The Asylum Seekers - by Cristina Rathbone (Hardcover)

About the Book

From award-winning journalist and priest Cristina Rathbone comes this remarkable work of reporting about a community of people at the US-Mexico border. In The Asylum Seekers, Rathbone renders in blistering detail the story of people camped at the foot of a bridge: the trauma they carry, the community they create, and the faith they maintain.

Book Synopsis

A remarkable, decimating work of reporting by award-winning journalist and priest Cristina Rathbone about asylum seekers trapped at a port of entry to the US: the trauma they carry, the community they create, and the faith they maintain.

The Asylum Seekers offers a rare narrative account of the horror of the US-Mexico border. Borders run through author Cristina Rathbone too, whose mother was a Cuban refugee. So in 2019 she travels to Juarez, unsure what to do but determined to learn.

Weaving intimate portraits of individuals with broader stories about the community, reporting from the border as a whole, and reflections on the meaning of faith in a place of suffering, Rathbone tells the story of Mexican asylum seekers living in a makeshift tent camp at the foot of a bridge. Life in the camp is both hectic and harrowing. Families arrive. Families leave. Families get through to the US. Families are returned from the US. Women weep, children squabble, and grown men sob over photographs of their murdered sons' mutilated bodies.

Here too, however, are beauty, and empathy, and hope. Over time, a leadership team emerges. The community begins to convene daily meetings, establish systems of distribution for donations, and start classes for the kids. Serving as an unofficial chaplain, Rathbone is there through it all: listening, receiving, assisting, and most of all learning about what authentic faith looks like under conditions such as these.

Written in the tradition of My Fourth Time, We Drowned and Rivermouth, The Asylum Seekers renders in startling, intimate detail the day-to-day lives of people who are determined to enter the US legally and who often suffer for it. The result is a fierce, poignant inquiry into the dignity of those who seek asylum--and into what we owe each other.

Review Quotes

"Rathbone exposes in riveting detail the humanitarian horrors and government inefficiencies plaguing the border, but also strikes a hopeful note by highlighting the determination of those who help asylum seekers--including an immigration lawyer, a 96-year-old former fighter pilot turned priest, and an 85-year-old nun. This won't be easily forgotten." --Publishers Weekly

"This book is a cleric's account of her sojourn among people camped at our country's southern border, people seeking asylum and rarely receiving it. Rathbone writes with admirable candor about her small triumphs and failures, her doubts and uncertainties. But to me, the great strength of this story is the author's passionate sympathy for the desperate people she works with. It suffuses the book, like antivenin to the slanders forever thrown at immigrants." --Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Rough Sleepers and Mountains Beyond Mountains

"The Asylum Seekers shines with a kind of moral clarity that illuminates not only the horrific effects of the United States immigration system on individuals, families, and children, but the personal toll of working alongside those affected. A must-read." --Alejandra Oliva, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration

"These pages are filled with both anguish and uplift, and they depict a religious faith that is anything but ethereal. Nothing I have read about the so-called border crisis has torn up my heart and haunted my conscience like The Asylum Seekers." --Samuel G. Freedman, award-winning author of Upon This Rock, Small Victories, and other books

"This a book on the edge, by a priest on the edge. The Paso del Norte bridge at the US-Mexico border is both a physical structure and a moral faultline. In The Asylum Seekers, Cristina Rathbone submits herself, body and soul, to the teaching of the people who most clearly see its double nature: the powerless, the victimized, the dispossessed and exploited. With a style that clicks like a Geiger counter at the approach of primary reality, Rathbone crosses frontier after frontier of understanding." --James Parker, columnist for The Atlantic and author of Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes

"No other book I've read brings you so closely, so intimately, into the lives of Latin American migrants living in poverty. Fleeing horrors and lethal danger, they encounter the new horrors of US border policies bent on ending the right to asylum. At moments, The Asylum Seekers seems to combine the genres of the thriller and the account of a pilgrim's progress. This staggeringly beautiful and important book will fill your heart and mind with a sense of wonder, sorrow, and gratitude for what it has shown you." --Francisco Goldman, Pulitzer Prize-finalist author of Monkey Boy

"With the eloquence of a poet, the spiritual depth of a contemplative, and the courage of a prophet, Cristina Rathbone reveals how her encounters with the men, women, and children seeking asylum break open her own heart in ways she could never have imagined. She reminds us that the most revolutionary--and most Christian--of all human acts is the simple yet seemingly 'useless' act of being fully present and attentive to another human being in their suffering." --Roberto Goizueta, author of Caminemos con Jesús

"The Asylum Seekers is elegant, unsentimental, loving, and piercingly honest. It is a prayer--and almost a miracle. Not because prayer is magic, but because it is the planting ground for hope. For those who despair and those who rage, for all who thirst, Cristina Rathbone digs a furrow in the dirt of our shared suffering, and makes a space where we can abide together." --Sara Miles, author of Take This Bread and City of God