, seeking safety and a chance to continue lives halted by violence. Yet upon their arrival, they fail to find the protection that our laws promise, based on the broadly shared belief that children should be safeguarded. A meticulously researched ethnography, Precarious Protections chronicles the experiences and perspectives of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the US asylum process. Chiara Galli debunks assumptions about asylum, including the idea that people are being denied protection because they file bogus claims. In practice, the United States interprets asylum law far more narrowly than what is necessary to recognize real-world experiences of escape from life-threatening violence. This is especially true for children from Central America. Galli reveals the formidable challenges of lawyering with children and exposes the human toll of the US immigration bureaucracy.

Celebrations of the “transgender tipping point” in the second decade of the twenty-first century occurred at the same time of heightened debates and anxieties about immigration in the United States. On Transits and Transitions explores what the increased visibility of trans people in the public sphere means for trans migrants and provides a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse that the inclusion of transgender issues in law and policy represents the progression of legal equality for trans communities. Focusing on the intersection of immigration and trans rights, Josephson presents a careful and innovative examination of the processes by which the category of transgender is produced through and incorporated into the key areas of asylum law, marriage and immigration law, and immigration detention policies. Using mobility as a critical lens, On Transits and Transitions captures the insecurity and precarity created by U.S. immigration control and related processes of racialization to show how im/mobility conditions citizenship and national belonging for trans migrants in the United States.

"I worked in a trailer that ICE had set aside for conversations between the women and the attorneys. While we talked, their children, most of whom seemed to be between three and eight years old, played with a few toys on the floor. It was hard for me to get my head around the idea of a jail full of toddlers, but there they were." For decades, advocates for refugee children and families have fought to end the U.S. government's practice of jailing children and families for months, or even years, until overburdened immigration courts could rule on their claims for asylum. Baby Jails is the history of that legal and political struggle. Philip G. Schrag, the director of Georgetown University's asylum law clinic, takes readers through thirty years of conflict over which refugee advocates resisted the detention of migrant children. The saga began during the Reagan administration when 15-year-old Jenny Lisette Flores languished in a Los Angeles motel that the government had turned into a makeshift jail by draining the swimming pool, barring the windows, and surrounding the building with barbed wire. What became known as the Flores Settlement Agreement was still at issue years later, when the Trump administration resorted to the forced separation of families after the courts would not allow long-term jailing of the children. Schrag provides recommendations for the reform of a system that has brought anguish and trauma to thousands of parents and children. Provocative and timely, Baby Jails exposes the ongoing struggle between the U.S. government and immigrant advocates over the duration and conditions of confinement of children who seek safety in America.

Departures supports, contextualizes, and advances the field of critical refugee studies by providing a capacious account of its genealogy, methods, and key concepts as well as its premises, priorities, and possibilities. The book outlines the field's main tenets, questions, and concerns and offers new approaches that integrate theoretical rigor and policy considerations with refugees' rich and complicated lived worlds. It also provides examples of how to link communities, movements, networks, artists, and academic institutions and forge new and humane reciprocal paradigms, dialogues, visuals, and technologies that replace and reverse the dehumanization of refugees that occurs within imperialist gazes and frames, sensational stories, savior narratives, big data, colorful mapping, and spectator scholarship. This resource and guide is for all readers invested in addressing the concerns, perspectives, knowledge production, and global imaginings of refugees.

Media pundits, politicians, and the public are often skeptical or ambivalent about granting asylum. They fear asylum-seekers will impose economic and cultural costs and pose security threats to nationals. Consequently, governments of rich, democratic countries attempt to limit who can approach their borders, which often leads to refugees breaking immigration laws. In Refuge beyond Reach, David Scott FitzGerald traces how rich democracies have deliberately and systematically shut down most legal paths to safety. Drawing on official government documents, information obtained via WikiLeaks, and interviews with asylum seekers, he finds that for ninety-nine percent of refugees, the only way to find safety in one of the prosperous democracies of the Global North is to reach its territory and then ask for asylum. FitzGerald shows how the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia comply with the letter of law while violating the spirit of those laws through a range of deterrence methods -- first designed to keep out Jews fleeing the Nazis -- that have now evolved into a pervasive global system of "remote control." While some of the most draconian remote control practices continue in secret, FitzGerald identifies some pressure points and finds that a diffuse humanitarian obligation to help those in need is more difficult for governments to evade than the law alone. Refuge beyond Reach addresses one of the world's most pressing challenges -- how to manage flows of refugees and other types of migrants -- and helps to identify the conditions under which individuals can access the protection of their universal rights

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

This multidisciplinary volume brings together experienced expert witnesses and immigration attorneys to highlight best practices and strategies for giving expert testimony in asylum cases. As the scale and severity of violence in Latin America has grown in the last decade, scholars and attorneys have collaborated to defend the rights of immigrant women, children, and LGBTQ+ persons who are threatened by gender-based, sexual, and gang violence in their home countries. Researchers in anthropology, history, political science, and sociology have regularly supported the work of immigration lawyers and contributed to public debates on immigration reform, but the academy contains untapped scholarly expertise that, guided by the resources provided in this handbook, can aid asylum seekers and refugees and promote the fair adjudication of asylum claims in US courts. As the recent refugee crisis of immigrant mothers and children and unaccompanied minors has made clear, there is an urgent need for academics to work with other professionals to build a legal framework and national network that can respond effectively to this human rights crisis.