Article

Interpretation: A Journal of

Notes Toward a Theology

Bible and Theology
2018, Vol. 72(2) 188­–197
© The Author(s) 2018
of Cross/ing Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0020964317749545
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Emily Askew
Lexington Theological Seminary, Lexington, Kentucky, USA

Abstract
Born from the ethical imperative of two sets of wounds, the open sores on the feet of a migrant who crosses
the desert and the crucified feet of the One on the cross, this essay compares the U.S.-Mexico border wall
and the cross of Jesus through the lives of undocumented migrants crossing into the U.S. From the “third
space” of the desert, this essay develops a theology of cross/ing in which the crucified Christ challenges the
status quo of state policies that promote injustice, suffering, exploitation, and poverty.

Keywords
Border; Crossing; Crucifixion; Immigration; Migrant; Sanctuary; Sonoran Desert; Theology of Cross/ing;
Third Space; Undocumented; U.S.-Mexico Border; Wall

Figure 1.  Annibale Carracci (1560–1609).
Crucified Christ with Symbols of the Passion
(ca. 1582). Oil on canvas. Staatsgalerie,
Stuttgart, Germany. Photo credit: bpk
Bildagentur/Art Resource, NY.
Figure 2.  An immigrant , bandaged for injuries
sustained while falling from a train called “The
Beast,” rests after crossing the Sonoran desert on
foot to reach the U.S.-Mexico border. Photo credit:
Jan Sochor/Latin Content Editorial/Getty Images.

Wounded Feet
In the picture on the left are the wounded feet of the crucified Jesus (Fig. 1). In the picture on the
right are the wounded feet of one who dared to cross the Sonoran desert to find a better life (Fig. 2).
This could be one who set out from Altar, Sonora to get to Tucson, Arizona, traversing the desert for

Corresponding author:
Emily Askew, Lexington Theological Seminary, 230 Lexington Green Circle, Suite 300, Lexington, KY 40503, USA.
Email: easkew@lextheo.edu
Askew 189

three days, walking at night in frigid temperatures, sheltering under the scrub that counts for shade
during the day, hunted by aircraft, night vision goggles, surveillance cameras, being stopped or
imprisoned or deported only to return again the next month or the next year, because there is no other
choice for survival. His wounded feet remind us that this is a branding into human flesh of what
Latin American feminist theologian Gloria Anzaldúa understands as our national wound—the
almost 2,000-mile gash called “the border” that divides families, and whose traverse changes one’s
status from “human” to “illegal.” She writes: “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [open
wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemor-
rhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country, a border culture.”1

In the winter of 2015, I travelled with eight seminarians to study immigration on the U.S.-
Mexico border near Tucson, Arizona. For six days we talked to migrants and learned from immi-
grant advocates, including Mark Adams, U.S. Coordinator of Frontera de Cristo, a Presbyterian
border ministry located in the sister cities of Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, and Douglas, Arizona.2
We learned about all the places that the border crosses the lives of immigrants and the physical,
mental, and spiritual marks that remain in the places that the border crosses. I set my theological
reflections against a backdrop of stories—the stories of Jesús, Rosa, and Maria, and hundreds of
unnamed crossers and deportees whose lives are crossed by the border every day.

Our politicians tell us that the cure for the wounds of the body and the wounds of the nation is
greater border enforcement, greater militarization of this arbitrary line in the sand.3 This political
move enrages my theological conscience as I gaze at these battered feet and listen to the stories.
These wounds will not be salved by walling ourselves off and militarizing the border. No wall will
cure. Indeed, the idea of isolating ourselves from the wounded of the world defies the very heart of
Christ’s journey into the pain and suffering of others—not away from it.

Jesus’s journey was made on foot. As he traveled, he preached a gospel of radical love and inclu-
sion that often got him into trouble. In his own hometown, people were so incensed by his words
that they forced him to the edge of a precipice (Luke 4:28–30). After washing his disciples’ feet
(John 13:1–15), he was arrested and walked to Golgotha carrying a cross on his back (John 19:17).
His journey made on foot calls us to remember all those who make their journeys on foot.

When I see the bleeding feet of the border crossers, I feel called to understand the crucified feet
on the cross. I am called by the feet on the cross to attend to the feet of the crossers. What is it that
these pairs of wounds have to say to us theologically? I have come to believe that a theology of
cross/ing that takes as its mandate these pairs of feet viewed together offers a powerful reassess-
ment of a traditional theology of the cross.

1 Gloria Anzaldúa, The Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute
Books, 1999), 25.
2 See http://fronteradecristo.org. This ministry offers participants an opportunity to reflect and act on
Jesus’s words: “…I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to
drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you
took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (Matt 25:35–36).
3 The U.S.-Mexico border is anything but fixed. For a brief but informative description of how the bor-
der has been redrawn through war and treaty, see Miguel A. De La Torre, Trails of Hope and Terror:
Testimonies on Immigration (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 2009), 9–17. In 2017, President Donald Trump
has called for lengthening the border and erecting higher walls (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/
us/mexico-wall-prototypes-trump.html).
190 Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 72(2)

The Politics of Immigration

In 2015 there were an estimated 11 million undocumented migrants living in the United States.
Fifty-nine percent or 5.6 million were from Mexico.4 They have come for many reasons, but by and
large they have come because life and livelihood in their homeland have become impossible. They
come because drug cartels and the mafia terrorize their families. They come because they cannot
feed their children on the wages they make. They come to reunite with families separated by the
border. The economic and social conditions are such that leaving their home is seen as the only
viable option for survival. A border crosser named Ignacio explained: “We risk death, not because
we want to, or because we are foolhardy. We risk death for the families left behind….It may be
crazy to cross, but we are not crazy, we are desperate.” 5

For decades the United States has relied on migrant labor to sustain our economy, with little
understanding or sympathy for the plight of these workers. Our policies welcome and then excori-
ate migrant laborers.6 In shorthand form, “Undocumented workers are in the United States because
of what immigration experts call the push-and-pull factor. The economic conditions existing in
their homelands, due in part to our agricultural subsidies, ‘push’ them out, while the US need for
cheap labor ‘pulls’ them in.”7

Push Factors
It is beyond the scope of this essay to cite all the factors that “push” Mexican migration to the U.S.,
but we can consider at least one controversial economic policy that has had an enormous effect on
immigration in the last generation, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or in
Spanish, Ratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte, which was ratified in January, 1994. The
complexities and relative gains and losses that have resulted from this treaty have been debated for
over twenty years. In sum, many U.S., Canadian, and Mexican citizens have benefitted from the
passage of NAFTA, because it promotes free trade, creates jobs, and keeps food prices low. But
many other North Americans have suffered profound losses. Manufacturing jobs, particularly in
the U.S. and Mexico, have been lost. Competitive food prices have made sustaining a livelihood in
farming impossible for many poorer Mexican farmers.8

The impact of NAFTA on poorer Mexican farmers has been particularly harsh. Prior to NAFTA,
Mexican corn production was subsidized so that farmers could make a living, even if it was meager.
Prices were kept low so that poor people could buy food. With NAFTA’s advent in 1994, corn sub-
sidies for Mexican corn were removed to encourage trade, while at the same time subsidies on U.S.
corn remained in place. This created an imbalance in trade, and it became cheaper for Mexico to
buy U.S. corn than it was for them to buy corn from their own people. Because of this imbalance,
an estimated two million corn farmers have had to leave their ancestral lands to find different kinds
of work. Many of them migrated north to work other people’s lands.9

4 http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s.
5 “Testimony of a Border Crosser—‘Ignacio’,” in Miguel De La Torre, Trails of Hope and Terror:
Testimonies on Immigration (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009), 18.
6 Aviva Chomsky, Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (Boston: Beacon, 2014), 113–29.
7 De La Torre, “Testimony of a Border Crosser,” 41.
8 https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/naftas-economic-impact.
9 http://www.npr.org/2013/12/26/257255787/wave-of-illegal-immigrants-gains-speed-after-nafta; http://
www.politicalresearch.org/2014/10/11/globalization-and-nafta-caused-migration-from-mexico/#.
Askew 191

As an added burden on farmers who have attempted to stay on their land, modern agri-business
has so thoroughly hybridized corn and the corn market that all farmers, here and in Mexico, can no
longer save seed from one year to the next to replant. The corn is so specialized against pests, rot,
and mold that, like the flu vaccine, it is good for only one year and unusable for the next. Farmers
must buy new corn seed each year to plant, thus significantly increasing the cost of production.
“Farmers who can no longer compete in the market with subsidized produce have little choice but
to abandon their lands, the land of their ancestors….”10 Many Mexican farmers cross into the U.S.
to labor in our fields or in our hotels, restaurants, gardens, factories, and construction sites in order
to survive.

Other “push” factors include high rates of crime, often because of drug cartels, increasing rates
of unemployment, high poverty rates, and natural disasters.11 Marco, a farmer from Honduras stay-
ing in a migrant shelter in Altar, Sonora, reports the factors that forced his emigration. He and his
family were producing barely enough to live on when Hurricane Mitch took all they had. “There
comes a point when the poverty is so severe, when the desperation is so great, when there is nothing
left to lose, that the only option available is to emigrate. After a while you start getting very hun-
gry…Many people are afraid to explain the reasons they are trying to cross over to the north
because they are afraid they will be seen as failures.”12

Pull Factors
For Mexican and other Latin American immigrants the “pull” factors are opportunities for jobs,
living wages, and safer living environments for their families. Some citizens of the United States
perceive that immigrants come to the U.S. for an “easy” life and “handouts.” But the reality is that
for the first time in many years, perhaps generations, their hard work is giving them an opportunity
to survive.

Citizens of the United States have developed a type of xenophobia that tolerates outsiders as
menial workers at the same time it scorns their equality as human beings. For centuries, immigrants
have built U.S. infrastructure, picked our crops, reared our children, cleaned our homes, and labored
at other necessary jobs that U.S. citizens would not do for such low wages. For generations, we
have used immigrants for our own purposes without giving them the full rights of citizens. “The
fact is that undocumented workers have not forced themselves on an unwilling society. They have
filled crucial occupational niches that are not provided for by our outdated immigration system…
It is a grievous injustice to take someone’s labor but not to welcome his or her full personhood.”13

Beginning with African slaves’ forced migration and continuing with people who immigrated to
the U.S. and were processed through Ellis Island, Americans have had a tendency to weave together
concepts of race and citizenship status with hard labor. Those who have done the most menial labor
have most often been people of color—African, Chinese, Mexican—who benefitted the prosperity
of whites.14 Indeed, measures have been taken throughout U.S. history to deny citizenship rights to
these necessary workers, even as whites have used migrant labor to their advantage.

10 De La Torre, “Testimony of a Border Crosser,” 41.

11 https://geographyas.info/population/mexico-to-usa-migration/.
12 De La Torre, “Testimony of a Border Crosser,” 46.
13 Ibid., 145.
14 Chomsky, Undocumented, 9.
192 Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 72(2)

A Theology of Cross/ing
“I didn’t cross the border. The border crossed me.”

—Jesús, a Guatemalan migrant in a migrant shelter in Agua Prieta,

Sonora, Mexico, Feb. 2015

In a theology of cross/ing we understand that journey is paramount. A theology of cross/ing reminds

us that the cross itself is not a fixed moment but a journey—a journey in which Jesus crosses the
ways of the status quo in order to reach those who suffer. Because he dared to seek something bet-
ter, he was wounded. When border crossers journey to find a sustainable life for their children, they
challenge the status quo of American law. When they brave the desert to find a life for their children
on the other side, they often are wounded physically, emotionally, and sometimes terminally by the
process.15 In a theology of cross/ing, these wounded crossers suffer a form of crucifixion. “Many
immigrants experience an economic crucifixion as a poor man, a political crucifixion as an illegal
alien, a legal crucifixion as a border crosser a cultural crucifixion in coming to a new country, and
above all a social crucifixion in piercing loneliness.”16

Jesús and Maria: Unlikely Criminals

We are sitting on the Mexico side of the border in a migrant shelter in Agua Prieta, Sonora. It is
winter, and the desert night is cold. My students and I are eating dinner with hesitant migrants who
have been deported from the U.S. to Mexico or who are attempting to cross the border soon. They
are hesitant because interviews with Americans have never resulted in anything but pain for them.
Through interpreters we try and reassure them that we only want to listen and not interrogate, but
telling the story of their migration experience seems foreign to them. Why would anybody care
about their stories when they seem to describe only failure?

My dinner partner is Jesús. Two students and I join him for a supper of beans, rice, and chicken
mole. As he eats he gradually begins to sense that we sincerely care about what has happened to
him. We are not there to judge him. Our judgment is reserved for our own government’s policies,
for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), for Homeland Security gone awry, and for our
own complicity as U.S. citizens in Jesús’s situation.

Jesús was a mover in Salt Lake City, Utah. Not like “mover and shaker” but like Mayflower and
Allied. He worked as a mover for eighteen years until ICE raided his employer, and the United
States deported him to Guatemala after incarcerating him for three years in a detention facility in
Bisbee, Arizona. As he speaks to us in good English, the irony is not lost on me that for many years
he helped others move to better jobs, better homes, and better lives, while he could not do the same

15 Since 2001, more than 2,100 migrants have died in the Sonoran desert. This is the most dangerous
place to cross along the almost 2,000-mile border between Mexico and the U.S., but because of law
­enforcement efforts at other crossing points, migrants are funneled into the Tucson corridor at the
Sonoran desert (http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/11/death-in-the-desertthedangeroustrekbe-
tweenmexicoandarizona.html). It is important to note that statistics reflect only the number of bodies
that have been found. Many more people are reported missing but never found because of the desert con-
ditions that eradicate traces of their bodies (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/us/immigrant-death-
rate-rises-on-illegal-crossings.html?_r=0). See also https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/06/26/
border-deterrence-becomes-death-sentence/eFQS2KBuKQAgEsOPMlwCfP/story.html and http://www.
latimes.com/nation/la-na-ff-immigrant-border-deaths-20151021-story.html.
16 Ignacio Ellacuria, cited in De La Torre, Trails of Hope and Terror, 21.
Askew 193

for himself. He is now considered a criminal in the United States, because he crossed the border to
escape poverty in Guatemala. After having contributed years of labor at a low-paying job that no
U.S. citizen wanted, he is unable to participate in any of the benefits of his labor.

His eyes well with tears when he recounts being incarcerated with murderers and rapists in
prison while he waited for deportation. He repeats the word “criminal” many times as he speaks
about himself, as if trying to get it through his head how our country could label him such when his
only crime was to cross the desert to make a living wage for himself and his family.

He tells us how he was deported back to Guatemala and had ridden a train known as La Bestia—
The Beast—up from Chiapas to Mexico City and then made it to the border on foot. By “ridden,”
he means he lay on the top of freight cars for days. The Beast injures or kills many migrants who
fall from the top and are crushed by the train (see Fig. 2).17 Jesús made it without falling off, but he
tells us of the women on the train who are taken off and raped by other travelers or by Mexican
officials waiting at the station. He tells us that he survived only because strangers gave him some-
thing to eat in the towns where the train stopped.

Now he is trying to cross the border again. As bad as his experience has been, it is still a better
life than he can find at home, so he will try again. In telling us his story, his journey becomes ours.
It is a journey that wounds us, too. We are wounded by the realities of our complicity in the global
economics and politics that fund migration and suffering.

As we contemplate our woundedness, we contemplate a theology of cross/ing that challenges

traditional theologies of atonement. In traditional theories of atonement, Jesus is the silent suffering
servant, volunteering himself in complete obedience to the will of God, in some form of payment
for our sins.18 Rita Nakashima Brock, Dolores Williams and other feminist and womanist theologi-
ans have challenged this theology of sacrificial atonement and have taught us that to valorize
Jesus’s silent, suffering servanthood as the payment God seeks for our fallenness perpetuates the
suffering of the marginalized.19 If Jesus suffered silently, as his “duty” to God, then so should bor-
der crossers, abused women, violated children, African slaves, and undocumented workers suffer
in silence. The message is clear: do not act up, do not ask for more, do not seek justice, accept your
plight, for it shall be made right in the next life.

I remember meeting Maria, a thirty-two year-old, undocumented worker in a plastics factory in

a small Wisconsin city. Maria came home from work daily with burns on her arms from welding,
yet she could not complain about her working conditions because she did not have papers. This is
the conundrum of the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy as it functions in the American workplace. In
addition to wounded feet, I remember Maria’s burned hands and arms, as she suffers silently for
fear of deportation. Maria’s journey becomes ours as we challenge the silence that surrounds her
working conditions and make it clear that we will not accept mistreatment of the least among us
(Matt 25:40).

17 Chomsky, Undocumented, 79
18 For an overview of atonement theologies, see Gregory A. Boyd, Joel B. Green, et al., The Nature of the
Atonement: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006).
19 Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf
and Stock, 2008); Dolores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1993). See also Theodore W. Jennings, Transforming Atonement: A
Political Theology of the Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009); Scot McKnight, A Community Called
Atonement, Living Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007).
194 Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 72(2)

A theology of cross/ing transforms Jesus’s (and Jesús’s and Maria’s) silent suffering from atone-
ment to shared experience. A theology of cross/ing is not about Jesus as a sacrifice for sin but about
God’s coming into the world as a human being to suffer in solidarity with those who are wounded,
rejected, incarcerated, and executed. A theology of cross/ing reminds us that the crucifixion is best
understood as the execution of a seditionist, a law-breaker.20 The political forces of Jesus’s day
conspired to execute him for crimes against the state. Thus the cross is born of the state and the
political forces of the state. Cross/ing is born from politics and the global economy that result in the
criminalization of migration. Border crossers become law-breakers whose travel-worn feet resem-
ble those of the crucified Jesus. As Jesus was reviled and rejected by the state, so are these migrants.
In a theology of cross/ing, Jesus is among the “least of these” who suffers alongside the poor and
rejected. But rather than offer them a cup of cold water (Matt 10:41) or solace (Matt 25:31–40), we
enact laws that cast them back into the desert.

Operation Streamline
We are sitting in a federal courtroom to witness a judge processing deportations, a process called
Operation Streamline. Five at a time, detainees shuffle in chains toward the judge’s bench, and
stand in front of microphones with translation headphones in their ears. Each man or woman in
their turn pleads culpable—guilty—for the crime of crossing the border without papers. To the
court, their guilt is self-evident. It does not matter that they were leaving a terrible situation to find
a less terrible one in el norte.

But before they go, they are incarcerated, joining millions of non-white men and women in our
penal system.21 The judge sentences each of the eighty people she will “process” during this two-
hour period to between thirty days and eighteen months in a detention facility before deportation.
Historian and activist Aviva Chomsky notes that having lived in the U.S. and contributed to the
work force does not make a difference in the deportees’ status: “Immigrants are human beings who
have arbitrarily been classified as having a different legal status from the rest of the United States
inhabitants.”22 Chomsky describes Operation Streamline as “daily hearings [that] fall somewhere
between kangaroo court and a slave auction. The migrants are shackled hand, foot and waist, and
sit in rows.”23

The shackled and brown- skinned Latino immigrants being deported from this country are expe-
riencing the inverse journey of the black bodies that were brought into this country in the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries. Though chattel slavery and the deportation of undocumented
immigrants clearly are different in their particulars, these institutions have the same basic racist
foundations: both thrive on dehumanizing attitudes and denial of citizenship based on race. For
Chomsky, Latino immigrants are “human beings who have arbitrarily been classified as having a
different legal status from the rest of the United States inhabitants.”24

20 Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Minneapolis:
Augsburg Fortress, 2001).
21 For example, in 2016 the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that 35% of state prisoners are white,
38% are black, and 21% are Latino. In twelve states more than half of the prison population is African
American. The Latino population in state prisons is as high as 61% in New Mexico and 42% in both
Arizona and California. In seven states, at least 20% of inmates are Latino (http://www.sentencingpro-
ject.org/publications/color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/).
22 Aviva Chomsky, Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, Boston: Beacon Press, 2014, ix.
23 Ibid., 8.
24 Ibid., ix.
Askew 195

Chomsky explains that most U.S. citizens insist that their stance toward undocumented immi-
grants is based solely on legal grounds, not race: after all, these people broke U.S. law. “But becom-
ing undocumented is a highly racialized crime,” Chomsky writes.

Another way to look at the racialized nature of undocumentedness is to compare the criminalization of
immigrants (especially Latino immigrants) in the post-civil rights era with the criminalization of blacks.”25
Citing the work of Michelle Alexander on the criminalization of black bodies, Chomsky writes, “Just as
African Americans have been stigmatized in the post civil rights era through criminalization, so have
immigrants. Before, legal discrimination could be based explicitly on race. When race-based discrimination
was outlawed, a new system emerged: turn people of color into criminals. Then you can discriminate
against them because of their criminality rather than because of their race.26

As the bailiff takes them away, the shackled deportees pass by us. “Lo siento,” my student Tonya
whispers to each one of them, “I’m sorry.” Outside the federal courthouse my students weep for the
pain and indignity they have witnessed. The journeys of the eighty men and five women incarcer-
ated on that day become ours as we weep for them and then rage in anger against unjust immigra-
tion policies.

A theology of cross/ing reveals the complexity of “roots and routes.” A theology of cross/ing
recalls Kwok Pui Lan’s reading of the great Ghanian theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye’s “cross-
roads Christianity,” which shows us that there is no single root and no single route that makes sense
of the complexity of the cross and the complexity of the crossing.27 The truth of the cross/ing is
complex because it lies between Mexico and America, between indigeneity and nomadism, between
“legal” and “illegal” status, between and because of life and death. The truth of the crossing reminds
us of the complex truth of the executed man who is the crucified Son, who is fully God and fully
human, who experienced death in life and life after death. We must train theological eyes to see the
complex interrelatedness of these strands. We must develop compassionate hearts to feel the ambi-
guities between life and death in order to do justice in these crossings. Failing to accept the totality
of the tangled and interlaced roots, we instead try to tame the shock of the cross, and we fail to
understand and meet the needs of the crosser.

The Third Space

A theology of cross/ing reminds us that in the journey that is the cross, as in the journey of the
crossers, we will enter what Homi Bhabha and other postcolonial theorists call a third space, a
space beyond simple binary identities in which the hyphen holds the truth of identity.28 In this third
space, courage reigns supreme, the terrifying space in which Jesus’s prayer “not my will but yours
be done” (Luke 22:42) makes perfect sense. This third space is as complicated as emotionally
negotiating the paradox of providing for a family by leaving them far behind for years on end. How
does a person transform, when he or she lives constantly in limbo?

When we meet Rosa, she and her family have been living on the grounds of Southside Presbyterian
Church in Tucson, Arizona, for six months. She is in sanctuary in the birthplace of the Sanctuary

25 Ibid., 15–16.
26 Ibid., expanding on the work of Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Era
of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 148.
27 Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox,
2005), 126.
28 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge Classics 55, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004).
196 Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology 72(2)

Movement of the 1980s.29 If she leaves the church grounds, she will be detained by ICE and deported
away from her husband and two sons. People of faith from many Christian denominations and other
religions have held evening prayer at Southside with Rosa and her husband every night since Rosa
sought sanctuary there. They will stand in solidarity with her until her case is closed, either by ICE or
by presidential decree. Rose waits in this liminal space, where she is both free and imprisoned.

The desert is another kind of third space, where people face the risk of death from heat stroke,
dehydration, and physical violence. From this third space of the desert, it becomes a felony to
attempt to save a person’s life. In the summer of 2005, two 23-year-old humanitarian aid workers
were driving along migrant trails in the Sonoran desert twenty miles outside of Tucson, to help
people in trouble. They came upon a group of nine people on the move. Six of them needed only
basic medical care, but three were suffering from heat stroke and were quickly declining. The two
young workers called the physician who supervised their group and asked for advice. He told them
to immediately transport the three heat-stroke victims to a Tucson hospital, an act that is against the
law. The aid workers saved the lives of the three crossers, but at the hospital they were arrested and
faced a prison sentence of fifteen years for transporting undocumented persons. Religious leaders,
humanitarian groups, and immigration rights advocates intervened on their behalf with the claim
that “humanitarian aid is never a crime,” and the charges were dropped.30 Though they were exon-
erated in this incident, the law remains in place.

A theology of cross/ing keeps squarely before us our work in matters of suffering and redemp-
tion, knowing that the God who suffers on the cross, suffers alongside the crossers, and alongside
us as well. We are not alone, but by the cross God does not exempt us from our complicity in execu-
tion and the redemptive work of restoration.

Conclusion
My students and I are in Douglas, Arizona, standing at the foot of the border wall, a twenty-foot-
high metal edifice through which we can see into Agua Prieta, Sonora (Fig. 3). Just feet away are
people who cannot cross over to our side without documents. The Border Patrol drives by our small
group once, twice, and then parks where they can watch us. They leave their cars idling, ready for
action, should we attempt anything.

And we do attempt something. “This is your wall,” Mark Adams reminds us. “Your policies,
your elected officials, and your government built and sustain this wall.” Silently, we each take a
panel of rusted iron between our hands and pray. We pray for the people on the other side and for
the courage to witness to the suffering we have seen here. We pray for our elected officials and our
government. We pray for an end to our complicity. We pray for the destruction of this wall.

This is our wall. This is our cross on which we have crucified migrants. Here, at the foot of the
wall, as if at the foot of the cross, we repent and beg for forgiveness for things known and unknown.
At the foot of the wall, we confess our participation in the practices that result in alienation, separa-
tion, suffering, imprisonment, and endless grief. We take the cold rough metal between our hands
and remember the faces of those for whom this wall has meant death. We remember Jesús and Jesus.

29 Ch. 8, “Reimagining the Underground Railroad: John Fife,” in Ched Myers and Matthew Colwell, Our
God is Undocumented: Biblical Faith and Immigrant Justice (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis), 2012. See also
http://religionandpolitics.org/2017/02/21/the-sanctuary-movement-then-and-now/.
30 https://www.democracynow.org/2007/4/23/no_more_deaths_humanitarian_group_provides.
Askew 197

Figure 3.  Students from Lexington Theological Seminary at the border wall between Arizona, U.S.A., and
the Sonoran desert, Mexico. Photo courtesy of Lexington Theological Seminary, Lexington, KY.