Under a different president, the Guatemalan woman and her disabled son would have likely been 100 days into a new life in the United States. Instead, by the time a group of 10 students from Laconia Christian Academy arrived in South Texas late last month, the family was miles south, 100 days into an uncertain future at a makeshift camp in Mexico.
Visiting an eerily quiet charity facility in San Juan, Texas, where the family might have eaten their first meal on American soil had their asylum appointment not fallen on Inauguration Day, Laconia Christian junior Natalie Bleiler thought about the similarities between the little boy and her own cousin, who also has a disability.
“They traveled and they waited and they had a way to be here in the right way — in a legal way. They weren’t sneaking over,” Bleiler said. “It was going to be such a bright future, and it was just shut down just like that.”
Over the course of a five-day visit to a border town transformed by President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, Bleiler and her classmates witnessed the ramifications of that shutdown everywhere. Instead of preparing meals for an influx of new arrivals, the students helped package mangoes and other food for the trip to Mexico, where migrants waited in limbo. The 36,000-person city in the Rio Grande Valley was quieter, too, absent the hum of Latin Americans preparing to fan out across the country.
Four of the students, who agreed to participate in an interview with the Concord Monitor last week, said the trip debunked many of the more vitriolic rumors they had heard about immigration and made them question the country’s current approach at the southern border.
“Obviously, I think that we shouldn’t have wide open borders for everybody to just come in whenever they feel like it; there should be a process for that,” Bleiler said. “But just the way it’s being dealt with, I find it just too inhumane.”
Some of the students said they came away from the trip believing the government was exaggerating the negative consequences of immigration for American citizens.
“Immigration is a problem, but it is not, I feel like, the biggest problem necessarily, and it just seems like we’re a high-income country that’s just sending these people back to poverty and danger,” senior Summer Mitchell said. “We’re not giving them a chance to make a foundation.”
The trip to the southern border was a departure from Laconia Christian’s standard service trips, which typically take students to perform natural disaster relief in places like Mississippi or Missouri or to countries with high poverty rates, like Honduras or Rwanda.
“In this political climate,” Head of School Rick Duba acknowledged, “when you’re choosing to go to South Texas to gain a deeper understanding of immigration, that’s a little edgier.”
Duba, who has been at the Lakes Region private school for more than two decades, said the possibility arose last fall, following a school board member’s own trip to the border. The school attempts to cultivate students’ ability to engage in dialogue across differences, and Duba believed exposing students to “a deeper understanding of immigration” was worthwhile.
“We’re a Christian school, which tends to be probably a bit more conservative politically, and I think it’s important that the kids — some of these kids are leaving for college this year, some will be leaving next year — that they have a greater understanding of the world around them,” Duba said.
“I had already had somewhat of an understanding that this was not going to be everything that was in the news, and it wasn’t,” he added.
Despite some pushback, Duba said most of the school community was on board with the trip. The parents of one Latino student worried he could be mistakenly detained and other parents worried about violence and drugs, but the students reported they felt safe throughout the trip.
Laconia Christian partnered with an organization called Border Perspectives, a non-partisan Christian organization that runs what they call “service learning” trips. The students began each morning with a devotional time, in which they examined what the Bible says about immigrants.
“God displayed a deep regard for the foreigner, and this was a way to live that out,” Duba said.
Each day after that morning ritual, the group participated in a range of activities in the changed region. Several of the students were struck by the barren buildings they toured, which earlier had been full of newly-arrived immigrants receiving social services from a constellation of charity organizations.
“The place was empty, and I think it just kind of made me sad that the facility that was doing so much good has been limited in that way and they can’t work in as many people’s lives,” senior Jillian Mitchell said.
The trip did not shelter the students from the darker underbelly of certain corners of the immigration system, either. Several said they were particularly moved by a conversation with Customs and Border Protection agents, who explained that they see certain children used over and over to carry drugs across the border.
“That’s like a regular occurrence,” said senior Ricky Vazquez. “It happens way too often until they start, all of a sudden, they start recognizing the kid.”
The meeting with the CBP agents also led students to develop a deeper understanding of their role in the immigration system.
“I feel like I had been told that border patrol was this ruthless, robot-esque force that just kicked people back to where they had come from,” Summer Mitchell said. “And then, we met with the border patrol officers, and they were, like, just people. They were kind and they were empathetic to people.”
By the time the students arrived back in New Hampshire, many said they felt the federal government’s approach to immigration conflicted with their faith.
“I think that as Christians, especially, but even as a country with so much power and wealth, that helping those who just need some help and a place to seek safety, in my opinion, that is just what we should do,” Bleiler said. “And I understand that it’s not that easy and there are other problems. But I think that, especially shutting down seeking asylum and refuge and shutting down the app where people could get appointments to be here legally, I think that just doesn’t sit right with me.”
Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.
