At the Border, a Shelter By — And For — Muslim Women

Anyone crossing the U.S.-Mexico border faces a journey fraught with violence and danger.

But for women and children, that journey is even more treacherous. Not only are many fleeing violence at home — including gender-based violence — they also experience higher rates of violence en route. Torture, mutilation, sexual violence, femicide,disappearances, and additional health complications are common occurrences for female migrants making their way north.

That danger is amplified for the thousands of girls living in makeshift camps and tent cities along the U.S.-Mexico border without protection or accompanying support. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Kids In Need of Defense, “[u]naccompanied children are especially vulnerable to sexual violence, human trafficking, and exploitation by cartels and other criminal groups.”

Over the last few years, a group of Muslim women has stepped in to meet their needs in unique ways. Albergue Assabil (“the Shelter of the Path”), the first Muslim shelter along the U.S.-Mexico border, has been in operation since June 2022 under the leadership of Sonia Tinoco García, founder and president of the Latina Muslim Foundation. According to staff, the shelter served nearly 3,000 migrants in its first two years of operation. Many of those migrants have been women, attracted to the shelter because of its separate men’s and women’s facilities and the fact that Albergue Assabil is a female-led shelter.

And it’s not only Muslim women finding sanctuary under the shade of the shelter’s blue dome; there have also been other female immigrants looking to García and her team for assistance as they make the perilous journey north.

“A group of Muslim ladies”

When García first headed to the U.S.-Mexico border to help others in 2014, her goal was simple: to help women, especially mothers and unaccompanied children, in their attempts to claim asylum or start a new life in the United States. Having immigrated to the U.S. herself in the 1990s, García knew what it was like.

She also knew the statistics.

Though the share has fluctuated in recent decades, immigrant women and girls make up at least half of all migrants and asylum seekers, according to figures from the Migration Policy Institute. Women and girls made up a total of 53 percent of the immigrant population in 1980, 51 percent in 1990, 50 percent in 2000, and 51 percent in 2010 and 2022.

Given the scale, García gathered what she called “a group of Muslim ladies” from her mosque community in San Diego. Each had a profound understanding of the situation female immigrants were facing.

Angie Gely, who works in the office at Albergue Assabil, said being an immigrant who was deported back to Mexico and is now living in Tijuana, helps her understand what women in the shelter are going through — and what they face once they arrive in the U.S.

 “Our families crossed the border to the U.S. too,” Gely said. “We can relate.”

Driven by their own past experiences and a deep desire to help female immigrants, García said she and other Muslim women started volunteering in Tijuana shelters, bringing food and clothing for people regardless of their religious, social, and cultural background.

Along the way, García and her “Muslim ladies” started noticing how many Muslims were mixed in with the larger population of immigrants and deportees. “It got my attention when I saw some women standing at the border with hijab,” García said. “I talked to them and discovered they were from Somalia, trying to go to the U.S. or Canada.”

The more time she spent in Tijuana, the more Muslims she saw arriving. At shelter after shelter, meanwhile, she witnessed staff too overwhelmed to cater to Muslim migrants’ unique needs.

“There were Muslims who didn’t feel safe in the shelters, because they were being discriminated against or questioned because of their faith,” Gely said. As a result, some would avoid the shelters altogether, struggling to find their own way on the streets or seeking help from Muslims at Centro Islámico de Baja — Tijuana’s only mosque at the time.

“The shelters didn’t have the time or money,” García said, “to provide halal food, to provide adequate space for prayer, or even understand their situations are different from those of migrants from Central America or elsewhere.”

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García and the others did what they could to serve the immigrants sent their way — covering the cost of hotel rooms, providing home-cooked halal meals, or connecting them to the legal aid they so desperately needed, in a language they could communicate in. Overwhelmed, they turned to their mosque communities in San Diego and Orange counties to raise funds and procure translators who could speak Arabic or Urdu, Farsi or French, and many dialects in between.

But the need continued to increase. More and more Muslim immigrants were making their way to Tijuana, and the “ladies” could only do so much. Shelters were overwhelmed, and García said she was scrambling to field the many calls.

That’s why, in 2017, they decided to do more. Founding a nonprofit organization — the Latina Muslim Foundation — they raised more than $200,000 (USD) to construct a purpose-built Muslim shelter. Situated in the border city’s Zona Norte neighborhood, the shelter features separate men’s and women’s facilities, a prayer area, halal food, Quran classes, and legal services to assist migrants.

The hope, García said, was to provide a humane and helpful place for Muslim migrants to land in Tijuana. They are there to help transform the border from a topography of inhumanity into a place of dignity and opportunity, García said.

A growing number of Mexican Muslim women

García said that as a child, she always dreamed of helping people. “I wanted to become a surgeon, but do surgery for free, because people need it to save their lives,” García said. “Or an attorney who did pro bono work, to help families who don’t have justice.”

García grew up in a large family in a village of 200 people near La Paz, in the very south of the Baja California peninsula. She did not know whether such dreams would — or could — come true. “We had a simple lifestyle. We were not rich people,” she said. “Because we were 11 siblings, not everyone got education.”

García was one of the lucky ones able to finish high school. She moved to Ensenada — an hour and a half south of Tijuana — and started working with a local orthodontist serving medical tourists from the U.S. When she was 21, she met a man named Abu Hamza, a medical tourist from Lebanon living in Los Angeles. Abu Hamza spoke no Spanish at the time, and she did not speak English, but they communicated with books and through other people. Twenty days after meeting, they were married.

García had grown up Catholic and knew little of Islam. But when she saw Abu Hamza, she said, “I saw Islam in him.” After moving to the Los Angeles area with Abu Hamza, she learned English and Islam at the same time.

García joined the growing ranks of Latina converts to Islam. The first Latina and Latino converts can be identified as far back as the 1920s; others converted in the 1960s and ’70s as part of Black Muslim movements such as the Nation of Islam and the Five Percent Nation. In 2011, 6 percent of Muslim Americans identified as Hispanic, according to the Pew Research Center; by 2017, it was 8 percent. The vast majority of this cohort of Hispanic American Muslims are women, many of them from Mexico or having Mexican heritage.

Muslims remain a small minority in Mexico, said Arely Medina, a professor at the University of Guadalajara. There are multiple small groups and communities made up of both migrants and individuals native to Mexico in the country’s interior, all of which have a relatively recent history, Medina said. “Thus, one cannot speak of a ‘Mexican Islam’ per se,” she said, “even though Muslims have a history here stretching back to the conquest of the Americas and continuing with a series of Arab immigrations in the 19th and 20th centuries.”

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According to Medina and other experts, most Mexican converts to Islam are women. Among them are sizable numbers of female Muslim immigrants from places such as Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Pakistan, Ghana, and Turkey who have made Mexico home. “Some hope to reach the United States and are concentrated along the northern border,” Medina said. “Others concentrate in places like Mexico City, Guadalajara, or Monterrey.”

It is difficult, if not impossible, to generalize these women’s motivations, plans, or situations, Medina said. As is true of those staying at Albergue Assabil, “There is not a single story,” she said. “Each one carries a narrative.”

Because these women face a variety of challenges — such as wearing the veil in a cultural context where Islam is not a prominent reference point or searching for a sense of freedom and security in the face of domestic violence and harassment — Medina said they find in each other a sense of solidarity. “They are in search of a better life,” she said. As Europe, the United Kingdom, and even the U.S. are experienced as less welcoming, Medina said, “Latin America is now seen as a place of possible openness.”

Empowered to help others

Whether local converts or newcomers from elsewhere, Muslim women have carved out their own spaces in Mexico, including the Albergue Assabil shelter and the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi order in Mexico City, which is headed by a woman — Shaykha Amina Teslima.

García often reminds donors, partners, volunteers, journalists, and authorities that Albergue Assabil is a shelter run by women. And not just any women, but Muslim women.

That, she said, makes a difference.

“We found that Islam gives women rights; it gave us empowerment,” she said of her and the other women running the show at Albergue Assabil. “I could do whatever I wanted to do — more than what I could do with my own culture or my own religion before,” she said. “Islam says that women can go study; men cannot tell you no. Men know this. My husband knows he doesn’t own me. He is my support.”

Indeed, her husband, Abu Hamza, is supportive of García’s work. He is often seen around the shelter too, pulling up on a motorcycle with García, bringing in donations, making phone calls, and generally doing whatever needs to be done. When asked about the shelter, he insistently points to his wife. “She knows better than me,” he said.

García said part of the shelter’s work is passing their own empowerment on to women who arrive at their gates. “In the shelter, when women come, we give them tools to be able to continue their education: English, Spanish, computers, cooking,” she said. “We want to give them the basics so that they are not reliant on men. In the time they stay in the shelter, we teach them as much as we can so that they can live for themselves.”

Increasingly, said Gely, that means more and more women are finding their way to Albergue Assabil — Muslim and non-Muslim. “Just yesterday, three ladies from Russia came here looking for shelter,” Gely said. “They’re not Muslim, no. But they hear how nice it is and want to come. Of course we take them in.”

One of them is Amie. Amie has struggled getting an appointment through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection app CBP One. She has spent three months in Mexico so far, arriving at Albergue Assabil six weeks after bouncing from shelter to shelter in Tijuana. Sojourners is withholding Amie’s last name, at her request, to protect her immigration status.

“They’ve been so kind to me,” she said, “out on the street, in other shelters, I feared for my life, worried I would be tortured, abused, or killed. This shelter is the only place I feel I could survive.”

As we talk, two more young Russian women walk through the front doors. They too are looking for shelter. Amie tells them to take a seat. Gely or García will be here soon, she says.

“They’ll take care of you,” Amie said. “They always do.”