Religion, Immigration and the 2024 Elections

Over the last six months, I’ve been covering religion and immigration for Sojourners Magazine.

I traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, Lampedusa, Italy, southern Arizona and downtown Los Angeles to hear from migrants making their way. I heard from Muslim aid workers on the front lines providing sanctuary and nuns serving the vulnerable asylum seekers living on the streets of Skid Row. I sat with mothers weeping over their children and praying for safe passage at a cemetery just meters from the bollard-steel border wall that rips through the Sonoran wilderness like a rust-colored wound. 

In my latest for ReligionLink and as part of my “What You Missed Without Religion Class” series at Patheos, I reflect on what you need to know about faith and immigration ahead of the 2024 elections.

At the border, a shelter for -- and by -- women

Anyone crossing the U.S.-Mexico border faces a journey fraught with violence and danger.

But for women and children, that journey is even more treacherous. Not only are many fleeing violence at home — including gender-based violence — they also experience higher rates of violence en route. Torture, mutilation, sexual violence, femicide,disappearances, and additional health complications are common occurrences for female migrants making their way north.

That danger is amplified for the thousands of girls living in makeshift camps and tent cities along the U.S.-Mexico border without protection or accompanying support. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Kids In Need of Defense, “[u]naccompanied children are especially vulnerable to sexual violence, human trafficking, and exploitation by cartels and other criminal groups.”

Over the last few years, a group of Muslim women has stepped in to meet their needs in unique ways. Albergue Assabil (“the Shelter of the Path”), the first Muslim shelter along the U.S.-Mexico border, has been in operation since June 2022 under the leadership of Sonia Tinoco García, founder and president of the Latina Muslim Foundation. According to staff, the shelter served nearly 3,000 migrants in its first two years of operation. Many of those migrants have been women, attracted to the shelter because of its separate men’s and women’s facilities and the fact that Albergue Assabil is a female-led shelter.

And it’s not only Muslim women finding sanctuary under the shade of the shelter’s blue dome; there have also been other female immigrants looking to García and her team for assistance as they make the perilous journey north.

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…