When Joe Biden’s motorcade departed the Brownsville airport on March 1, it hung a right, taking one route to a Border Patrol station on the Texas town’s northwestern outskirts. If, instead, the SUVs had turned left, setting out on a different route to the station, they would have passed directly by the Ozanam Center, a migrant shelter. That day, I met Durglannis Garrido in the center’s courtyard, where she stood mingling with other asylum seekers. Her three children played on the asphalt nearby; leaves strewed along the ground in the spring wind. Initially from Venezuela, the family had so far spent four nights in the United States in a shared bunk room. When I asked Garrido why she had come north, she grabbed her middle child by the shoulders to show me his cleft lip. She was hoping he could get surgery.

While Garrido and I talked, Biden was giving a speech to a crowd of green-clad Border Patrol agents. Toward the end, the president dared Trump to join him in pushing Congress to pass the “toughest, most efficient, most effective border security bill this country has ever seen.” The description would have come as a shock during the president’s 2020 campaign, but for months it had been obvious where Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party were headed: border crackdown. Last year, the White House signaled it was ready to relaunch the same kind of anti-migrant legislation that Democrats had spent years opposing under Trump, including bans on asylum seekers who transited through Mexico, and even Title 42, a public health statute that Stephen Miller had massaged into a deport-anyone-without-a-hearing law in 2020. When Congress failed to produce a bill, Biden went at it alone, signing an executive order in early June that created a de facto asylum ban (similar to, as the ACLU noted, a 2018 Trump order the courts threw out). The liberal coalition that may have once wanted the U.S. to welcome families like Garrido’s — if that coalition ever really existed — was gone. 

I asked Garrido what she would say to Biden if he visited the shelter on his border tour. “I’d tell him I’m one of those Venezuelans who wants to come here to work,” she said. She looked at me out of the side of her eyes. “I know there are many people who come here to do bad things, but I’m not one of them,” she added. Garrido later clarified that she was talking about Venezuelans who weren’t hard workers, but I couldn’t help thinking about the pressure that racist media coverage of recent violence committed by immigrants placed on her shoulders. The previous week, Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, had been abducted and murdered while jogging in Athens, Georgia. The man accused of the crime is Venezuelan, and the case had been plastered across the headlines. As often happens when undocumented men are accused of killing white women, the tragedy became a cause célèbre for the right. The attack “started a storm in our country,” Riley’s father would say in an NBC appearance.

The left may have no political program, no messaging, that can counter the kind of mainlined xenophobia that migrants like Garrido have to navigate. The mass movement that opposed the Trump administration’s family separation policy evaporated as soon as it stopped being a useful cudgel against the right. And as the number of people arriving at the southern border increased, reaching a record high in May 2022, then another in December 2023, fear and animus rose in tandem: in August 2022, polls found that a majority of Americans agreed that the situation on the southern border was best described by the word “invasion.” Perhaps that’s why the public has largely ignored the fact that Biden expelled far more migrants in his first two years in office than Trump did in his. By some metrics, Barack Obama still has them both topped — he issued more formal migrant removals, at a faster rate, than any other president in history. In Brownsville, it’s all too clear what the next decade holds in store: a wave of antipathy toward noncitizens, one that unites the center-left with the far right in policy and priority, if not always in affect. 

Since February, an average of forty to eighty newcomers have arrived at the Ozanam Center each day: from Venezuela, from Haiti, from Mexico, from Ghana, from Russia. Someone serves them food, even if it isn’t much; someone shows them where they can sleep, even if it is a pad on the floor. The border might be a line in the desert, a wall against the river, but the people it has roughed up are all over the country. In every major city, a shelter is looking for drivers or receptionists or pro bono lawyers or clerical aides; now is the time for a politics of the shelter.

Aiding the few instead of the many — sheltering individual asylum seekers rather than fighting for immigration laws that reduce their plight — can feel demoralizing, like resignation to policy forces beyond our control. But think of the network of Americans who helped smuggle Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, and thousands of other Jews away from the Nazis, or the abolitionists who put lanterns in their windows, points of light aligned north. In helping those we can, we might discover how together we can welcome the rest.