Weinberg junior Katherine Sobolewski lounges on a couch in Norris. The student center is far from the desert she visited last spring, which was punctured by heavily armed border patrols. Guards brandishing large guns ran toward her. Helicopters flew low in search of illegal immigrants as she and her traveling companions warmed themselves by a fire.
Recalling the scene, her face tenses up.
“What we saw was really shocking,” Sobolewski says. She was part of a group of Northwestern students who, through an Alternative Student Breaks trip last year, volunteered with a humanitarian aid organization called No More Deaths, located a few miles north of the border in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert.
The border, Sobolewski says, “has a militarized feeling—a literal war zone.”
For one week, the students camped in the desert with No More Deaths volunteers, hiking daily to leave water on the trails immigrants follow, hoping to save them from dying of dehydration. No More Deaths volunteer Matt Johnson says the organization’s mission is to end death and suffering on the Arizona border. The primary way it accomplishes this goal is through a continuous presence in the Sonoran Desert.
“It is physically impossible to carry enough clean drinking water to safely hike in the Sonoran desert for the several days to two weeks or more it takes people to cross, particularly during the scalding summer months,” Johnson says, explaining that leaving water is essential to the immigrants’ survival.
Weinberg senior Allie Mayer was inspired to volunteer with No More Deaths after a high school church service trip, where she remembers watching a group of dust-covered, helpless migrants plead guilty in court to illegal immigration. The clinking of the chains that bound them echoed in the minuscule courtroom. The injustices she observed in the legal system exasperated her.
She partnered with then-Weinberg senior Rebecca TeKolste to organize the No More Deaths ASB trip.
“The first time Allie talked about it, I thought that the idea of leaving water in the desert was a little crazy,” TeKolste says. “But then after thinking about how immigration can be seen as a human rights issue, I felt really drawn to the idea. People have to cross dozens of miles in 110-degree weather, and as soon as they get blisters on their feet, they’re doomed to die.”
The trip was so successful that it will happen again this year—which is unusual for an ASB program, according to SESP sophomore Karen Wilber, who helps plan ASB trips. TeKolste hopes the unique trip will become a yearly excursion.
“What’s going on within our nation is a political war zone,” Sobolewski says. She explains the trip provides immediacy to the political and physical turmoil facing our country and puts human faces on the illegal immigration issue. President Obama’s dedication to immigration reform, including signing an Executive Order in June 2012 to allow undocumented immigrants to temporarily avoid deportation, makes the trip even more relevant.
After spending time in the desert, Mayer began to question the effectiveness of borders. Her sentiments are mirrored by activist-turned-Northwestern professor John Márquez.
“The only thing that borders really do is kill people,” says Márquez, who teaches African American and Latino/a studies. “Corporations don’t abide by borders. Militaries don’t abide by borders really. Workers should have the same right to cross borders.” He gestures to a shirt in his office to illustrate his point that even capitalism doesn’t obey borders—odds are the shirt was made in Mexico.
The T-shirt further represents immigrants’ abandon of personal items on their journey across the border. Migrants hike through jagged desert mountains littered with rocks and cacti, leaving evidence of their existence along the trails, from abandoned backpacks to food containers to melted make-up packets to a myriad of shoes and now-empty jugs of water that were left out by No More Deaths the previous day.
“A lot of people at NU don’t know what’s going on with immigration policy and the people who are dying at the border,” Wilber says. “I can imagine these people must be suffering greatly, but the only evidence that seems to be left behind are the things they leave in the desert.”