At the U.S.-Mexico border, Loyola law students learn to be people for others

Vega is one of 11 Loyola School of Law students who joined six faculty members on a week-long immersion trip to southern Arizona for a course called Immigration Practicum: Advancing International Human Rights Protections.

The border trip, one of two that occur over the year, is spearheaded by Loyola School of Law’s Center for the Human Rights of Children, an interdisciplinary academic center with a mission to advance and protect the rights of young people. Led by Clinical Professor of Law Katherine Kaufka Walts, who serves as the center’s director, and Sarah Diaz, the center’s associate director and director of the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic, faculty members at the center have more than 30 years combined experience working on migration and human rights issues as practitioners, advocates, and scholars.

“Many, many components of the University have been focused on this one issue: How do we serve and accompany migrants?” Michèle Alexandre, the dean of the School of Law, said.

Bearing witness at the border

The School of Law’s focus on the legal and human rights of migrant populations is rooted in a long Jesuit, Catholic tradition.

In the late 17th century, Jesuit missionary and cartographer Father Eusebio Kino, colloquially known as “the patron saint of the borderlands,” established more than 20 missions in Sonora, Mexico, and southern Arizona. Many historians credit him with introducing cattle to the region and helping to protect indigenous tribes from forced labor and colonial enslavement. Centuries later, in 1980, Reverend Pedro Arrupe, S.J., founded the Jesuit Refugee Service—an international aid organization dedicated to accompanying and advocating for forcibly displaced people.

Created, in part, as a response to the plight of Vietnamese refugees fleeing their homeland in the wake of the Vietnam War, the organization’s mission embodies the phrase “people for and with others,” derived from Arrupe’s seminal 1973 address to a group of Jesuit high school alumni in Valencia, Spain.

Deeply felt experiences like Vega’s are part of what Diaz hopes will connect students with that history and give them a more nuanced understanding of the ripple effects of U.S. immigration law and policy on social issues such as housing, health care access, family dynamics, and education. “We want students to see and understand the impact of law and policy on the people involved in these systems so that we’re not just speaking abstractly or theoretically about their legal underpinnings,” she said.

Several years ago, when Walts launched the immersion border trip— first in Jena, Louisiana, and then in Tucson, Arizona—one of her goals was to demonstrate how Loyola, as an academic institution, could boost the capacity of resource-strained legal advocacy groups operating near the border. Immigrants with attorneys are 10 times more likely to establish their right to remain in the United States than those without representation, according to data from the immigrant advocacy group Vera. Yet representation is woefully hard to come by: a full 67 percent of detained people in removal proceedings begun in December 2019 still had no attorney five years later. “For asylum seekers, [legal representation] can mean life or death,” Walts says.

In prior immigration trips, Loyola law students worked closely with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project (FIRRP) to develop country conditions reports for detainees, including those held in the Eloy Detention Center, roughly 50 miles northwest of Tucson. Country conditions documents, which can describe political unrest, natural disasters, violence, poverty, and human rights violations migrants experienced in their home countries, are a crucial step to meet the U.S. Department of Justice’s “credible fear of persecution or torture” for making an asylum claim before an immigration judge, says Monica Cordero-Vazquez, an adult legal program manager at FIRRP.

This year, due to the heightened sensitivities of legal partners, the direct-services aspect of the Arizona border trip was put on pause. But Diaz says the shift in focus opened opportunities for deeper engagement with legal advocacy groups and grassroots organizations whose work is intimately linked with migrants’ safety and welfare.

“It’s good to have the experience of actually providing services, but it’s another thing to bear witness in some of these spaces and understand the interconnected dynamics on the border,” Diaz said.

The religious roots of the sanctuary movement

In a recent publication that grew out of the Immigration Practicum, titled No Right to Life: Lives Lost and the Legalized Violence that Shaped a Humanitarian Crisis in the Arizona Borderlands, Diaz and her co-author Madeline Brashear (JD ’22), a Scheiber Fellow at the National Immigrant Justice Center, chronicle a 60-year history of U.S. immigration reforms beginning with the 1965 Hart-Celler Act “that converted traditional migration ‘into the picture of illegality.’”

Deterrence through fear, as noted in the paper, is a feature, not a bug, of U.S. Border Patrol policy. This is true not only in the psychological reverberations of widely publicized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests in workplaces and courtrooms in U.S. cities, immigrant advocates say, but also in the use of the Sonoran Desert as a dangerous catch basin for illegal border crossers. By funneling migrants to remote and hazardous desert areas, where water is scarce and summer temperatures can reach 118 degrees, the desert’s deadly environment acts as its own repellant.

Hours before touring the border wall, students visited the square brick office of No More Deaths, a faith-based, largely volunteer group that distributes tens of thousands of gallons of water along migrant trails, to learn about the human impact of the decades-long policy.

Speaking to students and faculty inside a small, fluorescent-lit room, Bryce Peterson, a No More Deaths volunteer, pointed to a mural-sized “death map” marking places where the remains of almost 4,500 migrants have been recovered since 1990 in Pima and Mariposa Counties, which lie within the Sonoran Desert.

Compiled by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner and Humane Borders, the data reflects a “prevention through deterrence” strategy deployed by U.S. Border Patrol that, according to Peterson, has resulted in many of these deaths, often through dehydration and injury.

“That’s why the places where people are crossing are so remote and dangerous: this idea that people won’t want to migrate because it’s so dangerous,” Peterson says. “We know this is not true. People will still cross because they need to. What we’re doing is, very specifically, harm reduction.”

Days later, students visited the Southside Presbyterian Church, a Tucson house of worship regarded by many as the birthplace of the sanctuary movement. In the 1980s, amid bloody civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, the church provided safe harbor for refugees at risk of detention and deportation during a time when only about 2 percent of Central American applicants were being granted asylum in the U.S., says Leslie Carlson, a member of the church. Galvanized by shared religious convictions and extensive media coverage, hundreds of other churches, many of them Catholic, joined the effort, sheltering migrants and igniting a sanctuary movement that soon stretched from Central America to Canada.

“It was indeed an underground railroad. It just grew organically, because people saw that it was the right thing to do, especially people of faith,” Carlson said.

Called to act

Kavisha Prajapati (JD ’25), a first-generation, Indian-born immigrant who arrived in the United States at age two, says hearing speakers from No More Deaths and Southside Presbyterian Church was deeply empowering. “It reaffirmed to me that being a lawyer is important, and legal change is important to social change,” she said. “To see and hear from people at Southside Presbyterian who are not just saying, ‘We love our neighbors. We believe people should be here,’ but actively putting themselves on the line to hold that space for migrants was really powerful and maybe even challenged some notions that I’ve had.”

And to be sure, the open-armed view of many Christian religious organizations of the era toward migrants, including the National Federation of Priests’ Councils representing more than 33,000 Catholic clerics, is in step with Jesuit, Catholic tradition, says Michael Canaris, an associate professor at Loyola specializing in Ignatian spirituality and immigration studies.

“All of the Jesuit experience in the United States is forged through the lens of migration,” he said. “Virtually all of the Jesuit universities that were founded in the United States were founded by immigrant Jesuits. And almost without exception, these schools were originally founded to educate migrants and the children of migrants.”

Moreover, Canaris says, the late Pope Francis publicly championed migrants’ rights, building on a long pontifical tradition that stretches back to the years immediately following World War II—a time of displacement for millions of Europeans— when Pope Pius XII wrote the apostolic constitution Exsul Familia Nazarethana, translated in English as The Migrant Family of Nazareth.

“We have in our tradition the idea that Jesus himself is a migrant, that the Holy Family were migrants,” Canaris said. “The Old Testament contains verses, like, ‘You shall treat the alien as a native among you for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.’ The Book of Matthew says, ‘I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.’’’

The compassion underlying that tradition is, by his own admission, what animates Grant Everly (JD ’25, MSW ’25), a dual-degree student in law and social work who leads children’s worship groups at Agapé Chicago church in Rogers Park and, as part of his degree program internship, counsels forcibly displaced children at the Marjorie Kovler Center, a mental health clinic near Loyola’s Lakeshore campus.

Everly told me the trip brought into focus his desire to engage in “truly transformative social work” in the mold of Jane Addams, a Progressive Era reformer and social worker who founded Chicago’s Hull House, one of the earliest settlement houses in the United States.

“A lot of what I am thinking about is how to shift these broader narratives,” he said. “The trauma and abuses we’re seeing aren’t going to be transformed by me representing someone in their detention hearing, even though that’s a needed service. So it was enlightening to see that there’s a world here I want to be tapping into.”

Vega, for her part, was left hungry for justice—and ready to fight for it. “My family raised me with the mentality that if you have the power to do so, build a longer table, not a higher wall.”

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