Rights Without Borders

By: Carolina Mendez, SAF Board Member

“In every journey, your rights follow you along.”

I saw this message on a wall at a migrant shelter in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in the summer of 2024. I had spent the day speaking with migrants about their journeys, their work, and the uncertainty of waiting at the U.S.-Mexico border. The words stayed with me. They captured something I had been trying to understand through my own community-based research and experiences: wherever people go, their rights go with them.

Before that summer, I had completed a yearlong internship with SAF. I was hesitant to apply at first. I didn't consider myself an organizer or someone interested in an advocacy career. But Solidaridad gave me the language to understand experiences I had witnessed in my own family and community. I began to see how linguistic discrimination, immigration status, and precarity could shape a worker's everyday life. The program validated what I had felt for years, while helping me understand the systems behind it.

That experience led me to spend the summer conducting research on labor and migration along the U.S.-Mexico border. I joined an amazing group of both local and out of state students. We had the opportunity to interview more than 80 migrants navigating the uncertainty of waiting to enter the United States.

At the time, CBP One shaped the process for many migrants seeking entry, leaving some in Mexico for weeks or months. During that time, many relied on informal work to survive. Some had left behind professions they had spent years building for jobs that offered little more than subsistence. I heard accounts of workers facing discrimination for being from Central America, of how hard it was to advocate for a livable wage when Mexico's own working class was already struggling, and of the added struggles queer migrants faced on top of everything else. In some cases, the small savings migrants managed to accumulate were later taken through extortion by local police or criminal groups.

Near the border, I encountered another example that made me think about the different dimensions of labor rights. At one shelter, migrants had previously been allowed to work at nearby maquiladoras. The shelter eventually prohibited residents from taking those jobs after concerns emerged about workplace exploitation. Some workers had reportedly been offered drugs to encourage them to work longer hours, and drugs were later making their way into the shelter, where families and children lived.

The experience raised difficult questions for me: What does it mean to have access to work, if the work itself can be the thing that hurts you? And even when someone does find work that's safe, what labor rights can they actually exercise with no legal status, no fixed address, and no certainty they'll still be there next week?

The following semester, I carried these experiences with me during a three-month study abroad program in Nepal, Jordan, and Chile. In Nepal, I spoke with coordinators who helped returning migrants reconnect with their families and communities. Some returns were devastating. Migrants who had traveled to Gulf countries for work sometimes returned home after dying in workplace accidents. For those who survived, returning home could mean starting over through programs that helped them find new employment or educational opportunities.

It was my first time seeing organizations and government agencies working together to support migrants after they returned home. Until then, much of my understanding of migration had focused on the journey itself. In Nepal, I began thinking more about what happens after a worker comes home and how much their work abroad can shape the rest of their lives.

Now, in the Dominican Republic, I am seeing another part of this story.

I am currently working in the Dominican Republic, in a small community about two hours from the Haitian border. Many residents face documentation barriers, while working in agriculture, construction, and service industries. In the fields surrounding the community, workers cultivate crops including rice and plantains.

One afternoon at a community meeting, a young woman told us about a farmworker who had died because of pesticides. His employer never told him what the chemicals could do to him. After being exposed, he became seriously ill. He was initially afraid to seek medical care because of concerns surrounding his documentation status. By the time he reached the hospital, it was too late.

I thought again about the words on the wall in Ciudad Juárez:

Across borders, I have heard different versions of the same story. The work changes. The country changes. The circumstances change. But the need for safe working conditions, fair wages, medical care, and protection from abuse does not.

Yet having rights and being able to exercise them are not always the same thing. For workers facing economic insecurity, discrimination, documentation barriers, or fear, even asking for help can carry risks.

That is what I have come to understand about labor rights: they are human rights, and protecting them is a global need. It is a lesson I grew up with, one that a wall in Juárez put into words for me, and one I am still learning every day.