Q&A with Sr. Kathleen Erickson

In 2014, things at the U.S. southern border seemed as bad as they could get.

U.S. border patrol made 486,651 arrests that year, nearly all of them on the southern border. More than 68,000 of those arrested were unaccompanied minors.

And on July 31, 2014, Global Sisters Report, which had just started three months before, published a Q&A with Mercy Sr. Kathleen Erickson, who had been working on immigration and social justice issues for more than two decades. Much of her focus in the interview was on the root causes of the immigration crisis and how most Americans enjoy comforts such as cheap consumer goods at the expense of people being exploited elsewhere.

Flash forward 10 years, and everything is different while nothing has really changed.

Immigration at the southern border is still a crisis — only more so. The crush of unaccompanied minors continues, but is getting much less attention despite the number of unaccompanied minors border patrol arrested nearly doubling to 126,655 in 2022 — because the total number of arrests has nearly quadrupled to 1.6 million, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, on immigration at Syracuse University.