Image Courtesy of Derek Penwell.
To the sojourners we were commanded to welcome:
Since Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the federal government can legally turn back asylum seekers before they set foot on U.S. soil, I keep thinking of a photograph from some years back, just prior to COVID.
You probably remember it. A young father named Óscar and his daughter Valeria, not yet two years old, face down on the bank of the Rio Grande. Her arm is draped around his neck. She held on to him until she couldn’t anymore (See photo above).
They were from El Salvador. Óscar had sold his motorcycle and borrowed money to get his family north. Valeria liked to dance and brush her family’s hair. They were desperate people the way the rest of us are desperate: they wanted a life and a little bit of safety. They wanted to give their daughter a future.
How bad does your life have to be to travel the length of a foreign country and risk the life of your twenty-three-month-old child in the process, just to escape it?
They’d been waiting in Matamoros, Mexico, to present themselves legally at a port of entry in Brownsville, Texas. The wait, however, was indefinite and in impossible conditions. And so one Sunday evening in June 2019, Óscar and Valeria stepped into the river. He didn’t make it back to safety. Neither did she. Tania, his wife, stood on the bank and watched them disappear in the current.
Last Thursday, the Supreme Court of the United States made official what that family already knew before braving the currents of the Rio Grande: the Court made it legally possible for the government to keep the door closed long enough that many desperate people may never get close enough to ask for asylum at all. In a 6-3 ruling, the Court held that the federal government can legally turn away asylum seekers standing on the Mexican side of the border before they set foot on U.S. soil, which is to say, from ever even asking for asylum. In other words, those seeking refuge from danger and economic violence don’t even get the chance to plead for mercy.
You deserve better from us. I wish I had a more profound way to say it, one that could do the kind of healing work necessary to bind up wounds that, if we didn’t inflict them, we certainly didn’t do anything to alleviate them.
What was done to you is wrong. It’d feel like a relief to be able to say that the whole thing is complicated, that it’s a difficult policy question requiring balance and nuance. All of which may be true. But some things are wrong, no matter how complicated they may be. No matter who thinks it’s necessary or how many, some things are just wrong.
And I want to say something else, to a different audience, the one that’s been telling us for years that this is a Christian nation.
The God of scripture had opinions about this stuff. Strong ones, it turns out. In the Torah, God didn’t merely suggest that Israel be kind to the stranger. God commanded the construction of cities of refuge, six of them, distributed across the land, places where the pursued could run and be safe while their case was heard.
Just so we’re clear, the right to reach safety before judgment fell was written into the legal architecture of ancient Israel. It was law. God said: build places where people can run for protection. Justice, not charity.
Ironic, isn’t it? The people who want the Ten Commandments posted in courtrooms are cheering a ruling that runs against one of the Bible’s clearest legal instincts: the pursued should be able to reach safety before judgment falls. But they did a hell of a lot more than gut a policy. By judicial decree, they made it illegal to ask for mercy at the border.
Jesus had a great deal to say about the “weightier matters of the law,” you know, stuff like justice, mercy, and faithfulness. In Matthew 23, Jesus torched the scribes and Pharisees for merely tithing faithfully, even down to their spices, while neglecting the people bearing God’s image standing in front of them. And he wasn’t particularly gentle with his criticism, when you get down to it. Neither, I think, should we be.
I honestly don’t know how to get that photograph of Óscar and Valeria out of my head. I don’t know what to do with the fact that, here we are, seven years later, with the law now arranged to ensure that the next family waiting in Matamoros has no legal recourse at all.
How do I scrub my brain so I don’t have to see that little girl’s arm wrapped around her papi’s neck?
I wish I knew.
What I do know is that we don’t get to call this a Christian nation while forcing desperate people into the river. We don’t get to do both. For those who follow Jesus, the claim is too specific, too relentlessly on the side of the vulnerable for us to have it both ways.
Valeria held on as long as she could.
We’re still here. What do we do with that?
Finally, what do we who claim to follow Jesus owe you, the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free outside our golden door?
It’s certainly more than we’ve given so far. And for that, I’m sorry.
Be gentle and brave,
Derek
Tony Dixon
The Rev. Derek Penwell
The Rev. Derek Penwell is Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. This is a free post from his Substack blog, Heretic Adjacent.