The Asylum Seekers, Cristina Rathbone. Broadleaf Books (ISBN: 9798889832010) 2025.

Summary: A priest lives with asylum seekers in Juarez, learning about what they fled, the community they built, and their faith.

Why would you leave home, community, livelihood? Why would you make a costly and perilous journey to the Mexican-American border for the uncertain opportunity to apply for asylum? This is a mental exercise I wonder if many on the American side of the border have ever engaged. So I ask, what would it take for you to do this in your situation.

Cristina Rathbone, an Episcopal priest, lived for close to a year in 2019 and early 2020 on the border, spending her days with the growing community of asylum seekers in Juarez. The Rio Grande and a bridge were not all that separated them from El Paso, and the United States. She learned why they came there. In general, they were fleeing gangs and cartels threatening their lives. In some cases they’d already lost a family member. Others had been threatened with death. Some wanted to save their children from choosing between life in a cartel and certain death. Up to 80 percent of the women had been sexually assaulted during their journey to Juarez. Many had spent fortunes on the journey.

Rathbone, a former journalist, had completed a parish assignment in Boston. Her mother’s family had immigrated from Cuba, and so she had some sense of what was stake, and felt it was time for her to see what she could do, and more importantly, what she could learn. In Boston, she had worked in a people-centered, community-based ministry among the homeless. And that is what she set out to do in Juarez. Very quickly, she came to struggle with the futility of her efforts. So many people. And border officials, acting for higher powers, who wanted to admit as few as possible. She wanted to flee until climbing one of the mountains to pray, and looking across the valley, she spotted a silhouetted statue of Jesus.

“Oh my God. Not to stay would be to run away. This is what I knew, all of a sudden: not to stay now would be to run away from him. And tell me, please, what in the world would there be to do after running away from Jesus?”

And so she stayed. Listened to stories. Organized children to collect trash. Set up a school with several other volunteers. Eventually, it was suggested she accompany families up the bridge to the border checkpoint where they could request asylum. It was thought her presence might help some get through. More often, though, they heard that there was no room (even though she later learned there were ample facilities sitting empty). And so she walked back down the bridge with those families. Presence.

She chronicles how a mass of refugees formed a community. Selected leaders. Established a list of asylum seekers, an order the community followed. Shared resources. Organized celebrations. Then as some succeeded in gaining entrance, others stepped up to lead.

Rathbone describes the pressure to set up big programs and how funders, and even her host bishop struggled to understand the person-centered ministry she engaged in. She writes:

“Small, real things. Small, real things. This is what I kept trying to remember and to trust. Not big, impressive things but small, real things are the way to love–with, through, and for the other. Small not because we can’t be bothered but because we are small ourselves.”

Often, her struggle was with herself. For example, she wrestled with her anger toward immigration officials representing an intransigent government. Or she despaired as family after family returned, especially after a more stringent HARP program. This program centered around a “credible fear” interview. If asylum seekers could not convince interviewers of the danger to their lives, the U.S. refused asylum and sent them back. And they could not re-apply. Consequently, they either had to return to the danger they fled, or try to find refuge with relatives living elsewhere.

Rathbone’s narrative is one in which she is kept, sometimes barely, by the scriptures and prayer–and the resilient faith of asylum seekers. Eventually, she gets help from the diocese, so that she never makes the march up the bridge unaccompanied.

Reading this narrative saddens one with the lack of generosity and humanitarian feeling of our country, which has only worsened. Far from the caricatures of asylum seekers as criminals, the people we meet on these pages are people I want as neighbors. They show determination, resilience, courage, integrity, and faith. Rathbone’s account offers a different vision of asylum seekers–one that looks beyond the challenges of settlement to the gift asylum seekers can be to a country. Along with that, her account reminds us that central to ministry is simply being the presence of Christ with people. Without that, we are just brash, arrogant Americans.

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program.