Compassion at the Border: The People Behind the Process
- Julia Kuczynski
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
By Julia Kuczynski
1/11/26
Compassion is usually the first thing lost when people talk about immigration at the U.S.–Mexico border. Headlines reduce human beings to numbers, and political debates turn individual stories into talking points. But when you look closely at the process and the policies that shape it, it becomes clear that the situation at the border isn’t just a logistical challenge — it’s a human one, and compassion has to be the starting point if we want to understand it honestly. What often gets missed in all the noise is who the migrants actually are. In the 2024 fiscal year, U.S. authorities reported about 2.1 million migrant “encounters” at the southern border, but those numbers tell a deeper story when broken down. Roughly 804,000 were family-unit encounters, which means parents crossing with children. Around 110,000 encounters involved unaccompanied minors, many of them fleeing violence or instability entirely on their own. These aren’t statistics about threats; they’re statistics about vulnerability. And the reality is that no one risks a journey across deserts or dangerous routes unless staying where they were was even more dangerous.
But arriving at the border doesn’t mean immediate safety. In many ways, that’s where the hardest part begins. Current policies make the process even more difficult for vulnerable migrants. In June 2024, the U.S. implemented a policy that allows the government to suspend access to asylum whenever unauthorized crossings exceed 2,500 per day over a seven-day period. When that threshold is reached, most people who cross without authorization are automatically considered ineligible to apply for asylum unless they meet a much higher “exceptional fear” standard — something incredibly difficult for traumatized families and children to articulate in a brief screening. Human Rights Watch and other organizations have argued that this policy effectively violates U.S. refugee law and international protections by turning people away before they can even explain why they fled.
Working Against the Odds
Even for those who are allowed into the system, the process is overwhelmingly stacked against them. Immigration courts are massively backlogged, with millions of pending cases and wait times that stretch on for months or years. And during that time, most migrants don’t have access to a lawyer. National data show that about 67% of people facing deportation do so without legal representation. For those who are detained, often families or asylum seekers, the numbers are even worse. Representation matters: migrants without lawyers are more than twice as likely to be ordered removed compared to those who have legal support. It isn’t that their cases are less valid, but instead that the process is impossible to navigate alone. When due process depends on access to a lawyer that most people can’t get, the system stops being just a legal process and starts being a barrier.
All of this raises serious human rights concerns. The right to seek asylum is guaranteed under U.S. and international law. But restrictive policies, high thresholds, and a lack of legal support have turned that right into something conditional, unpredictable, and sometimes inaccessible. Families are separated, children are detained in facilities not designed for them, and people fleeing extreme danger are sent back without a real chance to plead their case. These aren’t abstract policy flaws — they are painful realities for real people who are already running from trauma.
Compassion doesn’t require ignoring laws or abandoning border security. It simply means recognizing the full humanity of the people who arrive at the border and building a process that treats them with dignity. A compassionate system would uphold the right to seek asylum regardless of fluctuating border numbers, ensure access to legal counsel, process cases fairly and efficiently, and provide safe, humane conditions for those waiting. More importantly, it would reframe the conversation away from fear and toward understanding. Because in the end, the border is not just a political issue — it is the place where someone’s desperate past meets their fragile hope for a future. And compassion is the only lens that lets us see that clearly.
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