The Difficult and Inspiring Situation Now at the US-Mexico Border

If there were a way to make a heat map for pain and suffering in the USA right now, I’m confident we would see a huge red circle over the border dividing El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico. That circle is burning exceptionally bright now.

Last month, I traveled to El Paso with a group of teachers on a World Leadership School program. The teachers came from four schools, including a Columbus Academy (OH) team that included primary, middle, and high school teachers. Our goal was to gather perspectives on immigration to teach this complex subject in new ways.

We arrived shortly after President Trump issued a dizzying series of Executive Orders that quickly shut down and militarized the US-Mexico border. We spoke to district court judges, nonprofit leaders, immigration attorneys, representatives from the Border Patrol, and immigrants. I blogged about our experience after our first day here. But then I stopped writing. I needed more time to process the intense and challenging contradictions we were experiencing.

So here goes.

The most challenging part of the experience was reconciling the stories of the individuals we met against the larger immigration system impacting them. The individuals we met were profoundly human, inspiring, and earnest. The system felt complex, bureaucratic, and arbitrary.?

I’ll start by sharing the stories of the individuals:?

• The son of a Border Patrol Agent, who could not follow in his father’s footsteps because of a football injury, works instead as a spokesman at the Border Patrol Museum in El Paso. He told us that in 2021, there were 15 border agents killed, which was the deadliest year ever for BPL. He’s married to a Mexican woman from Juárez, who is now a US Citizen. He proudly shared that his father was part of a team that intercepted ultralight airplanes that were caught carrying drugs from Mexico into the nearby Chihuahuan Desert.
• A director of one of the large refugee and asylum organizations in El Paso broke into tears when she described the impacts of the funding freeze. Refugees often have to wait in refugee camps for an average wait time of 17 years before being placed in the USA and other receiving countries around the world. After going through a 2-year background check required by the USA, approved refugees may have to wait another four years. Refugees inside the USA who had approved 90-day funding can no longer receive any funds, which has sent refugee organizations scrambling to make up the difference.
• One Franciscan priest says his faith calls him to help whoever is in need. He runs a retreat that has for years offered housing and food to any immigrants in need, regardless of documentation. Though virtually no immigrants are passing through El Paso at the moment, this priest said he would stand up to any raid by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by demanding a warrant, wearing his Franciscan habit, and allowing himself to be filmed for the evening news.
• A second immigration attorney helps asylum seekers make their case in court. She said only a tiny fraction of immigrants can successfully meet all the requirements, which include persecution or credible fear of persecution because of “race, religion, nationality, social group, or political opinion.” They also must be present in the USA to present their application, which is no longer possible because asylum seekers are turned away at the border, and the CBP app for scheduling asylum interviews has been shut down. “Don’t do immigration law,” she said. “It’s hard on your soul. The cases you lose are the ones that keep you up at night.”?
• A US District Court Judge, who stayed after his morning hearings to speak with us, said that federal prosecutors are taking a much stricter approach based on new instructions from the US Attorney General. Nearly all unlawful entries are being prosecuted, even if there is no criminal history, no arms, and no one is in danger. He works to make eye contact with everyone who comes before him and pronounce the person’s name correctly. He said people in Juárez can see the lovely homes and cars in El Paso. “I understand why they come.”
• We met one of the last asylum seekers admitted into the United States before the CBP app was shut down. This man and his wife owned a clothing store in Caracas, Venezuela, and had to flee the country after being extorted and threatened by gangs. He journeyed with his wife and three children through the Darien Gap. He described days of hiking in the muddy rainforest with little water or food. He saw a Haitian mother wade across a rushing river as she held the hands of her two small children, one of whom was swept away by the current and drowned. He walked past the corpses of immigrants who died along the way. He faced the constant risk of assault and robbery. Somehow, his family survived. He was grateful to be in the USA and pledged to do his best to stay here: “We will study, work, pay our taxes, do everything correctly.” But his chances of being approved for asylum, especially after Trump terminated Temporary Protection Status (TPS) for all Venezuelans, are slim. He and his family will likely be deported.
• Another immigrant we spoke to was a corporate lawyer who left Venezuela after being persecuted by the government. Her sister is a US citizen. This lawyer said she would do everything by the law, including leaving the USA if she must when her TPS ends. Yet, being deported back to Venezuela is not an option for her. “If I get off the plane in Venezuela coming from the United States, I will be taken away by the police, never to be seen again.” She said she would look for other countries for asylum, including Canada or Spain. In many cases, the deportation of Venezuelan asylum seekers is a clear case of refoulement, which happens when people are forced to return to dangerous situations in their home countries. It's against international law and violates the rights of refugees and asylum seekers.?
• Once back home in Colorado, I talked to a friend who works in law enforcement for my county. He described the growing power and impunity of Mexican cartels within cities across Colorado. He said he and his fellow officers are relieved that security is being tightened on the border.

Those are the perspectives of the inspiring individuals. Now, I’ll describe what I learned about the system. I’m far from an expert on immigration policy (here’s a good overview), so I’ll share what I heard over and over again from the people we met:

• Any border, including the US-Mexico border, must be controlled and respected. Illegal crossings at the border of migrants from around the world into the USA is a huge problem and reached all-time highs during the Biden administration.?
• US immigration law is a confusing patchwork of policies needing an overhaul. At its core, US immigration policy is based on quotas that limit the number of visas awarded each year to immigrants from each country. The visas are awarded via a byzantine system of preference categories. As you can see from the US Visa Bulletin for February 2025, wait times for many visa categories are 10-20 years. “People always say immigrants should enter the country legally,” said immigration attorney Albert Armendariz. “But in most cases, they can’t come in legally. It’s impossible.”
• Immigration policy is not as clear-cut between party lines as it may seem. President Barack Obama deported more undocumented migrants than any other president. Biden passed changes to asylum procedures near the end of his term, dramatically curtailing immigration.
• The implementation of immigration law varies widely based on the judge and the state. In the USA, 94 US District Courts are organized into 12 regional circuits. Certain judges approve asylum cases 5% of the time, whereas other judges are at 90%. Asylum approval rates vary dramatically by circuit, but there are at least 50% swings between judges in every circuit. This means that judges are interpreting the same laws in very different ways. “It’s all over the map,” said one legal expert. “It’s very unfortunate.”
• A related issue is the massive flow of illegal guns from the US into Mexico, which has fueled cartel violence in Mexico. The US Supreme Court began deliberating this week on whether the government of Mexico can continue in its legal quest to win $10 billion in damages from US-based gun manufacturers. This case has far-reaching consequences.
• The Mexican cartels are well known for trafficking fentanyl and other drugs across the border, but in recent years, they have gotten into trafficking migrants across the border. “Their business model has been turned upside down in the last two weeks, and they are wondering how to replace the revenue,” said one expert, who said the cartels increasingly target Border Patrol.
• A university professor we met traced the thread of racism throughout immigration law, starting with The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and running through the current country quotas of today’s system. He made a simple but undeniable statement about immigration law, which stuck in my head: “Unless policymakers are descended from Native Americans, all immigration laws and policies in the US are made by immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.”

I don’t have easy answers to reconcile the deep humanity of the individuals we met with an immigration system that needs reform. However, polarity thinking is an approach leaders often use to grapple with similar vexing issues. The idea of polarity thinking is that challenging problems are usually not jigsaw puzzles with a final solution. Instead, they are based on opposite and irreconcilable poles, which can never be separated or brought together. Familiar polarities include inhaling and exhaling (we must do both) and activity vs. rest. Familiar polarities in systems include stability vs. change, centralization vs. decentralization, etc.

In the case of the US-Mexico border, we have individuals vs. systems.

Problems based on polarities can never be solved; they can only be managed.? If we manage both poles effectively, not everyone will get what they want, but at least we’ll experience the benefits of both poles. Two things must be true at once for a polarity to work. For instance, we need a secure and respected border, and we need to support humans in their search for a better life. When we prioritize one pole over another, we reach a crisis, which is where we have been since at least 2014, when violence in Central America sparked a wave of illegal immigration into the USA that has increased ever since.?

The final common thread we heard in El Paso is that immigration policy is often made by lawmakers in Washington, DC, who have no first-hand experience with immigration. “Immigration policy could be improved, but we need adults in Washington,” said one legal expert we met. “If you can solve that problem,? you can solve the rest.”