Just how the all-seeing eye of my smartphone decides what items will interest me is a mystery, but one featured ad caught me entirely by surprise this week. “Join our team!  U.S. Border Patrol is hiring!”  A striking African-American woman in an olive-green uniform looks intently at me from the ad. “Protecting America isn’t just a job.  It’s a calling.”  

Volunteers with the Green Valley-Sahuarita and Tucson Samaritans, based at a United Church of Christ in Sahuarita and a Presbyterian church in Tucson, meet Border Patrol agents every time we offer assistance to travelers or restock water and food caches in the desert. In recent years, most of those who cross the border between ports of entry have asked us to call BP agents to register and process them, hoping against the odds that they may be permitted to reunite with family members or apply for asylum. Far more likely are immediate deportation or confinement in a detention center. But the travelers know the horrors that lurk in the Sonoran Desert if they attempt to continue their journey. Since 2000 the Pima County coroner has logged 4.034 men, women, and children whose remains were found just in my Arizona county.  

Most of our encounters with BP officers have been courteous and cooperative. They have followed protocols protecting the safety and health of those they took into custody, and many said they welcomed the work of church-based volunteers. There are exceptions. BP agents have been observed slashing water jugs and scattering food caches. Drugs such as fentanyl do not cross the border in desert travelers’ backpacks, as right-wing media claim, but in vehicles that slip through official ports of entry, where officials on both sides of the border are willing to look the other way for the right price.  

BP agents, 16,500 of them stationed along the 2000-mile border, are now reinforced by several thousand National Guard and active-duty Army personnel, with more arriving each month. Very little has been disclosed about what they are doing or how they have been trained. In recent trips to the border, our volunteers have also encountered armed vigilantes who point guns at them and warn them to stay away. In one recent incident, armed men in unmarked vehicles accosted a group of Samaritan volunteers at gunpoint, handcuffed them, warned them that they would face federal criminal charges, and then let them go. They refused to identify themselves or say which federal agency had dispatched them.

Instilling fear in both travelers and volunteers appears to be the goal of the new deployments to the border. But large-scale arrests are not happening. Illegal crossings peaked in the first Trump administration and again early in Biden’s term, but the numbers have been declining since 2023 and are now at the lowest point in ten years, not because of Trump’s harsh rhetoric but because of changing conditions on both sides of the border. Several thousand refugees from violence at home were allowed to enter the U.S. and apply for asylum each month until, on Trump’s first day in office the legal process they had followed was abruptly shut down and thousands of appointments canceled.   

I did not spend much time thinking about my possible new career on the border, but it sounds like a much easier job today than in the recent past. In February 2025, local newspapers reported, the daily number of apprehensions, leading to detention or immediate deportation, amounted to one arrest per hundred agents on the ground. Both the alleged invasion on the southern border and the mass expulsion that would send every undocumented resident back south were fantasies concocted for political gain. They have not happened, and will not happen, in the real world.  

Meanwhile churches and nonprofit agencies, from the borderlands and across the country, face difficult choices as long-established programs of assistance come to a sudden halt. We can no longer assist asylum-seekers on their way to U.S. family or church sponsors, because none have been allowed to enter. We cannot offer newly deported migrants food and clothing on the Mexican side because border officials there, eager to show their compliance with U.S. pressure, keep volunteers away as buses depart. Searches in the desert often report having encountered no one. 

Other church initiatives continue, the need as great as ever. At my Tucson church, Southside Presbyterian, we serve a hearty breakfast and distribute take-away food to about 150 men, women and children twice a week.  Most are living on the streets nearby. We also provide training and legal advice in our Workers’ Center, since the church is located on a corner where employers have hired day laborers for a century. But we do not know how many of the people we serve in these programs lack residency papers and live in constant fear of arrest.  

In January our congregation was briefed on what federal agents may and may not do on our property. They may enter the church during times when it is open to the public, but at other times they must present a judicial warrant. The sanctuary status of churches – a tradition dating back thousands of years – has been officially revoked by the Trump administration, but church members are not required to allow warrantless searches or disclose information from church records.

As in every dramatic shift in government policies, there are winners and losers in the new border situation. The losers include thousands of asylum seekers who followed all the rules, waited months or years in Mexico until their appointment at the border, and then were turned away. Other losers include many thousands more who arrived at the border from East Africa or the Caribbean or central America or southern Mexico, longing for a better life and for reunion with their family members. Those who cross the border today are funneled into a private prison for weeks or months, then sent away without a hearing, perhaps to their home country, perhaps to unspeakably brutal prisons in El Salvador.  

And who are the winners? U.S. employers, first of all. They can pay undocumented workers as little as they want and ignore health and safety regulations. Anyone who complains can be reported for immediate arrest. The two biggest winners, two industries that are raking in billions thanks to the tightened border, are the contractors who build private prisons to detain migrants and the Mexican cartels who now demand payment twice as high as before – estimates range up to $20,000 U.S. – for transport to and across the border. The private prison industry is now one of the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. economy. And the drug cartels have essentially taken control of the border regions away from the Mexican government.  

U.S. immigration restrictions began with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the history of immigration law in the past 150 years is one of shifting lists of which nationalities are admissible and which are unwanted. No comprehensive legislation has been passed since 1990. 

Even as immigrants both with and without documentation fill millions of jobs and contribute essential services to the U.S. economy, we refuse to grant them their rights under international law or the respect due to them as people whom God made and whom God loves.  How long until the churches stand up and cry out against the cruelty and injustice of our policies?