Throughout recorded history, people have migrated in search of a better life. They have walked jaw-dropping distances, across ice and desert, mountains and valleys, jungles and plains, hoping to find easier ways to survive. They have gotten into boats and set sail for shores known and unknown with little hope of reaching them alive.

In part, it is what makes us human—our tireless movement, from here to there and anywhere. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you,” God commanded Abraham. And he did so, freely.

But is it a human right to migrate according to need? Or is it a human right for citizens of a sovereign nation to be able to monitor and control their borders? How might a reasonable balance be struck between true compassion and suitable law that guarantees the safety and dignity of all people? Those are the kinds of questions that people of faith are asking along the border between the United States and Mexico.

When I first met Sr. Maria Engracia Robles, she was stirring a large pot of beans with one hand and dishing out rice onto plastic plates with the other. She is one of three nuns who run El Comedor, a soup kitchen in Nogales, Mexico, just a few hundred feet from the border. Every day, she and two other Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist, Alma Delia Isais and Imelda Ruiz, feed as many as three hundred men, women, and children who have recently been deported from the United States and are now stranded in Nogales, trying to fend for themselves.

El Comedor is a cramped space, encircled by a chain-link fence and sheltered from the rain by a few slats of corrugated metal. The kitchen, off to one side, is only big enough for two people. Yet somehow the sisters and a volunteer from Guadalajara manage to cook impressive amounts of beans, rice, tuna casseroles, and vegetable sautés—depending on what food they receive each day from donors. “We cook whatever we get,” Sr. Robles says. “It’s different every day.” She is a tiny woman with silver hair, an angular face, and small expressive eyes. Despite her diminutive stature, she is a well of strength and determination.

Before every meal, Sr. Robles turns on a microphone to say a prayer. “Thank you, Lord, for this food we have received,” she begins. The prayer is accompanied by much coughing from the migrants, many of whom are sick. “May you guide them safely in their journeys,” Sr. Robles says. She knows well that their quest can take them almost anywhere: into the hands of the Border Patrol; to some distant town or city in the United States, where friends or relatives await them; into the grasp of a “coyote,” who might rob or rape them or leave them stranded in the desert; or home, after they have turned back or been deported. Some don’t survive.

El Comedor was opened in 2008 because of the unprecedented influx of deported migrants arriving in Nogales. This surge was the result of heightened border-patrol activities in the United States, including raids, the use of cutting-edge technology, doubling of the number of border-patrol agents, and mass trials.

Just sixty miles north, in Tucson, seventy men and women are tried every weekday afternoon at the DeConcini Courthouse. These trials are part of a new program known as the Arizona Denial Prosecution Initiative-or, more familiarly, as Operation Streamline. The initiative mirrors similar programs in Texas and California. It aims at deterring migrants from trying to reenter the United States by making their attempted crossing a felony. Each attempted reentry is punished with a longer jail sentence. Moreover, having a criminal record will make it difficult, if not impossible, for such men and women to work or live in the States in the future, even if they enter by legal means...

(Thanks to Commonweal & Ananda Rose Robinson)