as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, August 18, 2024
[Note: I preached a sermon with the same title reflecting on my experiences in El Salvador in 2014.]
It was the martyred Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero who said, “There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried.” Unitarian Universalist theologians Forrest Church and Rebecca Parker offer us similar advice. Church claimed that the core of our universalist theology was “to love your enemy as yourself; to see your tears in another’s eyes.” Parker, meanwhile, writes, “There is no holiness to be ascertained apart from the holiness that can be glimpsed in one another’s eyes.”
There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried. As many of you know, I spent the beginning of the week on the Texas/Mexico border. I traveled there with several members of our congregation, and the minister from Emerson, on a border witness trip. It was organized by our partner organizations Texas Impact and the Texas Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry. We went to learn something about this country’s immigration system and the experience of migrants. We went to take a glimpse through eyes that have cried.
What do you know about the immigration system? Or the lives of migrants? Or the situation at the border? In the media, the immigration system is typically portrayed as broken. Former President Trump describes migrants as an existential threat. He uses language favored by Germans in the 1940s when he talks about them. He says awful things like, they are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The former President likes to invoke the word “crisis” when discussing the border. On occasion, President Biden has even deployed such words.
Broken, a threat, poison, crisis, these are strong terms. They do not celebrate the humanity of the migrants. They do not mirror the values of our Unitarian Universalist tradition. We “declare that every person is inherently worthy and has the right to flourish with dignity, love, and compassion.” They do not invite us to see through eyes that have cried.
Through eyes that have cried, we began our journey with an organization that shapes the lives of so many: the United States Border Patrol. Our facilitator had arranged for a presentation describing the situation from the federal government’s perspective. The patrol’s communication officer told us, “whatever you see in the media is not exactly how it is.” Then he started to share a well-crafted Power Point.
We found ourselves awash in numbers. The Border Patrol encountered this many migrants during this period. They intercepted this much marijuana, this much cocaine, this much fentanyl and heroine. There were this many thousand unaccompanied minors last year and that many the year before.
There was no attempt to see through eyes that have cried. The agent said his time on the patrol had been “a fun seventeen years.” He talked about the material rewards of his work, “good salary, good benefits.” In Harlingen, Texas, there are not many other places for a someone without a college education to find a middle-income job.
He also celebrated the patrol’s success at apprehending people on the terror watch list. He shared that last fiscal year 160 “bad guys” had been stopped at the border.
Most of those who Border Patrol prevents from coming into the United States are not “bad guys.” They are ordinary people fleeing horrible conditions. It is like Myra Paredes from Team Brownsville said in our brief interview with her. For many migrants, “everything that they experience and witness at home is far worse than anything they encountered along the way.”
I know a little about this. Ten years I was part of another human rights delegation. We went to El Salvador to collect stories from deportees. They were bone chilling. One young man we talked to used to operate a bus with two of his friends. He was the driver. One of his friends collected fares. The third member of the group took care of the passengers.
One day, gang members boarded the bus. They robbed and killed the fare collector. A few days later, they threatened the two remaining friends. They told them that they planned to kill them because they had witnessed the murder.
The bus driver’s surviving friend was shot dead while he was at a neighborhood restaurant. As soon as he heard about this, the bus driver fled the country.
We interviewed him right after he had been deported to back to El Salvador. He told us that he had just called his mother. She told him that he could not come home. The gang was still out to kill him. Tears in his eyes, he admitted that he didn’t know what to do next.
That is but one story, of many, that I have heard about “successful removals,” to use the communication officer’s term.
All of this “success” is a strange this to celebrate. This country spent $21 billion in the last fiscal year on customs and border enforcement. The state of Texas spends, on average, another $3 billion a year. But migrants do not represent a threat. Even the right-wing Cato Institute has admitted this. Their research has shown that here in Texas immigrants have arrest and homicide rates that are significantly lower than people born in the United States. There have been no major terrorist attacks linked to people who entered this country illegally.
It is hard to understand how all of this money keeps us safe. President Biden has repeatedly argued that “White supremacy … is the single most dangerous terrorist threat in” this country. There is data to back him up. Texas leads the United States in hate crimes and terrorist acts. Almost all of them are connected to white supremacists. The shooting in Allen, the shooting in El Paso, both the responsibility of white supremacists. They have justified their violence with language mirroring words favored by both former President Trump and this state’s elected leaders. Governor Abbott talks about stopping the “invasion” at the border. The gunman in El Paso did too.
Just as significantly, immigration is huge net benefit to the economy. So much so that one economist has called it this country’s “superpower.” Without immigration, the United States economy would be smaller, the country would be less wealthy, and most of us would have less prosperity. It is estimated that on average each immigrant who comes into this country makes a net contribution of between $100,000 and $300,000 to the federal government over the course of their lifetime. That is, over the course of their lifetimes, they contribute between $100,000 and $300,000 more to the federal government than they receive in benefits. Each time the Border Patrol deports someone or stops them from entering the country they are depriving the federal government of a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ worth of future income. And that’s just the negative impact that deportation has on the public sector!
Throwing my own data sets back at the Border Patrol, or anyone else who is opposed to welcoming migrants, is not going to convince them to see through eyes that have cried. What gets lost in debates about immigration and the border, is that we are not talking about numbers. We are talking about people, about human lives.
Can we imagine ourselves in their places? What would we have experienced? How would we want to be treated? What do we see through eyes that have cried?
Let me invite you to see through eyes that have cried. Here is slightly fictionalized account of a migrant’s experience. It blends testimonies I collected in El Salvador and the story that Myra Paredes shared with us.
You are a fourteen-year-old boy. You left El Salvador after the local gang started to threaten kids on your soccer team. They planned to extort money from the players’ parents. To make sure everyone knew that they were serious, the gang members killed one of your teammates.
You set out with your mother and younger sister for the United States. The journey North took months. Part of the time you walked. Part of the time you rode “El Tren de la Muerte,” the death train. It is a network of freight trains that stretch from Southern Mexico all the way up to the border. You saw someone slip from a freight car. Their legs were severed when they fell. You can still hear the screaming.
Later, you and your family tried to ford a flooding river. You made it across. Some of your fellow migrants did not. You watched two young men die. They drowned when the rising water swept them away.
You make it to Reynosa. It is your last stop before you try to make it over the border. You are sleeping rough, in a makeshift tent, on the outskirts of town, when masked men wake your family up in the middle of the night. They have guns. They take you hostage. They threaten to kill you, your mother, and your sister unless a ransom is paid. Your grandparents back in El Salvador somehow come up with $6,000. It must be all the money that they have. You are released.
You stay in Reynosa until your mother can make an appointment on the glitchy CBP One app for an interview with a border agent. You claim asylum.
At this point, what happens? Fear of gang violence is not a legal reason to be granted asylum. Typically, families like yours are sent back to the country that they came from. In the last years, our government—whether we have had a Democratic or a Republican president—have made it more and more difficult for people to receive asylum. Back in June, President Biden issued an executive order severely restricting asylum. It is harder and harder for people trying to escape death and terror to find respite in our country.
But let us imagine, for the moment, that the Border Patrol agent your family talks to thinks you have a credible asylum case. They use the term “credible fear.”
You are given what is called a notice to appear. This is a governmental order stating that “you are an alien.” If you cannot prove your asylum case then you will be, in the official language, “removed.”
You have to go the immigration court to make your case. It is technically an administrative hearing rather than a criminal case. This bewildering terminology means that while you have a right to an attorney, the government does not have a responsibility to provide you one. You have to either find pro bono representation or hire a lawyer.
Your first court appearance might be six months after your initial encounter with the Border Patrol. In the time between, you will have had to figure out how to support yourself—a work permit is not guaranteed. Maybe you stay in a shelter for part of the time. Maybe the state of Texas buses you up to Chicago or New York.
You can get your case transferred to those venues. Or you can stay near the border and pursue it there. In either situation, there is a lot of hardship along the way. There is learning to adjust to a new country, a new culture, and learning a new language. All these legal proceedings are in English. Sometimes they are explained to you. Sometimes they are not.
We visited the immigration court in Harlingen. We sat in on two judge’s court rooms. It felt like the first judge was just shuffling paper in front of us. He spoke rapidly. He did not explain things. He dealt with five cases in about twenty minutes. No translator was available. The migrants’ attorneys waved their right to translation. It appeared as if the judge was not interacting with human beings. It seemed like he was moving pieces of paper from one stack to another. But, of course, the pieces of paper were people’s lives. Did he see through eyes that had cried?
The second judge was quite different. She had a translator present. She described the entire legal process to the migrants in her court room. She explained to them that after their initial appearance they would come back to make their asylum case. We were told that those are usually closed to the public. In them people recount the horrors that they are trying to escape. If all goes well, the case ends when the judge grants asylum and says, “Welcome to the United States.” The whole process might take two, three, four years.
Why are the people of this country so often unwilling to welcome people seeking refuge? If I was placed in the same kind of situations that many migrants find themselves in, I would make the same choices that they have made. I would stuff a backpack, raise money, and depart for the unknown land of opportunity and safety. What would you do? Didn’t many of our parents and grandparents do the same thing?
There are stories about migration in my family. My grandfather Morrie and great aunt Claire fled the Ukraine with their parents in the early 1920s. It was after the Russian Revolution. They were Jewish. Things for Jews in the Soviet Union seemed to be getting worse, not better. Violence was on the rise and religious persecution was increasing. My grandfather, great aunt, and my great grandparents left their home in Odessa with the clothes on their backs and whatever they could put in a small handcart. My grandfather was two or three years old. My great aunt pushed him in the handcart most of the way across Europe until they reached a port where they could sail to the United States. The whole journey took two years. Their story and the stories of migrants from El Salvador vary only in the details.
I can glimpse a little through the eyes of my ancestors. It should not be hard to see something through other eyes that have cried. For whom has not cried?
Yet faced with the pain of others, we humans often react fearfully rather than lovingly. We turn away. We push people away.
There is a story in the Christian New Testament that challenges us to greet the tears of others with love rather than with fear. You might remember it. It is usually called the “Parable of the Good Samaritan.”
In the Gospel of Luke, it reads: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him.”
The Gospel reports that after telling this story, Jesus asked his listeners, “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
“The one who had mercy on him,” someone replied. To which Jesus said, “Go and do likewise.”
There are many interpretations of this parable. One I particularly like comes from the liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez. He observes that the Samaritan in the story crossed the road to help the man in the ditch. The wounded victim of the robbery was not initially in the Samaritan’s path. The Samaritan made a conscious choice to aid him. Reflecting on this, Gutiérrez writes, “The neighbor… is not the one whom I find in my path, but rather the one in whose path I place myself, the one whom I approach and actively seek.”
This is an important lesson for Unitarian Universalists. Many of us have the privilege to close our eyes to others. We can choose to ignore things that make us uncomfortable. We can choose to be ignorant of the violence that so many migrants are fleeing. We can refuse to admit that this country has fueled the civil wars and political destabilization that has devastated most of the places that people are leaving.
And when they come, do we close our eyes to them? Or do we open them? Can we see through the eyes of others? It is imperative that we do. Closing our eyes is an act of fear. Opening them is an act of love. Which do you want as the motive force in your life? Fear or love?
Choosing neighbors who might make us uncomfortable is an act of love. Choosing to live with neighbors who only look, act, and think like us is an act of fear. Which shall we choose? People seeking refuge force us to make such choices. Shall we welcome those who are fleeing violence? They have suffered already. Shall we increase their suffering and fear the changes they bring to this country? They do bring changes. They will make this nation a little browner and a little more fluent in Spanish.
Try to see the world through their eyes. You will find your own tears there, whatever the color of your skin.
This is the task of our religious community. If we are, in the words of Micah, “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly” then we must learn to see with the eyes of others. We need to share their stories. We need to tell Governor Abbott and advocates of closed borders that we want to live in a country, and a state, governed by love rather than by fear. We need to change the narrative about immigration and bear witness to the lives of others.
We must remember, as Rebecca Parker charges us, “There is no holiness to be ascertained apart from the holiness that can be glimpsed in one another’s eyes.” It is only by seeing holiness in one another’s eyes that we can begin to turn from fear to love. It is only by recognizing someone else’s tears as our own that we can overcome that viciousness that closes the country’s borders. It is only by seeing through eyes that have cried that we can learn to welcome, and not to fear, the migrants who have come to our borders.
Amen and Blessed Be.
