Their church basement used to host quinceañeras. Now it houses Mauritanian Muslims

“They call me Mom,” said Maria Elena Montalvo, pastor of Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bell, Calif., as she worked with Dioulde and Jallo, two asylum seekers from Mauritania, to mop the floors of the church basement where they have been staying since September 2023.

Dioulde and Jallo are two of 20 Mauritanians living in a space that used to be rented out for quinceañeras in the largely working-class area of southeast Los Angeles, where the population is 89.1 percent Latino. Now, in a space that families used to celebrate their daughters’ 15th birthdays under the sprinkling lights of a chandelier, there are rows of futon-style beds lined up against the walls, with folded Muslim prayer rugs, gallon-sized water bottles, and plastic sandals neatly stacked alongside. (Sojourners is withholding the full names of migrants in this story, at their request, due to the sensitivities of immigration status.)

Showing Dioulde how to work the mop bucket and telling Jallo to get the chicken out of the freezer so it can thaw for dinner that night, Montalvo cuts the figure of a mom giving her kids directions on their chores.

But her daughter, Jennifer Coria, 24, who works at the church, said with a wry smile, “She’s nicer to them than she is to us at home.”

For more than six years, Montalvo’s church has made space available to migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers arriving in Bell from countries in Central and South America and Mexico. But over the last nine months, Mauritanians like Dioulde and Jallo have come to call the 100-year-old church their home as well.

They arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border last summer…

BorderLine Impossible

As Hamza starts tellling his story, tears roll slowly down his cheeks.

Sitting on the back of a white pick-up truck with other Ghanaians, Hamza and his fellow countrymen are within eyesight of the rusted steel bollard fencing that demarcates the dividing line between San Ysidro, California and Tijuana, Mexico.

On the other side of la linea, Hamza hopes to claim asylum in the United States.

It’s been a long, laborious journey to get this far. Hamza left Ghana for Brazil the day after his only daughter was born, which also happened to be Eid al-Fitr. That was May 2, 2022. It took Hamza another three, arduous months to make his way by foot, truck, train, and bus across the Amazon and then through Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Guatemala to Mexico. Along the way, Hamza said he saw dead bodies hidden in the bush, witnessed multiple assaults, and suffered the pangs of frequent hunger without adequate access to halal food. He spent another one and a half months in Mexico, bouncing from shelter to shelter, struggling to maintain a halāl diet and keep to his daily cycle of prayers.

Then he heard about Albergue Assabil (“the Shelter of the Path”), a sanctuary in Tijuana for Muslim migrants run by the Latina Muslim Foundation (LMF) of San Diego, California.   

Sitting outside the shelter, tantalizingly close to his goal, he is filled with hope and fear, expectation and exhaustion. “Next week, insha’Allah, I will be in the U.S.,” he said.

Hamza is far from alone.

Described as a “waiting room” for “thousands of migrants who try to reach the border between Mexico and the US every month” and a principal landing point for deportees, Tijuana has taken center stage in the ever-unfolding drama of migrants’ journeys to the U.S.

Among them are Muslims like Hamza, from places like Chechnya and Afghanistan, Syria and Ghana. According to Eduardo Campos Lima, writing for Arab News, “thousands of people from Southeast Asia, Middle East and Africa try to reach the US-Mexico border every month.” Although there are no firm statistics about these “Muslim migrant flows,” organizations in the region report that more-and-more are making their way north from Brazil to the U.S./Mexico border.

For Muslim migrants, the “normal” stresses of labor precarity, family separation and potential imprisonment, deportation, or death are compounded by additional complications. Arriving in Tijuana, Muslim migrants face added challenges of finding shelter where they can consume halāl food, access facilities for prayer, and procure information about asylum in a language they can easily comprehend. If they are able to cross over, a triple bind of Islamophobia, anti-migrant sentiment, and a host of American fears about crime, disease, and a loss of cultural privilege await.

To provide a humane, and helpful, place for Muslim migrants to land in Tijuana Sonia Tinoco García and LMF constructed a purpose-built Muslim shelter. Opening in the border city’s Zona Norte neighborhood in March 2022, the shelter features separate men’s and women’s facilities, a prayer and wudu area, halāl food, Quran classes, and legal services to assist migrants. In the first year of operation, they served over 1,000 asylum seekers, deportees, and others seeking shelter.

Refugee Converts Aren’t ‘Fraudsters': the Fraught Politics of Convert Asylum in Germany

When you visit Trinity Lutheran Church in the Berlin district of Steglitz you’re going to meet a lot of different people, from all over the world: the German woman who thinks Mississippi is the greatest place in the world, the family from Bangladesh who comes to the English-language service every other week, the pastor — Rev. Dr. Gottfried Martens — who has learned Farsi in addition to English and German in order to minister to his community.

Then, you might get to know the hundreds of men and women who have found sanctuary at Trinity, seeking to remain in Germany and not be sent home to places as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere.

This is a community whose lives are in limbo. They’ve applied for asylum on the basis of their conversion to Christianity and they claim that they will face religious, social, and political repercussions if forced to return to their countries of origin. Some fear for their lives.

Between 20,000 and 40,000 refugees are seeking asylum in Germany on the grounds of religious persecution because of their conversion to Christianity, according to a 2019 Open Doors report. Amid sharp national debates about anti-refugee sentiment, religious literacy, and religious freedom, a number of evangelical leaders have called for changes to the process of officially evaluating refugee conversion.

Currently, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) judges the sincerity of conversion and the severity of potential threats to asylum seekers’ lives. There is, however, a lack of explicit standards, clear criteria, or legal precedent for these examinations, and the BAMF grants asylum at significantly different rates in different parts of the country.

To say the least, this issue is fraught with multiple angles, opinions, and perspectives to consider. The process is mired by Islamophobic assumptions, a supposedly secular and neutral state making decisions in matters of religion, and the messy and mysterious question of “authentic faith.”

But for those seeking asylum, the issue is clear — “I’ve converted and my conversion puts my life, and the lives of those I love, in danger. I need asylum in Germany.”

Reporting on the topic for Christianity Today, I spoke with refugee converts, local pastors, evangelical leaders, scholars of Islamic law, government ministers, immigration authorities, and everyday Germans about how the issues around the question of judging asylum cases might be untangled.

The end result is that there is no clear answer, no silver bullet, no rubric that can be universally applied. Blame for the inefficiencies and failures of the process cannot be easily allocated — it isn’t an “Islam” problem, a secular government problem, or an evangelical Christian problem. It’s a shared problem, one that must activate multiple stakeholders with varying perspectives, postures, and positions on faith, the state, and religious freedom.

Nonetheless, in the course of my reporting, I did sense that there is the possibility for legal experts, politicians, government ministers, pastors, and religious actors to work together to seek the best solution for those involved.

These questions are not going to go away on their own. Instead, as the church body at Trinity Lutheran Church in Steglitz testifies, we are likely to continue to confront such questions in the years to come given the ongoing entanglement of people, traditions, and nations across the world.

Germany’s struggle offers a telling case-study for the issues we might encounter and the possibilities that lie before us. Perhaps, there is a “third way” that religious actors and the secular state can walk together to protect human rights and maintain peace and order.

Time will tell. For now, take a moment to explore an issue that is far more complex than it at first appears.