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On June 6, just 14 days after Xiomara
was turned away from the border, Cha-
varría helped her to a hospital where she
delivered a healthy baby girl. But her jour-
ney wasn’t over: still in limbo, Xiomara
and her four children have now been liv-
ing at San Juan Apóstol for eight months.
As COVID-19 begAn spreading through-
out the U.S. in March 2020, immigration
courts temporarily shut down, increas-
ing wait times for those under MPP. The
Department of Justice’s Executive Office
for Immigration Review (EOIR) would
announce court closures on its website,
or via Twitter, and many asylum seekers
missed the notices. They’d show up at
ports of entry ready to make their case
to a judge, only to find out their court
date had been canceled.
Beginning at 4 a.m., Levy would stand
at the Juárez side of the Paso del Norte
international bridge connecting Juárez
where they would give birth and that
they had been turned away from hospi-
tals. “[It was] really kind of scrappy from
the beginning,” Levy says of Las Zadas’
early days. Levy gave free legal advice,
while midwife Anna White provided pre-
natal care. If a woman needed shelter,
she’d be referred to San Juan Apóstol,
where coordinator Karina Breceda could
assist her. There, Chavarría and Patricia
Galarza, a Juárez psychologist, offered
free physical and mental health care.
“[My team is] basically on call 24/7,”
Breceda says. “There’s a lot of peace, and
a lot of healing with the work that they’re
doing. The situation here in the city
[Juárez], it’s sometimes a very unsafe
place and the women go through crises.”
In Mexico, asylum seekers are
often victims of kidnapping, robbery,
rape and extortion. Human Rights
First, an advocacy organization, has
documented more than 1,500 public‘There’s a lot ofPEACE, and a lot ofHEALING with thework they’re doing.’
—Karina Brecedato El Paso, Texas, several times a week
to meet those asylum seekers and break
the news. “There were a lot of women
coming who were visibly pregnant, just
devastated by the fact that the courts had
been canceled,” Levy says. “It was during
those cold dark mornings, where I started
thinking about creating this project.”
Some of the women told Levy they
had never seen a doctor, didn’t know