I am honored to have been selected as the Jennifer Caldwell Fellow for 2025. This grant supported me in conducting research for my master’s thesis, which explored the extent to which faith-based support efforts of asylum seekers in Seattle move beyond charity toward more radical forms of solidarity and sanctuary.
This project was deeply personal and rose out of my own involvement in mutual aid networks supporting recent arrivals to the city in the last several years, as well as a deep interest in the possibility of grassroots efforts to challenge the violent bordering regime. I had seen firsthand how church support of asylum seekers provided genuinely life-sustaining care where there was none, while also being shaped by real tensions around race, legal status, power, and the limits of charitable provision.
I ultimately completed eight months of fieldwork between 2025 and 2026 at a church migrant shelter operating out of King County, and interviewed twelve Spanish-speaking asylum seekers who had formally stayed at these shelters. The funds allowed me to compensate my interlocutors for their time and expertise, a small act of reciprocity toward people who were generous with their stories and knowledge. A portion also went directly to grassroots migrant-led efforts, including funds challenging the arbitrary detention of community members impacted by the indiscriminate ICE raids of the past year.
My research found that church-based emergency shelters offer genuine and often life-sustaining refuge to newly arrived asylum seekers, while also risking reproducing unequal power dynamics between “care-giver” and “care-receiver” that require deference and silence. Additionally, the most dignified and radical forms of solidarity often emerged not from the institutional church, but from immigrant community leaders and from the horizontal relationships migrants formed with one another in the shelter space. This is what I am calling convivencia, the practice of doing life together, in which migrants are seen not as needy victims in need of saving, but as complex persons with political claims, spiritual needs, and gifts to contribute to the collective.
What my research made clear is that transformational solidarity requires sustained presence, cultural and linguistic competency, and above all, following the lead of migrant community leaders. As I complete my degree and graduate in Spring 2026, I look forward to carrying these findings into organizing and solidarity efforts. I am deeply grateful to the Jennifer Caldwell Fund and the UW Center for Human Rights for making this research possible.