Fasting for Immigrant Rights: Proposed Reform Leaves Out the Most Vulnerable Nicole Kligerman - Forward
go to original July 22, 2013

Shoes symbolizing deported fathers are displayed during a demonstration, organized by the New York Immigration Coalition, outside a detention facility run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on June 14. (Getty Images)

I sat in a tent in the desert and waited for travelers to arrive. They came on government buses, dehydrated, exhausted, covered in blisters and bug bites. We welcomed them into our large, white tent and offered bandages, water and clumsily wrapped burritos. Abraham welcomed three strangers into his desert tent. Each day, I welcomed hundreds of deported immigrants apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol in the Sonora Desert and sent back over the border to Mexico.

As I crouched in a tent in Nogales, Mexico, I bore witness to stories of displacement, violence and state-sponsored cruelty against immigrants. A 19-year-old undocumented college student caught in an immigration raid and now forced back to Mexico for the first time since he was 3 years old. A 6-year-old in a party dress and her five-months pregnant mother, who had been wandering in the desert for two weeks before finding themselves staring into the barrel of a Border Patrol agent’s gun. A desperate father who spent a year detained in solitary confinement in a California prison before being separated indefinitely from his family members, who remain in the United States.

I left my summer of volunteering on the border with the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel printed on my heart: “… morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

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