Episcopal Diocese Defends Migrant Shelter, Citing "Jesus" and "Constitution"

On March 11, the Department of Homeland Security sent the Episcopal Diocese of the Rio Grande a letter insinuating illegal activities at a diocesan shelter, including human trafficking.

The letter, sent by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, states that the Department of Homeland Security, of which FEMA is a part, has “significant concerns” about organizations receiving FEMA grants using those funds to engage in or facilitate “illegal activities.”

Hamilton wrote that such organizations, such as the diocese’s migrant shelter, “may be guilty of encouraging or inducing an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States” and “transporting or moving illegal aliens, harboring, concealing or shielding from detection illegal aliens or applicable conspiracy aiding or abetting.”

In an online video posted on March 14, Bishop Michael Hunn of the Rio Grande diocese said the letter amounted to a not-so-subtle accusation that the diocese was engaged in human trafficking. Hunn did not share the letter with Sojourners. (The Denver Post published a copy of a similar letter.)

“I’m insulted by the insinuation that we have been involved in anything illegal or immoral,” Hunn said in the video after reading excerpts from the letter.

Immigrant churches standing in sacred resistance against Trump’s “shock and awe” immigration policies

“WE ARE FULL of fear, but we are not helpless,” said Giselle, a 40-year-old living in a mixed-status immigrant family in Chicago. “We have the power of God, the power of the church, and the power of the Holy Spirit on our side,” she said.

Giselle is the mother of two children who are U.S. citizens. She is long settled in Chicago, having arrived two decades ago from Michoacán, Mexico. She lives in a three-bedroom apartment in Chicago’s Little Village — known as the “Mexico of the Midwest” or “La Villita” by locals — and works as a bookkeeper and worships at a local Pentecostal church where, she told Sojourners, there are other immigrants without permanent legal status singing next to her on Sundays. She volunteers and donates to local charities and generally tries to be a good neighbor — offering her time, talent, and treasure to others in her little corner of Chicago. Giselle said she has built her life in the U.S. and that her adolescent children know nothing else. “We are proud to be Mexican American, to live life here and be part of this community,” she said.

Like thousands of others across the U.S., Giselle and her family do not know how the Trump administration’s stated mass deportation policies will play out. But as policies are put in place and enforcement efforts ramp up, questions keep running through Giselle’s mind: How will I protect my family? What will happen to my immigration status? How will I be able to seek safety in the U.S.? “These are just some of the questions that handicap my ability to live,” she said.

As the Trump administration continues to implement its mass deportation plans, a swirling vortex of pain, fear, and uncertainty dominates the conversation among immigrants and faith communities across the nation. People of faith are responding with hope, resilience, and a steady resolve to be the best neighbors they can be to immigrants in need.

Interfaith Action at American Borders

Every border has a story. Every dividing line on a map, every marker and monument and wall and fence comes with a narrative.  

And at the U.S./Mexico border, that story is an increasingly international and interfaith one.  

Not only are people on the move arriving at the U.S.’s southern border representing a broader swathe of global society and the world’s religions, but organizations across a range of faith traditions are teaming up to provide for their needs — both immediately and in terms of securing their rights to movement and to seek asylum once they arrive safely in the country.  

“An increasingly interfaith affair”  

Rick, 46, a San Diego resident who volunteers with various organizations at the U.S. border with Baja California, Mexico, said he’s noticed the uptick in migrants with backgrounds he would not necessarily expect. 

“I mean, across the years, it’s traditionally been a lot of people from across Latin America — Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala,” he said, “but nowadays, my Spanish is pretty useless. 

“People from all over the world are making their way here,” he said.  

In spring 2024, Rick regularly came down to the Iris Ave. trolley station in South San Diego — just 3 miles from the San Ysidro Border Crossing — to hand out waters to new arrivals waiting for onward transportation in the shade of eucalyptus trees next to the station.  

When he showed up, Rick said he was surprised by the people he met there. “There were Sikhs from Punjab, Buddhists from China, Christians from Haiti, Muslims from Bangladesh and Afghanistan,” he said, “it was like the United Nations in South San Diego.” 

That was quite the shift, Rick said. “It used to be mostly Catholics, a smattering of Pentecostals and Protestants; I met a few Mormons from Mexico a few years ago. But now, it’s an increasingly interfaith affair,” Rick said.

Haunted Land, Popular Saints: Rituals of Death along the U.S./Mexico Border

It’s a gray, mid-May morning in Panteón Municipal #1, a city cemetery in Tijuana’s Zona Norte neighborhood. Alberto, the gatekeeper, saunters down a rocky pathway lined with palms, jacaranda, and gravestones to a prominent, red brick chapel, built over the tomb of one Juan Castillo Morales.

The shrine is covered wall-to-wall with candles, flowers, and plaques with names and messages of thanks to “Juan Soldado” (Juan the Soldier), as Castillo is known. Amid the array sits a stylized bust of a young soldier, resplendent in military attire, this morning bearing a black rosary and a blue-and-white Los Angeles Dodgers snapback hat.

The shrine is one of many unofficial memorials where loved ones remember lives of immigrants lost along the U.S.-Mexico border. From chapels erected around the graves of unofficial saints such as Castillo to digital memorials people carry with them into the desert to the crosses, flowers, and other mementos left along the border boundary itself, these monuments not only pay tribute to the individuals lost but bear witness to the ubiquity of death — and faith — in America’s southwestern borderlands.

Rosalba Ruiz-Hernández, a 46-year-old mother of five, stands in the shrine. Ruiz-Hernández, originally from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, was deported back to Tijuana after her own failed attempt to start a new life in the U.S. Two of her grown children still live in Long Beach, Calif., near her former husband. They are undocumented, she said, but they make a living. Two others are in Tijuana with her. Matías, her middle son, died in the desert on his way north to join his siblings in Southern California.

“I come to Juanito’s chapel to give thanks for the children who have their new life in Long Beach,” Rosalba said, “and to pray for Matías’ soul.”

Juan Soldado is an unlikely saint. According to the Roman Catholic Church, he isn’t a saint at all. On Feb. 17, 1938, Castillo was executed for the rape and murder of Olga Camacho Martínez, a young girl who is buried in a cemetery just up the road. William Calvo-Quirós, an associate professor of American and Latino/a Studies at the University of Michigan, said the young soldier, a convicted murderer and rapist, transformed over time into Juan Soldado — a “folk saint” who is venerated as a victim of state violence.

And Tijuana holds many such stories, of border “saints” who, in death and in life, suffered at the intersections between worlds. And beyond Tijuana, there are numerous other unofficial saints’ shrines populating the U.S.-Mexico borderlands: El Tiradito in Tucson, Ariz.; Jesús Malverde in Culiacán, Sinaloa; Niño Fidencio in Espinazo, Nuevo León; the Virgen de San Juan del Valle, outside McAllen, Texas; and El Señor de los Milagros in San Antonio. Each memorial is part of a rich tapestry of rituals and beliefs that immigrants and their loved ones carry with them, or depend on, to sustain them amid migration, uncertainty, and death.

Nobody knows how many of these saints exist, wrote historian Paul J. Vanderwood. But the popular devotions and informal canonizations that emerged around them are a testament to the unjust circumstances of their deaths and, by extension, the deaths of many in the borderlands. These are souls with “unfinished” business, Vanderwood wrote — they “clamor for assistance” and cry out for justice.

Hundreds of migrants die every year along one of the world’s deadliest land borders. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency reports that 8,050 people died attempting to cross the border between 1998 and 2020. The agency recorded an additional 568 deaths in 2021 and 895 in 2022 — the most deaths recorded in a single year. Many more, who die from some form of exposure (heat stroke, hypothermia, or dehydration), are left unaccounted for and unclaimed. Then there are those who die somewhere in Mexico or Central and South America, en route to the U.S.-Mexico border.

This, said Calvo-Quirós, makes the border a nearly 2,000-mile stretch of “haunted land.”

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.

What faith and immigration leaders are saying about Kamala Harris' candidacy

The prospect of Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee in August — and the possibility of a Harris presidency in 2025 — shook up the race for president last week.

And among faith leaders, it has reinvigorated hopes that her leadership could signal a commitment to both the rights and dignity of immigrants, as well as a secure, well-managed border.

Many fear a Donald Trump presidency and what it might mean for migrants already living in the U.S. or arriving at its borders. But President Joe Biden’s decidedly mixed record has also garnered condemnation from faith leaders who called his most recent executive orders — severely restricting most asylum claims at the border and expediting the removal of unauthorized migrants — as “cruel and racist.”

And though people of faith — and the wider U.S. population — want comprehensive immigration reform with increasing urgency, the practicalities of bipartisan legislation have remained elusive for multiple administrations, Republican and Democrat.

The end result is a status quo at the border that leaders like Dylan Corbett find unacceptable and hope Harris might be able to change.

“We need a new approach to managing migration at the border, one that works for our country, for border communities and the next generation of American immigrants looking to raise their families with dignity,” said the executive director of Hope Border Institute, an organization working to advance justice on the border in El Paso, Tx.

When asked what he expected from Harris on immigration in the months to come, Corbett emphasized that responsibility to reform the country’s immigration system lies with all sides. “Both parties need to undertake a serious examination of conscience on immigration policy, which has been needlessly politicized, to the detriment of all;” he said, “humane and safe immigration policies are possible and within reach.

“The only thing lacking is political leadership,” he said.

"Christ crucified on the streets of Los Angeles"

It’s an overcast Saturday morning on Gladys Avenue in Skid Row — a 54-block area in downtown Los Angeles, home to one of the country’s most stable populations of people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. 

Andrew Jiang, of Alhambra, a city in western Los Angeles county, is there with a group of around 15 other volunteers with the Friars and Sisters Poor of Jesus Christ to serve chicken, rice, and vegetables to some 150 people living on Skid Row. On other days, a team of friars, nuns, and volunteers will walk block to block, distributing up to 400 sandwiches to more than 200 people. 

Jiang, who has volunteered on Skid Row since 2018, said, “You get to know some of the people, develop a relationship. We try to do more than just hand out food, but talk and get to know their stories.” 

Sister Goretti and others serve migrant families on Skid Row (PHOTO: Courtesy Sisters Poor of Jesus Christ Los Angeles)

In recent months, Jiang said he has noticed, among the usual crowd queuing in line, an upswing in the number of new faces, many of them from Central and South America. “Immigrants,” Jiang said. “In the last five years, I hadn’t met a single one down here, but now we meet at least a few every week.” 

Skid Row is seen by many as the epicenter of the U.S.’s unhoused epidemic; it’s now home to an increasing number of migrant families from Colombia and Venezuela, being bused in by Republican governors in border states like Texas or making their way here to seek asylum. 

According to The Los Angeles Times, “there are more than 100 families living there now, with more than 200 children,” many of whom are recent migrants. While the majority stay at privately funded mission shelters that accept families, a smaller number of these families now reside “in an array of large tents, pup tents and tarp shelters” along Towne Avenue, near Fourth Street, in what the Times called a “last resort for families that have run out of options.” 

But Giovanni, a Skid Row resident originally from Mexico, said more families are running out of options. “Whole families from South America are coming here, with their kids and everything,” he said. “They say the numbers are low, but I’ve seen them increasing.”

And as more migrants end up on Skid Row, a Catholic order is stepping in to meet their needs.

This is their story.

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…

"Cruel and racist": Faith leaders decry Biden's border shutdown

At a White House event hosting border-town mayors on June 4, President Joe Biden announced an executive order that would temporarily shut down the U.S.’s southern border to asylum requests when average daily migrant crossings at legal ports of entry exceed 2,500. The border would then reopen if the average falls below 1,500.

Many faith leaders expressed deep disappointment at the announcement. While they agree something needs to be done about increased numbers at the border, they told Sojourners that Biden’s unilateral actions are the wrong approach. They also expect the executive order to be struck down in the courts.

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge — formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service — said in an email to Sojourners, “We are deeply concerned about the legality of this executive order and the moral implications of turning away asylum-seeking families desperate for protection.

“This is a troubling departure from an approach that balances the carrot and stick in favor of hardline restrictions,” added Vignarajah. “Our fear is that such restrictions would ultimately deny protection to persecuted individuals and families based on increasingly arbitrary factors, and not on the actual merits of their claim.”

Torn: Why Latino Evangelicals Don't Always Support Immigration Reform

Miguel Cárdenas came to the U.S. as a child in 1980. His parents brought him from the western Mexican state of Jalisco across the Rio Grande without documentation.

They went on to work for farms across Texas with the hope of giving their son a better life. Then, on Nov. 6, 1986, when Cárdenas was in fifth grade, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act into law, allowing around 3 million immigrants who entered the U.S. without papers before 1982 — including the Cárdenas family — the ability to apply for legal status.

“It’s the classic American dream,” Miguel, now 48, said. “I am eternally grateful to my parents and Reagan for making my life what it is today.”

That life is filled with family barbecues and hunting trips with his wife and three kids; building his insurance business in Houston; and volunteering his time with his local church, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Republican party in the greater Houston area. He enthusiastically supported former President Donald Trump’s campaigns in 2016 and 2020.

“Sometimes, people are surprised to meet a Mexican migrant who is pro-Trump,” Cárdenas said. “But then I remind them that of all people, we are pro-family, pro-security, pro-business.”

As Cárdenas makes clear, Latinos do not always support candidates with progressive immigration policies — including policies that expand legal pathways to citizenship, enforce fewer penalties for those who immigrate without documentation, or end sanctions that devastate economies and fuel immigration. Experts and members of the community say Latinos of faith, with or without an immigration background, can feel torn between theologies that emphasize respect for the rule of law, a cultural emphasis on the family, allegiances to denominations that encourage support for conservative candidates, and their own personal trajectories, like that of Cárdenas, that can lead them one way or the other.

Faith and Immigration in U.S. Swing States

How are faith communities responding to the immigration crisis in the states that are likely to decide the 2024 presidential election?

According to numerous sources, immigration has become the single most important issue for voters in the 2024 election. But while changing policies in Texas or California often catch the most headlines, what swing state voters are thinking, saying, and doing about immigration is likely to play a key role in the election's outcome.

In this series with Sojourners, I report from communities in different states — including migrants, experts, and people of faith — to explore how immigration is a key part of the electorate’s journey.

Texas Ministries Say "the work of God can never be illegal"

Faith-based migrant ministries in Texas are used to operating in tough circumstances, including finding the right resources, meeting migrant needs, and funding their day-to-day work. But recent legal challenges have left some Texas faith leaders uncertain about the future of their ministries.

At the forefront of these legal challenges is Senate Bill 4, a bill passed by Texas lawmakers in 2023 which would make it a state crime for migrants to cross the border into Texas at any unauthorized point and allow authorities to arrest people for doing so. Though it was expected to go into effect in early March 2024, the bill was delayed by legal challenges from the U.S. Justice Department, framed as an unconstitutional infringement on the federal government’s power to set and enforce immigration law. The Supreme Court briefly cleared the way for the law’s implementation on March 19 before it was blocked just hours later when the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an administrative stay. The court heard formal appeals on April 3 in New Orleans, but at the time of publication, the law remains blocked.

Many ministries feel that if SB4 is allowed to stand, the bill and ensuing legal actions will erode existing welcoming efforts across the state.

“SB4 will unequivocally create an environment of fear and distrust in local Texas communities, erode welcoming efforts, and legitimize racial profiling,” said Melissa Cedillo, a board member of Hope Border Institute, an organization working to advance justice and end poverty on the U.S./Mexico border.

Cedillo told Sojourners that families with members of different legal statuses, who already live in fear that one of their family members could be deported, may be more reticent to seek out care from migrant ministries.

“They may now feel they have to learn how to exist in the shadows, to live so that they are not noticed in the hope it might offer them some kind of protection, instead of shelters and hospitable ministries.

“The atmosphere these legal actions make may mean they will not even try to access these services or connect with ministries designed specifically for them,” she said.

Evangelicals want immigration reform. Here's why they're unlikely to get it

What do evangelicals in the U.S. want? Immigration reform.

When do they want it? Now.

When will they get it? No time soon, it seems.

According to a recent Lifeway Research poll sponsored by the Evangelical Immigration Table and other evangelical groups, evangelicals desire immigration reform with increasing urgency. Showing a marked increase from prior years, 77 percent of poll respondents say it is important that Congress passes significant new immigration legislation in 2024 — up from 71 percent in 2022 and 68 percent in 2015.

Their opinions are in line with the wider U.S. population, which generally agrees that the current immigration system needs to be reformed. Different political groups, however, rarely agree on what exactly is broken or how to fix it.

Among evangelical leaders, the consensus is that the legislation should be both bipartisan andcomprehensive. That is the golden standard, said Chelsea Sobolik, director of government relations at World Relief — the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals, and one of the poll’s sponsors.

Research from political scientists Ruth Melkonian-Hoover and Lyman A. Kellstedt confirms that evangelical clergy and denominational leadership tend to support immigration reform efforts, and have stepped up their involvement to support them, based on biblical principles of “welcoming the stranger.” But a combination of partisanship, presidential voting preferences, and right-wing cultural populist attitudes mean not all evangelicals feel the same, they write. In particular, white evangelical laity historically view the effects of immigration most negatively and favor the most restrictive immigration policies.

From her time working in the nation’s capital, Sobolik knows immigration issues can draw strong passions from different populations and political factions. Nonetheless, she believes in the power of faith to motivate lawmakers to find bipartisan solutions by meeting on common sacred ground.

“Americans of faith want leaders who will work together on immigration and sensible border solutions,” Sobolik said in an interview. “They want pragmatic reforms that offer increased security infrastructure without sacrificing compassion and human dignity.

“In the end, they want a different, more reasonable conversation,” she said.

Sobolik suggested those sensible solutions draw on the principles proposed by the Evangelical Immigration Table, which include: respect for the God-given dignity of every person; protecting the unity of the immediate family; respecting the rule of law; guaranteeing secure national borders; ensuring fairness to taxpayers; and establishing a path toward legal status and/or citizenship for those who qualify and who wish to become permanent residents.

A Cross In The Barbed Wire: Mixed Reflections On Faith & Immigration

In February 2019, Miguel stared out at the San Pedro Valley in Mexico, stretching for miles below him from his position on Yaqui Ridge in the Coronado National Monument. Standing at Monument 102, which marks the symbolic start of the 800-mile-long Arizona Trail, Miguel remarked on how the border here doesn’t look like what most people imagine.

Instead of 30-foot bollards, all one finds is mangled barbed wire to mark the divide between Arizona and Sonora. Here hikers can dip through a hole in the fence to cross into Mexico, take their selfie, and pop back over.

“It’s as easy as that,” Miguel said, with a melancholic chuckle.

But for Miguel’s mother the crossing was not only difficult — it was deadly. She perished trying to find her way to the U.S. across the valley’s wilderness when Miguel was just four years old and already living in the U.S. with his father.

Not knowing exactly where she died, Monument 102 became a makeshift memorial for Miguel’s mother, the obelisk marking the U.S./Mexico border a kind of gravestone. The barbed wire itself even holds meaning for Miguel. “When I come every year to remember her,” he said, “and the knots in the barbed wire remind me of the cross.

“It may sound strange, but that gives me comfort,” he said.

Miguel is far from alone in making religion a part of the migrant’s journey. As migrants move around, across and through borders and the politics that surround them, religious symbols, rituals, materials and infrastructures help them make meaning, find solace and navigate their everyday, lived experience in the borderlands.

With immigration proving a top issue for voters in the U.S. and Europe this year, this edition of What You Missed Without Religion Class explores the numerous intersections between religion and migration.

Language, Preaching, and the Politics of Immigration

How does the language preachers, politicians or reporters use impact the kind of immigration policies we might make or opinions we have about migrants themselves?

In my first two pieces as Faith and Immigration Reporter at Sojourners magazine, I take a look at both issues.

In the one, I explore how more than colloquial conundrum, the language we use determines the policies we support and the theologies we hold about people crossing borders.

In the other, I talk to pastors and theologians about how they are navigating the political polarization around the topic from their pulpits.

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.

How migrants are changing Europe's churches

“Each apartment block has its own community, its own dynamics, its own culture,” Ute Paul said as she walked among the Plattenbau — formidable apartments built of prefabricated concrete slabs —  in Gotha West, a working-class suburb of the central German city, Gotha.

Originally constructed as a planned housing development (Neubaugebiet) during the waning years of the socialist East German Republic, the district is now home to migrants who have made their way from Ukraine and Eritrea, Afghanistan and Romania, Nigeria and Syria. Many of them are relocated to places like Gotha West, where they often end up grouped with their fellow countrymen and forming cliques based on shared language, religion, or background.

On Coburger Place, a centrally located square with shops and a small casino that serves as the neighborhood’s main hangout spot, there is a small storefront with the words, “from dark to light” written across its windows.

The shop is the principle gathering place for the Mustard Seed District Mission (senfkorn.STADTteil Mission). Since 2015, pastor Michael Weinmann and his wife Christiane have been leading Mustard Seed and “experimenting with new forms of community in Gotha-West,” said Paul, who joined the pair along with her husband, Frank, in 2021.

Focusing less on events and more on “relationships, ‘accidental’ encounters, and natural life in the district,” Paul said the mission has little to show in terms of deliverables or church attendance.

Instead, reflecting the challenges and opportunities of migrant mission in Europe, Paul said Mustard Seed has been able to “create a vibrant network of relationships between people of different backgrounds and origins from across the world.”

Along the way, Paul said the Mustard Seed team has had to unlearn a lot of what they thought they knew about mission and adapt to the everyday realities of those God has given them to serve.

Since the unprecedented migratory movements that shook Europe in 2015 and 2016, an increasing number of Christian organizations have had to reshape their institutions and rethink the identity of Christianity from below.

Mustard Seed is just one example of how the movement of asylum seekers, economic migrants, and internally displaced persons has created new commissions and institutions to meet changing facts on the ground across the continent.

Migration to Europe is not a recent phenomenon. But since 2013, some 17.2 million migrants from outside the European Union (EU) have come to Europe, finding their way to places like Germany and Spain, the UK and Italy. As they arrived, they have sparked public discourse around European culture, values, and religious identity.

Amid the debate, churches have played key roles in the process of integration. Beyond offering religious hospitality, a 2018 study from the Churches’ Commission for Migrants in Europe (CCME) found how congregations provide “symbolic resources for positive self-identification and opportunities for interaction with others as well as crucial services.”

The result has been a transformation of the churches themselves.

The churches are willing, but the bureaucracy is weak: UK Christians welcome refugees amid frustrations with immigration process

When Wai Lin Wong arrived in Bristol from Hong Kong in April 2021, one of the first things she did was look for a new church.

“I logged onto Facebook; I searched Google,” she said, “and found churches with webpages translated into Chinese, groups of other Hong Kongers, and sanctuaries full of people like me.”

That happened a lot, said Mark Nam, an Anglican priest in Bristol. As the Chinese government clamped down on the democratic freedoms of the former British colony in 2020, thousands of Hong Kongers fled to the UK thanks to a visa programthat allows them to live and work in Britain with a pathway to full citizenship.

Hundreds of churches announced they would welcome the Hong Kongers with open arms. They did. And cities like Bristol have since seen their churches swell with newcomers, Nam said. Anglican parishes, Chinese Protestant churches, and evangelical congregations all grew dramatically in the last year.

“It’s been wonderful to see the welcome,” Nam said last year.

In recent months, UK Christians responded to another influx of refugees, this time from Ukraine.

The Sanctuary Foundation, which supports potential sponsors and assists the government in rolling out its Homes for Ukraine program, said over 2,000 churches, businesses, and schools plugged into their programming or volunteered to help in some way since March.

But in both cases, along with the surge of compassion, support programs, and congregational growth, there have come a host of challenges—from bureaucratic inertia to worrying signs of prejudiced double standards.

Sanctuary Foundation’s founder Krish Kandiah, who has been working with refugees since the 1990s, said his organization has been seeing churches welcome thousands of newcomers from Hong Kong, Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine.

The outpouring of generosity by congregations, individuals, and local organizations has been immense. Amid the rush from Ukraine alone, more than 1,000 UK churches stepped up to host refugees, he said.

However, enthusiasm on the part of Britain’s churches has not always been met with efficiency or empathy by their government.

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.